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LOS ANGELES - Officials have announced they have found body parts among wreckage of adventurer Steve Fossett's plane.
Rescue workers discovered the wreckage of the light aircraft belonging to Fossett, the record-breaking aviator who vanished just over a year ago.
Federal investigators confirmed they have found body parts amid the wreckage of the aeroplane in the mountains of eastern California.
The National Transportation Safety Board said that searchers found enough at the crash site of Steve Fossett's plane to provide coroners with DNA.
A small piece of bone was found amid a field of debris 122m long and 46m 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 were 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.
Fossett was 63 when he vanished a little more than a year ago.
The remains of Fossett's single-engined Bellanca aeroplane were found near the summit of a ridge 2,956m above sea level in the Ansel Adams Wilderness section of the two-million acre Inyo National Forest.
Most of the aircraft's fuselage, which was made from wood and fabric, disintegrated on impact with the thickly-forested hillside, but its engine was found several hundred feet away from the initial impact site.
The exact location was being kept under wraps.
However, it is reported to be roughly a hundred miles due south of the Nevada desert airfield from which Fossett set off on September 3, on what now appears to have been his final flight.
Searchers began combing the area after a local ski-shop owner, Preston Morrow, stumbled upon several items of the 62-year-old adventurer's personal belongings in a patch of thick undergrowth while walking his dog.
They included two ID cards, a black sweatshirt and US$1,000 ($1,520) in cash.
"I came across the ID card, another card and the 100-dollar bills in the dirt and the pine needles and stuff and I went, 'wow'," Mr Morrow told reporters.
"There wasn't a picture of Fossett, but there was a name and ID and stuff ... It didn't pop in my head right at that time who that was."
The aircraft's discovery may finally reveal what happened when Fossett, who had set more than 100 world records, failed to return to the Flying M Ranch, a remote private airfield owned by the hotel magnate Barron Hilton, after what was described as a routine pleasure flight.
His disappearance sparked one of the biggest peacetime search-and-rescue operations in American history, covering 51,800 square kilometres. and centring on a wide area of desert he was thought to have been scouting for a new land-speed record attempt.
Despite the massive operation, which lasted for over a month, no trace of the aviator was found.
In February, a court in Chicago - where he made his fortune in finance before devoting himself to adventure sports - pronounced him legally dead.
Soon afterwards, conspiracy theories began circulating that Fossett might have faked his own death in order to escape personal or financial problems, or to secure an insurance payout for his wife of 39 years, Peggy.
They wondered how such an experienced pilot could have got into difficulty in a simple and reliable aircraft in almost perfect flying conditions.
They also found it difficult to believe that experienced investigators could have failed to find a crashed aircraft.
Although they are unlikely to be totally silenced until a body is found - and experts say it is likely to have been eaten by animals - friends of Fossett said yesterday that they hoped the discovery of his aircraft might dampen the speculation.
In an interview with Sky News, Sir Richard Branson, who collaborated with Fossett on several of his famous record attempts, said he believed this week's find was genuine.
"The positive thing is that today a couple of stories will be put to rest once and for all, and everybody who was close to Steve will have the chance now to pay the right tribute to what was a truly great and extraordinary person," Sir Richard said.
"They're definitely authentic belongings, it was his pilot licence, his driver's license, it was also a membership card to the National Aeronautic Association, which gave Stephen an award a couple of years ago.
"He also often carried 100-dollar bills with him, so we are certain that these are genuine findings."
Yesterday, accident investigators were busy working out how Fossett's aircraft came to grief.
Experts said the topography of the area could have contributed to an accident, if a pilot flew into one of the mountain gullies which suddenly narrowed before he had time to manoeuvre himself out of it.
The authorities were also trying to establish how the wreckage was initially missed by search and rescue teams.
The Nevada Civil Air Patrol, which co-ordinated the operation, said teams had flown over the Mammoth area, but admitted it was away from their main area focus.
Locating wreckage in the eastern area of the Sierra Nevada can be especially difficult because of the dense woodland which covers much of the ground, and the fact that almost every hillside has hundreds of gullies, which need to be searched individually.
Meanwhile, Mr Fossett's wife, Peggy, issued a statement saying that she was monitoring the situation closely.
"I am hopeful that this search will locate the crash site and my husband's remains, and am grateful to all of those involved in this effort," she said.
- INDEPENDENT, AP
