�
 |
|
 |
|
|
| Hikers find Steve Fossett's ID, belongings - |
| View previous topic
:: View next topic |
olympic
 Posted:
Wed Oct 01, 2008 8:01 pm |
|
|
|
Hikers find Steve Fossett's ID, belongings
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Hikers in a remote area of California have found clothing and aviation identification cards belonging to millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, presumed dead after his plane went missing a year ago, police said on Wednesday.
Fossett's family was monitoring developments as authorities in the area where the items were found -- the eastern Sierras between Yosemite National Park and the Nevada border -- rushed to set up a command post to search for wreckage of his plane.
"I am hopeful that this search will locate the crash site and my husband's remains," Peggy Fossett, the missing adventurer's widow, said in a statement.
Local officials provided few details of the personal items recovered by the hikers.
"There was some various paper identification found and some clothing," said Shannon Kendall, a spokeswoman for the Mono County Sheriff's Department. "We have a ground team heading out to search the area."
Kendall told Reuters that wreckage from the small airplane Fossett was piloting when he disappeared was not located with the identification and a sweatshirt discovered by hikers.
They came across the items in a remote part of neighboring Madera County linked by the mountainous area's only road to Mono County.
"It's very rugged alpine terrain," said Lt. Michael Salvador of the Madera County Sheriff's Office. "You hike in or you fly in (by helicopter)."
Fossett, 63, vanished in his airplane after taking off from a private airstrip in Nevada in September 2007.
Despite weeks of extensive land and air searches, no wreckage was found, and he was declared legally dead in February 2008 after investigators concluded that his airplane was destroyed in a fatal accident.
Hiker Preston Morrow told cable TV's Fox News Channel that he had found the Federal Aviation Administration ID cards with Fossett's name on them, along with several $100 bills, while returning from a mountain hike on Monday. There was no sign of any wreckage, he said.
The sweatshirt was found in an area higher up the same mountain ridge by searchers on Tuesday, Morrow said.
"I was coming back down this really steep terrain, and what caught my eye was these little (ID) cards in the dirt and the pine needles, and some $100 bills."
"I see the ID. I caught the name. I got the ID cards ... and about five or six of the hundred-dollar bills (which) were dirty and muddy," he said.
"I was wondering, 'why are there some ID cards and money when there was nothing else?' No wallet, no bags, nothing nothing, nothing," Morrow told Fox News.
Fossett held several aviation and sailing records, becoming the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world in 2002.
He disappeared after setting off from western Nevada on September 3 in a single-engine plane for what friends said was a casual pleasure flight.
|
|
Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Posts: 2140
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
| Hannie
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 10:24 am |
|
|
|
I always found this a hinky story somehow, don't know why, there's just something about it....
It wouldn't surprise me if he did set this up and lives a happy life somewhere else...
|
|
li'l Shango's Mommy
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 23202
Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| SavannahStar
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 10:31 am |
|
|
|
| Hannie wrote: | I always found this a hinky story somehow, don't know why, there's just something about it....
It wouldn't surprise me if he did set this up and lives a happy life somewhere else... |
It's intriguing, that's for sure! But sheesh he was RICH....if he just ran off to live a life elsewhere, it might be on a deserted island in the middle of nowhere, and with nothing. Maybe that's what he wanted........
Strange!
|
|
**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 21295
Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Hannie
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 10:49 am |
|
|
|
Yes, if he's alive he could be anywhere that's true. The moment when I first heard about this last year, I always had that funny feeling about it and I really don't know much about him...
I think that id and that money being found is also weird. Just as if he put it there...don't know, call me suspicious... 
|
|
li'l Shango's Mommy
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 23202
Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Isanah
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 12:49 pm |
|
|
|
Oh my, there isn't a conspiracy in every case! The man is dead, there is absolutely no reason for him to have faked a disappearance.
I'm pretty sure they will find his remains.
|
|
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 8085
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Hannie
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 2:21 pm |
|
|
|
I'm not one about conspiracies in general, Isanah. I'm pretty level headed with those kind of things actually. Hey, maybe the guy is dead, but I thought it was a hinky story somehow...
|
|
li'l Shango's Mommy
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 23202
Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| yankee-in-france
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:07 pm |
|
|
|
They also said that usually remains after such a long time in the wilderness are not found.
|
|
YIF
Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 7011
Location: France
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Hannie
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 6:04 pm |
|
|
|
A small amount of human remains has been found with the wreckage of adventurer Steve Fossett's plane, authorities say.
|
|
li'l Shango's Mommy
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 23202
Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| olympic
Posted:
Thu Oct 02, 2008 8:16 pm |
|
|
|
Searchers find Fossett's plane and human remains
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. - More than a year after the mysterious disappearance of millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, searchers have found the wreckage of his plane in the rugged Sierra Nevada along with enough human remains for DNA testing.
The remains were found amid a field of debris that stretched 400 feet long and 150 feet wide in a steep section of the mountain range, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday at a press conference. Some personal effects also were found at the crash site, but investigators would not describe them in any detail.
"We found human remains, but there's very little. Given the length of time the wreckage has been out there, it's not surprising there's not very much," said National Transportation Safety Board acting Chairman Mark Rosenker. "I'm not going to elaborate on what it is."
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.
Rosenker said enough remains were found to provide coroners with DNA.
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 — in fact, the first trace of any kind — 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."
___
|
|
Joined: 18 Dec 2006
Posts: 2140
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Arubalover
Posted:
Sun Oct 05, 2008 2:31 pm |
|
|
|
I hated it when someone would call this guy a hero. What did he ever do for society? He wasn't a hero, he was an egomaniac. He was probably out there in that stunt plane, was doing some stupid aerial stunt and lost control.
Sorry, but I think his wife should have to pay for the cost of the search.
|
|
Joined: 24 Nov 2007
Posts: 1103
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| dugo
Posted:
Sun Oct 05, 2008 5:35 pm |
|
|
|
| Arubalover wrote: | I hated it when someone would call this guy a hero. What did he ever do for society? He wasn't a hero, he was an egomaniac. He was probably out there in that stunt plane, was doing some stupid aerial stunt and lost control.
Sorry, but I think his wife should have to pay for the cost of the search. |
probably paid more tax than I ever will..
|
|
Dashing Dutch Dynamo Dude
Joined: 12 Apr 2006
Posts: 6129
Location: L4L
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
�
Jasidogdotcom template v.1.0.4 © jasidog.com
Powered by phpBB
© 2001, 2004 phpBB Group
|
