Video taking off 33x its usual first day

Purdue goes looking for Amelia Earhart's Electra off Nikumaroro

Sam Champion's report follows a team checking a 2020 Apple Maps image by day and leaving the island at night because of its giant coconut crabs.

Channel:

Good Morning America Story of October 15, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 132,866 views a day, 33 times a normal first day on this channel (3,987).

US researchers share possible new clues in Earhart expedition

Purdue is looking again. Researchers from the university and the Archaeological Legacy Institute are on Nikumaroro, an uninhabited island in the Pacific, trying to settle whether a shape in a 2020 Apple Maps satellite image just offshore is the wreck of Amelia Earhart's plane.

The university's role is more than a coincidence. Earhart joined Purdue's faculty in the mid-1930s, and the Lockheed Electra she was flying when she and navigator Fred Noonan vanished on July 2, 1937, was bought with money raised through the Purdue Research Foundation. So the school is searching for an aircraft it helped pay for.

The expedition's leaders sound hopeful. "It could be within the next day or two that we are able to solve one of the biggest mysteries of the 20th century," says Rick Pettigrew, the institute's executive director. Steve Schultz, Purdue's general counsel, says, "the eyes of the world are following us." The report does not announce a find.

It does offer one memorable detail of island life. The crew travels between Nikumaroro and their ship every day and goes back aboard each night to avoid the giant coconut crabs. Pettigrew is relaxed about the danger to anyone's fingers, but the team still leaves before dark. Back in the studio, the segment notes that more than 4,000 pages of National Archives records on the original 1937 search were released last year.

For a Good Morning America Short, it drew a big crowd: about 87,000 views in its first eleven hours. The comments filled up far faster than they usually do. Many viewers argue that the shape is a fallen tree, point out that the wings appear to have no place for engines, and ask why nobody has waded the few feet out to look yet. Others bring up earlier searches of the same island, Robert Ballard's among them.

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What viewers say

Good luck! I hope she is found in my lifetime! This is amazing!❤ I heard those crabs are delicious lol.
@melgar96See it on YouTube
Watch out for those Crabs !!
@Angus-HamishSee it on YouTube
I know we all want it to be real, but that's a tree.
@SamPanamaOfficialSee it on YouTube

4 more comments

So they've been there for 2 days and no one has waded out into that lagoon yet to examine the "artifact"?!
@TimberWolf762See it on YouTube
It's going to be hard to find a Lockheed 10 Electra in a lagoon of waist deep water,and ankle deep silt.
@tomspaur3789See it on YouTube
They have been there two days and haven't yet investigated the suspected submerged 'wreck'?
Was it the weather? 👍🇬🇧
@nigelcarrenSee it on YouTube
The biggest clue that its a tree is that the image doesn't show any support structure for the engines which were mounted on the wings. There should be some area notched out for the engines but there is nothing. The supposed 'wings' are just perfectly straight.
@zadeh79See it on YouTube