An exhaustive expedition aimed at locating Amelia Earhart's lost plane may have spotted the elusive aircraft sitting on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The remarkable mission was reportedly spearheaded by former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, who spent a staggering $11 million on the endeavor. This past Autumn, he and his team zeroed in on an area of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Howell Island, where it is believed that the legendary aviator's flight came to a tragic end back in 1937. In looking for the lost plane, they deployed a submersible that scanned massive swaths of the ocean floor over the course of several weeks and, when the team later examined the data, they were stunned by what they saw.

Sonar images captured by the submersible (featured in the video above) show an eerie outline that appears to resemble a relatively small aircraft that Romeo believes to be Earhart's lost plane. "There's no other known crashes in the area," he marveled to NBC News, "and certainly not of that era in that kind of design with the tail that you see clearly in the image." While the weird formation found on the ocean floor is undoubtedly tantalizing, experts are understandably not quite ready to declare the decades-old mystery solved. Fortunately, neither is Romeo as he now intends to launch a second expedition to the specific spot where the suspected plane was photographed in the hopes of confirming that it is, indeed, Earhart's missing aircraft.