Billionaire Adventurer Disappeared On Labor Day 2007

Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of the mysterious disappearance of famed aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett... and though official search efforts for the billionaire have ended, friends and admirers continue to scour the desolate Nevada landscape for some sign of what happened.

A privately-funded, 10-member search party was launched in July, led by Canadian geologist Simon Donato. That team failed to come up with any leads, but that hasn't dissuaded others from trying.

The Associated Press reports a new search began August 23, with a 28-member team headed up by Robert Hyman, Lew Toulmin and Bob Atwater. All three belong to the New York-based Explorers Club, which also counted Fossett as a member.

The team is concentrating their efforts close to Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch, where Fossett departed on his last flight on Labor Day 2007, as ANN reported. A massive aerial and ground search, conducted the days following Fossett's disappearance, failed to turn up any sign of what happened.

But were those crews looking in the right area? New information suggests the flight path believed to have been Fossett's may have actually been another pilot, who said he flew over the area around Mount Grant on the day Fossett disappeared.

Like Donato, Hyman's team thinks Fossett may have actually stayed closer to the Flying M Ranch than previously thought, so they're focusing on a smaller area to the west of the airfield, combing the steep canyons and gulches of the Wassuk mountain range.

A smaller search is being conducted by Mike Larson and Kelly Stephenson of Carson City, NV, who have searched an area southwest of Hawthorne, NV for several months, on their days off from work.

To date, none of the searches have turned up anything new. Crews on Hyman's team were buoyed with the discovery of a scrap of blue cloth... but it appears to be too thin to have come from the fabric-covered Bellanca Decathlon (shown below) that Fossett borrowed from hotel magnate Barron Hilton for his last flight.

"We're finding your typical broken glass, bottles, cans, car parts, fenders, coffee cans, anything they can put out there and aim at and shoot up," said Hyman. "[But] we're pushing harder, leaving people in the field longer. We've got the lay of the land now."

The current search is scheduled to end September 10... but Toulmin hopes they find the answer's they're seeking before then. "We hope that Wednesday's the day," he said. "That would be nice."

Fossett was legally declared dead in February. The adventurer's widow, Peggy, has issued a statement saying she supports the private efforts to locate her husband.

(Copyrighted photo of N240R used with permission of photographer Doug Robertson Jr. Photo from www.airport-data.com .)

FMI: www.stevefossett.com, www.explorers.org