Has Amelia Earhart’s missing plane been found?

A mystery that has lasted 87 years may be a step closer to being solved.

A pilot, former military intelligence officer and commercial real-estate investor says he may have found Amelia Earhart’s missing plane, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The investor sold real estate to help pay for the $11 million expedition to scan the Pacific Ocean, NBC News reported.

Tony Romeo’s gamble may have paid off.

The explorer said that a sonar image that he captured during a search late last year is likely the Lockheed 10-E Electra plane that Earhart had been flying when she disappeared in 1937.

Romeo said the location was in the right area. It was captured about 100 miles from Howland Island between Australia and Hawaii.

Howland Island was a stop for Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, during the last leg of their around-the-world trip, but they were never seen again, The Smithsonian said. The government searched for 16 days with nothing found, The Wall Street Journal reported. After two years the U.S. government said she crashed somewhere despite her plane and neither Earhart nor Noonan’s remains ever being found NBC News reported.

When you see the image generated by Sonor devices, while grainy, looks like an airplane.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Deep Sea Vision (@deep.sea.vision)

Romeo told the “Today” show he is convinced that he found the missing plane.

“There’s no other known crashes in the area, and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image,” he said.

Romeo plans on taking a crew to the location, along with cameras and a remote vehicle to get images of the site.

“The next step is confirmation and there’s a lot we need to know about it. And it looks like there’s some damage. I mean it’s been sitting there for 87 years at this point,” Romeo said.

But not everyone is convinced that it is the missing plane until they get eyes on what is really under the water.

“Until you physically take a look at this, there’s no way to say for sure what that is,” Andrew Pietruszka told The Wall Street Journal. Pietruszka is an underwater archaeologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego who searches for military aircraft and those who were lost in the incidents.

Several other explorations have tried to find Earhart and her plane, including Dana Timmer, in 1999, who searched near Howland Island and saw something on his sonar but couldn’t raise money to go back to confirm, The Wall Street Journal reported.

1 of 29