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By TRACIE CONE and JULIANA BARBASSA, Associated Press Writers
2 hours, 43 minutes ago
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - A hiker in a rugged part of eastern California found a pilot's license and other items that appear to belong to Steve Fossett, the adventurer who vanished on a solo flight in a borrowed plane more than a year ago, authorities said Wednesday.
The information on the pilot license ââ¬â including Fossett's name, address, date of birth and certificate number ââ¬â was sent in a photograph to the Federal Aviation Administration, and all matched the agency's records, spokesman Ian Gregor said.
"We're trying to determine the authenticity of the document," Gregor said.
The hiker, Preston Morrow, said he found an FAA identity card, a pilot's license, a third ID and $1,005 in cash tangled in a bush off a trail just west of the town of Mammoth Lakes on Monday. He said he turned the items over to local police Wednesday after unsuccessful attempts to contact Fossett's family.
Mammoth Lakes police investigator Crystal Schafer confirmed that the department had the items, including the ones bearing Fossett's name.
Search teams led by the Madera County Sheriff's Department have been sent to the scene, and an air and ground effort was expected to be under way soon, said sheriff's spokeswoman Erica Stuart.
Morrow said he found no sign of a plane or any human remains.
Fossett, whose exploits included circumnavigating the globe in a balloon, disappeared Sept. 3, 2007, after taking off in a single-engine plane borrowed from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton. A judge declared Fossett legally dead in February following a search for the famed aviator that covered 20,000 square miles.
Fossett's widow, Peggy, said in a statement Wednesday that she was aware of Morrow's discovery and that authorities were going to the site.
"I am hopeful that this search will locate the crash site and my husband's remains," she said. "I am grateful to all of those involved in this effort."
Aviators had flown over Mammoth Lakes, about 90 miles south of the ranch, in the search for Fossett, but it had not been considered a likely place to find the plane. The most intense searching was concentrated to the north of the town, given what searchers knew about sightings of Fossett's plane, his plans for when he had intended to return and the amount of fuel he had in the plane.
Morrow, 43, who works in a Mammoth Lakes sporting goods store, said he initially didn't know who Fossett was. It wasn't until he showed the items to co-workers Tuesday that one of them recognized Fossett's name.
"It was just weird to find that much money in the backcountry, and the IDs," he said. "My immediate thought was it was a hiker or backpacker's stuff, and a bear got to the stuff and took it away to look for food or whatever."
Morrow said he returned to the scene with his wife and three friends Tuesday to search further and did not find any airplane wreckage or human remains. They did find a black Nautica pullover fleece, size XL, in the same area, but he said he wasn't sure if the items were related.
Morrow said he consulted local attorney David Baumwohl, and they initially tried to contact the Fossett family but were unable to get through to their lawyers.
"We figured if it was us, we'd want to know first. We wouldn't want to learn from the news," Baumwohl said.
Baumwohl and Morrow tried to contact the law firm that handled the death declaration. When they weren't successful, they decided to turn everything over to the police, the attorney said.
Mammoth Lakes is at an elevation of more than 7,800 feet on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, where peaks top 13,000 feet. This year's biggest search for Fossett focused on Nevada's Wassuk Range, more than 50 miles north of Mammoth Lakes. That search ended last month.
The California Civil Air Patrol and private planes from Hilton's ranch previously had flown over the area, but it was "extremely rough country," said Joe Sanford, undersheriff in Lyon County, Nev., which was involved in the initial search.
One of Fossett's friends reacted to Wednesday's news with cautious optimism.
If the belongings turn out to be authentic, then that could help narrow the search area for possible wreckage, said Ray Arvidson, a scientist at Washington University who worked on Fossett's past balloon flights.
"It would be nice to get closure," Arvidson said.
Fossett made a fortune trading futures and options on Chicago markets. He gained worldwide fame for more than 100 attempts and successes in setting records in high-tech balloons, gliders, jets and boats. In 2002, he became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in July 2007.
He also swam the English Channel, completed an Ironman Triathlon, competed in the Iditarod dog sled race and climbed some of the world's best-known peaks, including the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081001/ap_o...ett_search
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Sheriff: Search teams find Fossett wreckage
By TRACIE CONE and JULIANA BARBASSA, Associated Press Writers
22 minutes ago
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - Searchers found the wreckage of Steve Fossett's airplane in California's rugged Sierra Nevada just over a year after the millionaire adventurer vanished on a solo flight, and the craft appears to have hit the mountainside head-on, authorities said Thursday.
Crews conducting an aerial search late Wednesday spotted what turned out to be the wreckage in the Inyo National Forest near the town of Mammoth Lakes, Sheriff John Anderson said. They confirmed around 11 p.m. that the tail number found matched Fossett's single-engine Bellanca plane, he said.
Anderson said no human remains were found in the wreckage.
"It's quite often if you don't find remains within a few days, because of animals, you'll find nothing at all," Anderson said.
Teams led by the sheriff's department would continue the search for remains Thursday, while the National Transportation Safety Board was en route to probe the cause of the crash, he said.
Most of the plane's fuselage disintegrated on impact, and the engine was found several hundred feet away, Anderson said.
Searchers began combing the rugged terrain on Wednesday after a hiker found identification documents belonging to Fossett earlier in the week. The wreckage was found about a quarter-mile from where hiker Preston Morrow made his discovery Monday.
The IDs provided the first possible clue about Fossett's whereabouts since he disappeared Sept. 3, 2007, after taking off from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton.
"I remember the day he crashed, there were large thunderheads over the peaks around us," Mono County Undersheriff Ralph Obenberger said, gesturing to the mountains flanking Mammoth Lakes.
Aviators had previously flown over Mammoth Lakes, about 90 miles south of the ranch, in the search for Fossett, but it had not been considered a likely place to find the plane.
The most intense searching was concentrated north of the town, given what searchers knew about sightings of Fossett's plane, his plans for when he had intended to return and the amount of fuel he had in the plane.
A judge declared Fossett legally dead in February following a search for the famed aviator that covered 20,000 square miles.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081002/ap_o...ett_search
I think it is all a staged finding.
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I think so too, especially since all this is coming out 13 months after he disappeared.
Searchers find Fossett's plane and human remains
By TRACIE CONE and MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press Writers
35 minutes ago
More than a year after the mysterious disappearance of millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, searchers found the wreckage of his plane in the rugged Sierra Nevada, along with enough remains for DNA testing.
A small piece of bone was found amid a field of debris 400 feet long and 150 feet wide in a steep section of the mountain range, the National Transportation Safety Board said at a news conference Thursday. Some personal effects also were found at the site.
Officials conflicted on whether they had confirmed the remains were human.
"We don't know if it's human. It certainly could be," Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said late Thursday, hours after the leader of the NTSB had said the remains were those of a person. "I refuse to speculate."
Asked about the sheriff's assessment of the physical evidence, NTSB spokesman Terry Wiliams reaffirmed NTSB acting Chairman Mark Rosenker's earlier statement.
"We stick by that. It's human remains," said Williams, who declined to say how the NTSB had arrived at that conclusion.
Fossett, the 63-year-old thrill-seeker, vanished on a solo flight 13 months ago. The mangled debris of his single-engine Bellanca was spotted from the air late Wednesday near the town of Mammoth Lakes and was identified by its tail number. Investigators said the plane had slammed straight into a mountainside.
"It was a hard-impact crash, and he would've died instantly," said Jeff Page, emergency management coordinator for Lyon County, Nev., who assisted in the search.
NTSB investigators went into the mountains Thursday to figure out what caused the plane to go down. Most of the fuselage disintegrated on impact, and the engine was found several hundred feet away at an elevation of 9,700 feet, authorities said.
"It will take weeks, perhaps months, to get a better understanding of what happened," Rosenker said before investigators set off.
Search crews and cadaver dogs scoured the steep terrain around the crash site in hopes of finding at least some trace of his body and solving the mystery of his disappearance once and for all. A sheriff's investigator found the 2-inch-long piece of bone.
The remains are enough for a coroner to perform DNA testing, Rosenker said.
"Given how long the wreckage has been out there, it's not surprising there's not very much," he said.
Fossett vanished on Sept. 3, 2007, after taking off from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton. The intrepid balloonist and pilot was scouting locations for an attempt to break the land speed record in a rocket-propelled car.
His disappearance spurred a huge search that covered 20,000 square miles, cost millions of dollars and included the use of infrared technology. Eventually, a judge declared Fossett legally dead in February. For a while, many of his friends held out hope he survived, given his many close scrapes with death over the years.
The breakthrough ââ¬â in fact, the first trace of any kind ââ¬â came earlier this week when a hiker stumbled across a pilot's license and other ID cards belonging to Fossett a quarter-mile from where the plane was later spotted in the Inyo National Forest. Investigators said animals might have dragged the IDs from the wreckage while picking over Fossett's remains.
The rugged area, situated about 65 miles from the ranch, had been flown over 19 times by the California Civil Air Patrol during the initial search, Anderson said. But it had not been considered a likely place to find the plane.
Lt. Col. Ronald Butts, a pilot who coordinated the Civil Air Patrol search effort, said gusty conditions along the mountains' upper elevations hampered efforts to search by air, as did the small amount of debris that remained after the plane crashed.
"Everything we could have done was done," Butts said.
Searchers had concentrated on an area north of Mammoth Lakes, given what they knew about sightings of Fossett's plane, his travel plans and the amount of fuel he had.
"With it being an extremely mountainous area, it doesn't surprise me they had not found the aircraft there before," Lyon County Undersheriff Joe Sanford said.
As for what might have caused the wreck, Mono County, Calif., Undersheriff Ralph Obenberger said there were large storm clouds over the peaks around Mammoth Lakes on the day of the crash.
Fossett made a fortune in the Chicago commodities market and gained worldwide fame for setting records in high-tech balloons, gliders, jets and boats. In 2002, he became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon.
He also swam the English Channel, completed an Ironman triathlon, competed in the Iditarod dog sled race and climbed some of the world's best-known peaks, including the Matterhorn in Switzerland and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.
"I hope now to be able to bring to closure a very painful chapter in my life," Fossett's widow, Peggy, said in a statement. "I prefer to think about Steve's life rather than his death and celebrate his many extraordinary accomplishments."
___
Marcus Wohlsen reported from San Francisco. Associated Press writers Malia Wollan in San Francisco and Scott Sonner in Reno, Nev., contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081003/ap_o...UlMmYDW7oF
They first said on the news that there were NO human remains found anywhere in or near the crash. Now they say that they found a small bone fragment that is his. This is all BS.
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Steve Fossett revelation: remote viewer Ed Dames named Sierra Mountains crash site months ago
October 3, 10:22 AM
by Patricia Phillips, Space News Examiner
As California authorities examine the very limited remains found at the site of famed aviator Steve Fossett's crash in California's Sierra Nevadas, it's time to take a look back. Months ago, a remote viewing prediction said search efforts in Nevada were wasted because Fossett had died in California.
Whew.
That claim came from controversial, self-proclaimed remote viewing expert Ed Dames, a frequent guest on Coast to Coast, the alien-UFO-paranormal broadcast begun by Art Bell and now anchored by George Noory. Dames, also called "Dr. Doom" for recent psychic-style predictions of Earth's "end times," has bounced through a great deal of controversy in his career, including having a $2,000,000 judgment slapped against him for the appropriation of intellectual property.
All that aside, Dames did say several months ago that Fossett was dead, and that searchers wouldn't find him in Nevada--his departure point on the recreational flight that led to his death--because he crashed in California. Dames also said that Fossett had gone down in the rugged Sierrra Mountains.
In July, Dames discussed the Fossett search and his earlier prediction that the plane had gone down in California. This link leads you to a map and the access to that show.
What the heck is remote viewing? According to Wiki:
Remote Viewing (RV) refers to the attempt to gather information about a distant or unseen target using paranormal means or extra-sensory perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information about an object that is hidden from physical view and separated at some distance.[The term was introduced by parapsychologists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in 1974.[4]
The U.S. government explored remote viewing in the Stargate Project. Reportedly, other governments, including Russia, have done the same. Among the Stargate participants: Ed Dames and David Morehouse, who went on to write Psychic Warrior, a turgid account of his time in Stargate.
Back to the here and now. In California, police aren't sure if a bone at the crash site is human or not. It's been more than a year since Fossett disappeared, but authorities also say that they have recovered enough remains to do a DNA check, CSI-style.
Should searchers have listened to Dames? You decide.
http://www.examiner.com/x-504-Space-News...months-ago
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Mariana Trench - I would love to know what is down there - that is where Steve Fossett was working on going to next.
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Posted by Lee Glendinning Thursday October 2 2008 16:39 BST
Steve Fossett conspiracy theories get a reboot
Claims that wreckage from Steve Fossett's plane may have been found has fired up the conspirasphereAll comments (2) As search teams busied themselves combing the rugged Californian mountains for more evidence after a hiker's discovery of two identification cards and a wad of cash, bloggers got on with things this morning on the web.
There already exists quite a comprehensive body of material of the possibilities other than a straight forward plane crash to answer the unanswerable in the Fossett mystery.
One of the favourites, is that the adventurer was shot down over Area 51.
Also the story about how a Californian highway patrol officer actually saw the plane flying low near Mammoth lakes and has subsequently vanished.
Oh, and let's not forget the possibility that he was kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, because that also makes it into e bloggers list of 12 possibilities, which you can read here.
On the slightly more-believable level, there is much discussion that Fossett could have faked his own death following some ill-advised business ventures, or so he could start a new life with one or other of his supposed mistresses, and that he had been squirreling money away into a secret bank account for some time.
We can blame the British press - in some capacity - for the beginnings of the conspiracy theories, which, when tracing the trail back, appear to have started in the News of the World and been carried in the Daily Telegraph.
It published a story quoting Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US civil air patrol who said Fossett may have faked his own death because of personal problems or fears about his business dealings.
I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found. It's not like we didn't have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do.
Then there was the risk assessor Robert Davis, who carried out an eight-month investigation into Fossett's death.
I discovered that there is absolutely no proof that Steve Fossett is actually dead. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a man who deals in facts, and I don't really care if he is alive or dead, it makes no difference to me.
What I am interested in is the truth - and a proper criminal investigation of this man's disappearance was never undertaken by law enforcement or officials in the state of Nevada.
This was followed by an all-encompassing piece in the Independent, which made an interesting point about the military personnel who had helped propagate the theories.
Military people are not prone to hyperbole, and Ryan's comments about the Fossett case (in an interview with the News of the World last weekend) were far from understated.
Perhaps the last word, then, to a blogger who claims to be a ''fellow billionaire and acquaintance" of Fossett's, who had this to say today:
You see, in the search for Fossett, every form of technology known (some unknown) to man has been employed in the search effort: satellites, radar, aerial, foot, dogs, microwave, internet, seismic, thermal scans, .... and thousands upon thousands of personnel have been involved. BUT NO FOSSETT!
I can't help but wonder, "is something else going on here?"
There has never ever been this level of technology and manpower put into a search for anyone in history, still zilch!
I'm no conspiracy theorist, but, you have to admit this is interestingââ¬Â¦
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2008...ossett.usa
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Searchers find large bones near Fossett crash site
By TRACIE CONE, Associated Press Writer Tracie Cone, Associated Press Writer
2 mins ago
MADERA, Calif. ââ¬â Searchers have found what appear to be two large human bones near the crash site of Steve Fossett's plane in California's Sierra Nevada, along with the adventurer's tennis shoes and driver's license, authorities said Thursday.
Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said at a news conference that the bones were found Wednesday about a half-mile east of the crash site. Investigators have sent them to a Department of Justice testing lab and should know in about a week whether they are Fossett's.
Anderson said searchers also found Fossett's tennis shoes, his Illinois driver's license and credit cards. The shoes and driver's license had animal bite marks on them.
"This reinforces our theory that animals dragged him away," Anderson said.
Previous bone fragments discovered near the wreckage were either found to be not human or too small for DNA tests. Investigators have completed their work on the ground and do not plan to resume search efforts, Anderson said.
Fossett's widow, Peggy, said in a statement Thursday that the discovery of bones was "another step in the process of completing the investigation into the tragic accident that took Steve's life."
Fossett vanished in September 2007 after taking off from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton during what was supposed to be a short pleasure flight.
His disappearance spurred a huge search that covered 20,000 square miles, cost millions of dollars and included the use of infrared technology.
For a while, many of Fossett's friends held out hope he survived, given his many close scrapes with death over the years. But a judge declared him legally dead in February, and his plane wreckage was found this month after a hiker came across his pilot identification cards amid a pile of weathered $100 bills west of Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierra.
Authorities have said Fossett slammed into a mountainside at about 10,000 feet and probably died instantly. The cause of the crash is still under investigation.
Fossett made a fortune in the Chicago commodities market and gained worldwide fame for setting records in high-tech balloons, gliders, jets and boats. In 2002, he became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081031/ap_o...4WQQ4DW7oF
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