Nevada Triangle: The Plane Cemetery | The Mystery Of The Nevada Triangle | On The Move

[Music] september 2007 one of america's richest men went missing on a solo flight in the mountains of the sierra nevada steve fossett was a world famous pilot who cheated death on dozens of record-breaking flights how could he just vanish off the face of the earth there were rumors that he was in argentina there were rumors that he had faked his death a lot of people especially wealthy people sometimes they just kind of check out i'm walking away from this fawcett who'd made the first solo balloon flight around the world had disappeared in america's very own bermuda triangle an area of nevada and california in which more than 2 000 planes have crashed in the last 50 years some call it the nevada triangle it's just something that's been passed around by pilots in this area for decades that you know in the old days planes would go missing nobody ever found the airplane they were talking about hundreds and hundreds of planes that had vanished into the nevada triangle of the devil's triangle of nevada the nevada triangle is a mysterious area with an unforgiving landscape of high mountain and desert inside its borders is area 51 a top secret military base famous for rumors of ufo sightings and unsolved plane crashes only by unlocking these mysteries to try and find out what happened to steve fossett can we learn why so many planes crash or disappear in the nevada triangle [Music] yerrington nevada 8 45 am monday the 3rd of september 2007. record-breaking pilot steve fosseck took off on a solo flight in a two-man decathlon stunt plane a weekend guest at a ranch 60 miles from reno he didn't tell his hosts where he was going simply saying he'd be back in a few hours after three hours his worried friends declared him missing it triggered the biggest peacetime search and rescue operation in us history it was led by the nevada wing of the u.s air force's civil air patrol there was no flight plan filed the only information we had was that you know he was basically taking off on a sunday joy ride and flying a 395 corridor fossett's reputation for fearless flying kept his rescuers optimistic this man can be found alive any sighting or anything that seems to be appears to be accurate with the information known about the aircraft we are following up as they come in fawcett had taken off from this desert airstrip the flying m ranch owned by his friend billionaire hotelier baron hilton the potential search area was huge eight times the size of britain he had about four hours of fuel on board that aircraft and it flies at about 120 miles an hour so that means that in four hours he could cover 480 miles called 500 miles and then do pi r squared it's three quarters of a million miles so unless we have some very good clues as to what direction what piece of that there's no way that we can search 750 000 square miles the searchers were looking for a pilot who at the age of 63 had amassed 105 world records there's a large number of aviation records but there are three uh what are called absolute world records one of them is for distance one of them is for duration and one of them is for altitude and i i set two of them today terry de laure flew with faucet for five years together they set more than ten world records for gliding the last one just weeks before fawcett disappeared he was interested in what he calls the ultimate challenges ultimate achievements things that nobody's ever done before do something further or faster or longer or whatever fossett was a driven man he saw adversity as a challenge surely he couldn't have lost his life on a two-hour pleasure flight he trained himself to be able to put up with all the variety of conditions that nature would throw at him because all he was looking at was the the goal at the end you know to to finish his challenges to get the records to to get where we wanted to go fawcett had been a risk taker all his life it had made his fortune by the time he was in his 40s he'd made lost and made again millions on the chicago stock exchange i have set a a goal which is at the very limit of this aircraft if i've miscalculated to any extent i will be unable to finish this flight but hatfosset miscalculated that sunday morning the sierra nevada mountain range runs down the western coast of the united states and straddles the border of california and nevada the airstrip he'd taken off from in yerrington is in the middle of what has become known as the nevada triangle it has seen more than 2 000 plane crashes over the last 50 years since the second world war there have been uh hundreds and hundreds of planes that have crashed uh in the desert and in the sierra nevada so it is a treacherous place for aircraft frank mullen is a newspaper journalist he started to plot out the crash sites the map that i put together of 129 crashes are only crash sites where there is still debris on the ground there's actually been more hundreds and hundreds of crash sites around the state the area covers almost 25 000 square miles half the size of england there are many theories why so many planes go missing here from unusual atmospheric effects to alien intervention in the search for steve fawcett investigators would explore each one in the hope of finding him i gotta say the most critical part of a search is probably about the first 24 hours it's the best possibility for someone that's injured in a crash a survivable crash to still be found alive your best options at being able to to get help to this this person or these people as fast as you can but faucet wasn't found on the first day or the second i would say after about three days we are pretty confident that we're searching for wreckage rather than an individual who needs to be rescued unfortunately the temperatures go down pretty low at night even in the summer times here and if a person is injured they're not going to survive very long usually fossett was not only an adventurer in the skies he sailed oceans and made two attempts on everest when you say the name steve fawcett then that changes your whole perspective and if anyone was going to survive the thing and come walking out maybe broken and battered but still alive we really thought it would be him the rescuers didn't want to give up hope because if anyone could beat the nevada triangle it would be steve fawcett that is if he was still in the triangle the mountains of the sierra nevada stretch for nearly 400 miles along the border of california and nevada in september 2007 they were the focus of a massive search and rescue operation steve fossett the record-breaking aviator had not been seen for two days since taking off on a pleasure flight as search planes combed the peaks and valleys they reportedly spotted dozens of plane wrecks that had lain undisturbed for years the plane that went in down in these rocks here was just small pieces that were found by hunters a year after it went in and there was just nothing visible from the air it wasn't news to the locals but the world was discovering this region of the sierra nevada was an aviation graveyard initially of the tv cable networks were all saying there were hundreds of planes that had flown into nevada and never were seen again just vanished into thin air and uh this turned into talk of the nevada triangle on the cnn and the other tv networks bermuda triangle located in the desert of nevada where people just vanished more than 2 000 planes have crashed in the nevada triangle since 1962 in the southeastern corner at the bottom of the triangle is area 51 a top secret military testing site for years it has been associated with ufo sightings alien encounters and unexplained crashes when it comes to someone vanishing and you look at what else is in the area and you see the proliferation of of military bases and secret technologies and so forth it's not a hard leap of faith to say well gee maybe these other things are involved in this mysterious disappearance area 51 was within fossett's flight range there are rumors that uh steve fawcett got into area 51 or that there was some incident there somebody who would really get into the airspace of area 51 would definitely be [Music] forced down if they really end up the airspace the idea that faucet was forced down here is not so far-fetched to sell york anu has spent years studying satellite photographs and investigating unexplained sightings crashes and what actually goes on in area 51. these three f-16s here seem to be pretty much on standby just in case an intrusion in the airspace would happen they'll be very quickly able to taxi out to the runway which is right over here and take off and basically intercept an intruder into the area 51 airspace could steve fawcett have strayed into restricted airspace and been mistakenly fired upon in a covert flying exercise they are probably close to two dozen crash sites around rachel aircraft that crash during red flag exercises this is a very heavily used area for military flight operations and what they do here is as close as it gets to real combat situations the authorities keep secret a lot of what happens here which leads to speculation about the high rate of plane crashes on its doorstep a lot of people think that what is going on at area 51 might interfere with these planes so everyone comes up with their own little conspiracy theory about area 51. as well as the secret research being carried out at area 51 covert exercises are flown over the desert from nellis air force base and from the navy's top gun school at fallon air station could the busy skies explain how so many crashes happen we are heading up to the crash site of an f4 this particular fighter jet crashed in 1979 the crashed f4 is on the perimeter of the high security zone this is as close as you can get to area 51 there's road sensors buried along the road so we will trip several sensors on our way and base security will know that we're going up there over on the next bridge over there's a security vehicle from area 51 they are sitting there to watch us to make sure that we don't do anything that we shouldn't be doing york shows fellow investigator jimmy barfield the wreckage they're convinced the high number of crashes are down to the top secret test planes and exercises and not aliens this could very well be part of the ejection seat the cockpit was right here you'll see this was one of the windows of the aircraft hopefully two crew members on an f4 hopefully they both made it out of this this f4 was being flown low simulating evasive action against enemy radar but it came in too low and clipped one of the ridges with a wingtip both pilot and navigator were killed before they could eject that was enough to turn it around a little bit and unfortunately it slammed right into the next ridge over and pretty much disintegrated york believes that conspiracy theorists make too much of area 51's location inside the nevada triangle the location for area 51 inside the training range is an ideal location as far as remoteness people cannot go there and these crash sites around area 51 really add to the mystery of the place gary dirks head of the nevada emergency management team also heard the rumors that fawcett had flown into restricted airspace we were told that he did stray into area 51 and then he was shot down first thing i did when we called when i got that information is i called the u.s air force base in nellis down by las vegas got a hold of the operations guys they'll tell me do we have an issue and they said not at all if he wasn't shot down there were dozens of other rumors the searchers had to deal with a lot of rumors came through a lot of things that that he was on his boat that was docked in long beach harbor and that he was getting ready to go away another one was at the plane he landed on a dirt road and the plane was put in the back of an 18-wheeler and he drove away you know radar disproved all these theories but we followed up on every single lead that was called in even though knowing going in that the odds of it being true were just not there but you have to you have still got to follow up on it if fossett didn't crash out in the open desert of area 51 could he have flown towards the mountains that mark the western border of the nevada triangle the sierra nevada form a towering barrier up to fourteen thousand five hundred feet high the planes must cross to reach the rest of the country many surviving pilots who've crashed in the mountains reported how disorientating they are it all adds to the reputation of the nevada triangle so many planes come down the sierra nevada because of number one you have a lot of traffic going through here you know anyone in central california has to cross the sierra nevadas to go east craig fuller is an aviation archaeologist he knows this region well he's been to more than 500 crash sites looking for clues that will reveal why planes come down here i'm frequently contacted by family members looking to find the crash site of a relative sometimes it's a son or a daughter who is only a few years old when their father was killed and for them it's often a finding of closure to find these sites we're looking for a bonanza airplane made by beechcraft that crashed in the early 50s should be just up top of the this little rise here and supposedly there's still quite a bit of wreckage that remains at the site this crash site lies within the search box that steve fossett's rescuers were combing if he'd crashed here his plane could lie undiscovered for years hidden under the dense tree cover we're getting close now you can see how hard it is to spot wreckage you know here we're only 20 yards away from the wreck and we first spotted it just now this wreck has lain virtually undisturbed since it crashed here more than half a century ago it was a beachcraft bonanza a small propeller driven aircraft wow just like the one buddy holly died in 1959 this plane came down almost vertical the pilot and passenger had come over the sierra nevada from california for a days fishing at lake crowley seeing an approaching snow storm they made a run for home but that's when the mountain weather caught up with them left a very big impact crater looks like we have both wings here and the wings are compressed in or accordioned in indicates that it hit with a lot of force even after more than 50 years the clues are there to be seen its airspeed indicator was fixed at 280 miles an hour so the plane probably hit the mountain in the steep dive no one survived i'm really surprised at how tight and confined the wreckage is i mean we're talking basically wingtip to wingtip and then maybe you know 20 feet in front even the air rescue squadron plane searching for the bonanza went missing its five-man crew was eventually found nearly 50 miles away having parachuted to safety i wouldn't say so much the sierras or jinx as i would say that the mountains stick up and like to catch airplanes had the mountains claimed fossett's life he'd walked the sierra nevada trail since he was a boy but he didn't have as much experience in the air above them on the day he disappeared there were no storms to complicate his flight was he still out there waiting to be rescued typically searches like this go on for a couple of weeks we'd like to have found him before now but everyone's in really good spirits and still feeling quite strongly that this man can be found alive by the 10th of september 2007 a week into the search for steve fawcett the nevada civil air patrol had flown hundreds of sorties and was searching nearly twenty thousand square miles of mountain and desert fossett's friends also rallied their resources to help search billionaire richard branson who'd shared adventures with fossett was one if steve if steve is found alive and well which is more likely than not knowing steve um he'll certainly just brush himself down and wonder what all the fuss was about they mobilized a private army of pilots and ground patrols who examined every lead no matter how unlikely we had to evaluate eyewitness testimony psychic information to see if it matched up the time of day we also received radar information radar tracks from fallon naval air station that the fawcett family had turned over that was very important to us as well so a lot of pieces of the puzzle had to fit [Music] a local surveyor mike larson was one of the many who eventually joined the search steve was a he was a little bit of a role model for me i'd been sort of an adventurer and explorer all my whole life and a surveyor navigator and i really thought he was kind of an american hero in a way while the official search had concentrated their operations to the west of the nevada triangle mike and his team acting on information from the fossett family searched an area to the east much closer to his last known location the flying m ranch we knew that there was a good probability that the plane crashed within a 50-mile radius and particularly 50 miles south southwest of the flanging ranch and so operating on those premises we decided to continue our search even ground patrols find it hard to prize secrets from the nevada triangle there's numerous plane wrecks in nevada that have never been found because it's so difficult most of these regions are never accessed unless someone's on a road so to get off road it's extremely treacherous even with horses and jeeps you can run into problems so the only way to do it is on foot we did find some signal fires organized in a triangle and there were airplane type materials in these fires wiring and synthetic materials that you couldn't get from anywhere else so why would those materials be there by week two there were more questions than there were answers the search had grown into the largest peacetime operation in u.s history there's a good rumor mill going out there and i do want to let you people know we have not found him we have not found an airplane i don't know what condition he's in because we don't know where he is rescuers were starting to talk of finding a body because two weeks is too long to survive in the nevada triangle but nobody wanted to think of steve fawcett as dead so speculation grew that he'd run off to start a new life or to look for new adventures late september 2007 the search for missing aviator steve fawcett was in its third week the nevada and california civil air patrols had flown hundreds of sorties and covered thousands of miles but had failed to find him or his aircraft but some wondered had steve fawcett used the mysterious reputation of the nevada triangle to escape into a new life people said that he might want to have disappeared because he was having money problems or that he was having personal problems family problems or that he was simply bored he had done everything he set out to do and set all the records he wanted to set and wanted to start a new life somewhere in the months ahead other investigators began to look at leads outside the nevada triangle my name is paul ciolino and i am a licensed private investigator i was hired by an insurance adjuster out of louisiana a man by the name of robert davis he was concerned about a potential claim that may have been filed on mr faucet's estate he was concerned that perhaps he wasn't missing and he may be alive cielino has investigated many disappearances some of them criminal people fake their death they go missing for a lot of reasons usually they're running some kind of financial scheme and they're in big trouble the federal alleys are closing in on them their wife just caught them fooling around a lot of people especially wealthy people sometimes they just kind of check out we're done i'm walking away from this and then the multi-millionaire's private life came under scrutiny i mean there's rumors and innuendo and we talked to a couple women who said that they had relationships with them one one in california one in florida but ciolino's investigations didn't raise any convincing reasons why fossett would want to start a new life this is a guy who did anything he wanted whenever he wanted and didn't seem the lack for financing for anything uh in so much of is he had affairs uh most rich people do have affairs i'm not saying he did i don't know that for a fact i i investigated some areas and talked to some people but i don't know for certain that he was having affairs in fossett's case nothing could be substantiated but wealth and women have been reason in the past for investigating mysterious disappearances in the nevada triangle charles ogle vanished in 1964 on a flight to reno from california and uh it's believed he went down in the sierra and to this day no hiker has come across that wreckage and it was a larger plane than faucets like fawcett ogle was also a self-made man he was about to sign a property deal that would make him millions more on the evening of august 12 1964 he took off from oakland airport in california on route he said to a business meeting his flight path took him towards the nevada triangle at the time there was some speculation that he was maybe trying to avoid business complications questions were asked when ogle's mistress came forward and claimed he'd been about to divorce his wife but no body or wreckage was ever found he was another victim of the nevada triangle the similarities between the charles ogle and the steve fawcett cases are that once these men disappeared alone in an aircraft people were speculating that perhaps they had done it on purpose for other motives and that they landed somewhere and then were spirited away trying to start a new life [Music] nothing was clear about faucet's disappearance no investigation or search had uncovered any clue then in late september three weeks after he went missing in the far southwestern corner of the nevada triangle a hiker made an extraordinary discovery 160 miles from where faucet took off i noticed an object shining in the sun and i realized it was a ring peter steckel an aviation enthusiast had hiked up to the mendel glacier in king's canyon national park following reports about a plane in the ice we easily were able to locate one of the engines we spent a lot of time being excited about that taking pictures and recording serial numbers because that would be our providence that would establish the identity of the airplane the plane wasn't faucets but it turned out to be the answer to a far older mystery it would help explain why some planes had crashed in the nevada triangle and perhaps a clue to faucets vanishing the 18th of november 1942 a u.s army beach 18 on a routine training mission with its pilot and three trainee navigators failed to return to base the men and their plane had been claimed by the nevada triangle the mountains don't like to give up their secrets but as the glacial ice began to melt gradually the fate of the airmen was slowly being revealed the national park service was contacted by the inyo county sheriff's department reporting that two climbers had hiked out from the mendel glacier having discovered human remains on the glacier jim gould was flown in to recover the body which turned out to be one of the world war ii aviators the airman was pretty much encased in ice we literally had to chip him out of the ice we used ice axes ice tools and hammer and chisels and it took approximately six to seven hours to get the airmen out of the ice the airmen was still in uniform with military clothing the frozen airman was identified as 22 year old leo mustang one of the cadets on the flight their plane a beach 18 similar to this model was one of thousands of non-combat crashes that occurred during world war ii approaching the mendel glacier right over here looks like the plane would have probably impacted the mountain right about the base of that cliff at the top of that rocky finger the wreckage has all slid down over the years with the movement of the ice and the snow and wind and what have you steve ivey runs an airport in bishop california he's puzzled for years over what caused the plane to crash now there is a chance that that beach 18 could have flown through this pass right here and then uh wound up crashing there in the basin but seems to me that it would have been pretty hard to make that ridge crossing right there and uh crash that close on the other side it's just my hunch when peter steckel saw the ring it was two years after the first body had been found and that's when it hit me i'm actually looking at the remains of one of the other navigators the navigator cadets and who turned out to be glenn munn and that really knocked me out determined to discover what happened he cross-referenced the flight plan with weather reports to find out what went wrong they flew over lake tahoe they flew south down the owens valley the weather was great they turned around by now it's approaching the fourth hour of flight they're on their fuel reserves they need to get home they get towards their crossing point at lake tahoe in the sierra nevada and they see a big storm clouds coming over the range similar to water sloshing out of a bathtub steckle believed the pilot william gamber decided to cross the mountains through a narrow pass in what is now the king's canyon national park gamber would have known to expect turbulence as he crossed the crest of the mountains the eastern crest where he's pointed is at twelve thousand eight hundred and eighty feet he can see the san joaquin valley to the west beyond he knows he's safe but then something extraordinary happened his airplane begins to rise he's caught in an updraft that could take him as much as 2000 feet per minute and then a moment later a downdraft of an equal intensity today we now know that this phenomenon is called the mountain wave but in 1942 when the beach 1887 was trying to cross the sierra nevada they didn't know anything about mountain waves how high up they went and how incredibly massive these monster waves really were the same powerful phenomena that has downed so many planes also brings glider pilots to the sierra nevada from all over the world and it was glider pilots and meteorologists who helped unravel the puzzle of the mountain wave sam whiteside is a minden based real estate broker he moved to nevada for the challenging gliding conditions the climate here is suitable for flying this airplane almost every day of the year a lot of pilots relocate here from around the world starting from the late 1950s glider pilots flew again and again into the danger zone that exists in the lee of the sierra nevada it can be very strong it can be extremely turbulent you can fly into that and be going the wrong way which is down towards the ground glider pilots discovered that the wind was predictable it formed a wave-like pattern that extended tens of miles beyond the mountainside a little pop the rope will go he'll go one way i'll do the other there it goes we're off to it'll get a little more peaceful now researchers discovered that the wave happens because the sierra nevada is the first barrier encountered by winds rushing in from the pacific ocean the gentle western slope on the california side lifts the air mass slowly up to 14 000 feet over the course of 70 miles then on the nevada side the terrain drops nearly 10 000 feet in just three miles and the cold ocean air drops with it when it hits the valley floor the air bounces up again at incredible speed up to three thousand feet a minute the mountain wave that everybody in gliders is looking for is something what you would see in a stream behind water flowing over a rock water goes over the rock then falls on the lee side and then sets up a lot of ripples downstream but the air is doing exactly the same thing with these knights the danger for any plane comes if it gets caught in the crashing downdrafts as the air falls over the mountains at speeds of up to 3 000 feet a minute even vastly experienced flyers can be trapped by the swirling masses of air and forced into the ground just months before steve fawcett vanished three gliders from this airfield were forced to the ground by the mountain wave but did it kill fawcett on the day he vanished he was flying a propeller-driven stunt plane but he was also an expert glider player this glider was owned by steve fossett and we used it for doing world record flights in argentina and here in nevada we've flown this glider up to 30 000 feet and we've done over 2000 kilometer flights in this glider flying his high performance glider he and terry de laure pushed the boundaries of what was achievable in mountain wave conditions fawcett was certainly aware of its dangers when steve started with the lighting he was interested to see how we got our information for the high altitude projects he employed the best meteorologists he could find but he was also willing to listen to local knowledge and the untrained experts if you like people that just had local knowledge in the micro meteorology and he knew what winds were doing although the mountain wave has been responsible for many of the nevada triangles victims it was discounted as the cause of faucet's disappearance meteorological records revealed that the mountain wave wasn't running the day he vanished after four weeks of extensive searching the nevada civil air patrol suspended their operation to find steve fossett you know when a search gets going for a week two weeks everyone really has an emotional investment in it and it's hard when it's called off everyone feels sort of geez we could do more if we just had more time more information we could find this guy no one had a clue what had happened to steve fawcett since he'd left the flying m ranch it looked like the nevada triangle had won again but all that would change late autumn 2008 record-breaking aviator steve fawcett had not been seen since he flew off into the nevada triangle more than a year earlier as winter approached it looked like the mountains would keep their secret for another season but on the 29th of september a hiker from mammoth lakes resort looking for an abandoned silver mine stumbled across the first clue to fossett's mysterious disappearance half the way i knew i was never going to make it to the mines was too far away so i just cut up to the top of a ridge to get a view before i come back down and come home saw the nice view great place and i just came down some really narrow little draw among some trees is where i found the what caught my attention of the of the id the id cards and the money preston had found fawcett's pilot's license and a thousand and five dollars mainly in hundred dollar bills returning to town he worried about finding the exact spot again a few of us got together and said gee we should come back up here and we should get gps coordinates because to remember exactly where i was even at that time would have been kind of difficult they hiked the five hours back up the mountain looking around they found no wreckage but they did find a black fleece [Music] it's no secret that we chief we could find more be great and my wife found the sweater up on top of a rock on top of the ridge and that took all day we didn't get home till like 9 10 o'clock that night but the very next morning my wife and i went to the police and sheriffs of mammoth and mono county and i brought them the id cards the money and my wife brought them the gps coordinates the search for steve fawcett and his plane was back on it took a day of searching before the wreckage of fossett's plane was finally discovered it was the first of october 2008 more than a year after he'd gone missing and seven months after he'd been officially declared dead they had found engine in one area and pieces of plane everywhere so all the pieces were scattered in this whole area they found enough wreckage to establish that it was in fact an aircraft they found a plate with the end number identifying it as the plane that belonged to stephen fossen the wreckage was high up in a small range called the minarets it was about 90 miles or less than an hour's flight south west from where foset took off from the flying enrage the ridge where preston found the id was about half a mile away but there were no signs of faucet at either location equivocally now we have not found any human remains at the crash site as teams continued to scour the mountains for signs of a body the shattered remains of the plane were recovered an inspection could find no mechanical defect so what had caused faucet to crash at the desert research institute in reno kelly redmond thinks that he has the answer and it's not the mountain wave the unique and unpredictable weather patterns of the sierra nevada are the cause we pulled out the records from our high altitude site and we have readings from this every few seconds and they're summarized in the 10-minute periods and what we found is right around about uh nine in the morning the winds went from an average of about 16 miles an hour up to about 28 miles an hour so it's swirling a little bit more than it had been and it's speeding up and slowing down and these are indications there may be some eddies in the wind and when these eddies are are moving along like this and they're and they're heading toward a mountain peak they will interact with that peak and form new eddies which can accentuate existing downdrafts and this is exactly what the official report into faucet's crash concluded a violent downdraft had sprung up and spun his plane out of control high resolution models based on minute-by-minute analysis from the desert research institute graphically reveal the powerful winds that fawcett encountered on that day as his plane was pushed into the hillside you have a temporary tornado-like vortex horizontal and that can that can tear an airplane apart if it's strong enough or you could certainly pull it out of control and make it loose altitude stravko podolski is a flight instructor who trains people to fly in the sierra nevada he uses a decathlon stunt plane identical to one used by steve fawcett on his last flight as we go higher and higher two things happen one is the air gets thinner which means that the propeller generates less thrust and the wings generate less lift which means you need more speeds to get the same lift at the same time the amount of oxygen also drops and so the engine can't burn gasoline or petrol so effectively so it's a triple whammy at last with a known location for fossett's plane the rescue teams could sort through the massive information they gathered and link his flight to a radar trace fallon naval air station had recorded it showed he'd headed away from the 395 highway and up into a narrow valley you would have come right up right up this valley right up like that once he got to this point steve fossett would have found himself trapped in terrain that was rising to well over ten thousand feet his plane gripped by a powerful downdraft of at least 400 feet a minute so you find that the air is pushing you backwards and you can't find the terrain and you find yourself trapped in a valley that's getting narrower and narrower and harder and harder to climb and you might find yourself you can't turn around anymore you can't climb and then you stop fawcett's decathlon plane had a climb rate of only 300 feet a minute he would have been unable to climb faster than the 400-foot downdraft he was trapped in and with the hillside rushing up to meet him there was only one option for him pilots call it seafit controlled flight into terrain [Music] crashing one of the most obvious things we can see that's pretty unique is this big slab of granite here and of course we know the plane was blue and white all the all the scratches are are scratched this way so most likely the plane was hit this and then just was cracking up in pieces going up there there's a fuel spill up in there where as the plane broke apart the fuel spilled caught on fire and caught all those trees on fire the plane had broken up and was scattered across the hillside finally how steve fossett crashed was understood and in telling the story of his death more has been learned about the nevada triangle this was a guy that had a skill set bar none but it meant going around the world at altitude with a lot of support he wasn't just a you know a mountain pilot that was accustomed to going out there and dealing with the little squirrely winds that can just take you out unfortunate that happens all the time around here but one question still remain where was the body of steve fossett finally on the 29th of october after four weeks of combing the area searchers found what they were looking for we did discover near the wreckage what appears to be bones two fragments of bone were found half a mile away from the crash site dna analysis confirmed them as the remains of steve fossett [Music] how would they ended up so far from the plane one theory is that his body had been dragged away to be eaten by bears it would not be typical black bears are extremely lazy they are he was deep deep in the forest it would be no goal for them to move mr faucet if they were going to take advantage of him as a food source steve searles the local bear ranger who'd seen the wreckage believes he knows what happened a great deal of evidence to suggest that he managed to get out of the plane before the fire and make his way to where his remains were found fawcett's bone fragments were found on a ridge above the crash site close to where his id and money were discovered had he crawled from the crash and made for the high ground to await a rescue that never came we may never know that's a secret the nevada triangle will probably keep to itself like many hundreds of others before you

Channel: On The Move

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Id: A9go-aoYRI4

Length: 47min 55sec (2875 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021