... There are more privately owned submarines nowadays as well, if someone had the money and desire to take it they could and it would end up in Vegas. ...
I'm not sure that there is an "it" to be taken.
There may yet be some big pieces, here and there, that didn't show up on the AUV sonar plots but that might be found with a more systematic ROV or manned submersible search.
I haven't seen any specs on the usable field of view available from the HD cameras on the ROV, but I speculate that it is a
much narrower band than that provided by side-scan sonar or the multibeam sonar on the ship.
If TIGHAR has found some pieces of the Electra, then an exhaustive HD search around that area
might turn up some more pieces that would provide photographic evidence that is relatively indisputable.
But I don't feel that this is a certainty by any means.
If, by good fortune, TIGHAR has stumbled across the remains of the Bevington object, then it is clear that that object got to its present location by a different set of circumstances than those that
seem to have (or
must have?) swept the plane (or plane parts) off the reef.
As I've said before, I don't think there is anyone more experienced than TIGHAR in mapping and searching the side of an atoll's seamount. I don't see any abstract reasoning that could substitute for going back and making more observations of the area--so I'm committed to Niku VIII.