Hikers May Have Found Fossett Items

An Anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting 'A weathered sweat shirt, cash and a pilot license with Fossett's name were found Tuesday near Mammoth Lakes, police Chief Randy Schienle said.' The license did not have a photo. '"We're not certain that it belongs to Steve Fossett, but it certainly has his name on the ID," Schienle said.'"

It's a hoax, people.

[mcrbids]

Ok, so a world-renowned pilot takes off in 2,000 pounds of airplane, steel, fuel, and glass, What's found? A partially burned piece of some of the most flammable things on the plane, including a very small piece of PLASTIC that happens to have his name on it.

But no body, no 1,000 pounds of steel, no bits of rubber, no airplane seat bits, just a few, highly flammable personal items (clothing, ID) that happens to have the name "Steve Fosset" on it.

What are the odds?

This is a hoax.

Location

[Anonymous Coward]

I had some time to burn so I entered a few things in Google Maps. Here's the best map I could come up with [google.com] using the takeoff location provided by Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. There's no option for directions by plane, so I went with the walking option. Anyway ... assuming this isn't some stupid hoax, the point is (if there really is one) that the searches last year were all focused on Nevada if I remember correctly. But from the location being reported and from the map, you can see that the location they're talking about is A) in California, and B) pretty much due south from where Fossett took off from.

Re:It's a hoax, people.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

To me, that would be an expensive hoax, because that would have to be turned in. If the license turns out to be faked, then it might be an even more expensive hoax if a prosecutor tries to file a suit for perpetrating fraud.

Re:It's a hoax, people.

[mortonda]

Ok, so a world-renowned pilot takes off in 2,000 pounds of airplane, steel, fuel, and glass, What's found? A partially burned piece of some of the most flammable things on the plane,

Have you seen the remains of the towers on 9/11? It's bizarre what can come out of a catastrophic event.

I'm not saying it's genuine or fake, but your criteria doesn't prove anything either.

Re:It's a hoax, people.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can see in the pictures of the license that it is "partially burned"...

Re:It's a hoax, people.

[gregbot9000]

One little flaw, they may be highly flammable but they are also highly transportable. If the plane EXPLODED, and if the hikers were where it exploded, sure. If he survived and wandered off, they could be miles from where it crashed. Him ditching the wallet and cash I could see, I'd ditch it too if my useless giant fortune sat there mocking me as I die alone in the woods. The sweater doesn't make sense, that would be worth more then gold in that situation.

Re:It's a hoax, people.

[myth_of_sisyphus]

People in the later stages of hypothermia engage in 'shedding' of clothes. They think they are hot so they start taking off articles of clothing, leaving a trail. This is often how rescuers find bodies, by following the trail of clothing to a frozen stiff. This was how they found the husband of the James Kim family who made a wrong turn in California about a year ago. The family stayed in the car while the husband went on walkabout. They followed the trail of clothing to his frozen corpse.

Re:Location

[jd]

As I see it, there are essentially three possibilities. First, Steve's instrumentation failed and he flew not only in the wrong direction but also ended up flying into the lake. Unlikely, given his experience, but even the best sometimes over-rely on instrumentation, and I've spoken to some damn good WW2 pilots who have assured me that prior to reliable instrumentation, people often took a fatal wrong turning in a cloud, or mistook a really smooth river for a runway. All in all, I consider this unlikely but within the realms of possibility.

The second option is that he crashed somewhere relatively near to where the belongings were found, where "relatively near" would be the distance you could expect a hardened survivor with plenty of experience of extreme conditions to be able to travel given his supplies and the availability of natural resources. In this case, it is possible he deliberately left a marker to (a) avoid walking in circles, and (b) inform searchers he'd survived that long and was in that general proximity. It's not unknown for people to leave such markers, and if there was a reason to believe the crash site would never be found (such as being in a lake), this could well be the only sort of marker he could realistically leave.

The third option - the most likely but also the most depressing - is that he got clear of the wreckage but was killed by a bear or other large predator, and that what we are seeing is a location where such a predator decided to take a snack. If this is the case, we might still locate the wreck, but this may well be all we'll ever see of Steve Fossett.

Re:It's a hoax, people.

[smellsofbikes]

*MY* pilot certificate was printed on a laser printer, in black, in the middle of an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of paper. I had to cut it out with scissors and get it laminated. If Fossett didn't bother with the lamination step, it would be pretty easy to DIY.

(I was somewhat annoyed, given that I'd spent $5000 for that bit of paper, that it wasn't just a little fancier.)