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A six-year-old in a homemade aircraft over Colorado is no comparison to one of the world's great aviators in a proper plane over Nevada. But there remain challenges in finding a human who disappears out of the sky. Learn some of Luke Dittrich's lessons from this story, originally published in the June 2008 issue.

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It's Not a Desert.

The area Fossett probably went down in is a jumble of scrubland and forest and canyons and black-water lakes. It would have been hard to find him in that sort of terrain even if the searchers knew exactly where to look. I experienced the landscape's talent for concealment firsthand one afternoon, high up in the Sierra Nevada.

A Civil Air Patrol pilot had given me the GPS coordinates of an uncharted crash site that he had spotted during the search for Fossett. (Six wrecks had been "discovered" during the search, but the other five all turned out to have been previously documented.) I wanted to visit the site and see if I could find a serial number or something else that might help me identify the wreckage.

The coordinates were near the top of a seven-thousand-foot-high ridgeline, five trailless miles from the nearest road. It was a long hike, and when I arrived, all I saw were boulders and rabbit burrows and trees. I zigzagged the ridgeline for three hours, figuring that even if the coordinates were slightly off -- the pilot had taken them while more than a thousand feet above the deck -- I'd have to spot something eventually. I didn't. The problem is, when you're on the ground, your perspective is ridiculously limited and your eyes, overanxious, start registering way too many false positives: I can't tell you how many mangled ailerons turned out to be gnarled juniper branches. The pilot himself had attributed his find to pure luck: He'd been flying by at precisely the right time of day for the sun to reflect visibly off a scrap of aluminum. I walked down from the mountains that evening humbled. I knew where to look -- I had GPS coordinates! -- and I still found nothing at all.

Plane Wrecks Are Brutal Time Capsules.

A few days before that failed trek, I made a successful visit to a different crash site, one that was four decades old but had been rediscovered during the Fossett search. I wanted to see it because I wanted to know what plane wreckage looked like up close. I figured knowing that might help me tell this story. This site was more accessible, just a little more than an hour's hike from the nearest road. I went with my sister, who had flown out to visit me in Reno. We arrived at the fuselage first, but the wreckage spread more than a quarter of a mile. This gave us a sort of reverse-sequence perspective on the catastrophe as we worked our way up the mountainside, through the scraps of metal and fabric and plastic that documented the plane's piecemeal obliteration. As we explored, we found things. A leather shoe. A bleached bone that looked like a human femur. A pair of Foster Grant aviator sunglasses. (The glasses featured 1960's ff77 "impact lenses," which, true to their name, survived the crash uncracked.) Plane wrecks are not like car wrecks, which are swept off the roads immediately. Plane wrecks stay put.

My Sister Sees Beauty Where I Don't.

The fuselage, which included the cockpit, made me shudder. I've flown in a lot of small planes, and this crumpled wad of aluminum was a testament to the forces unleashed when a small plane meets the side of a mountain. My sister, a painter, was taking photos of the cockpit from all angles. I asked her why. "It's gorgeous," she said.

Rawley Bigsby Is More Powerful Than the Internet.

During the search for Steve Fossett, a number of different story lines flared up, burned brightly in the press for a few days or weeks, and then fizzled out. The one that lasted longest, and attracted the most attention, was the one about the legions of anonymous Web surfers whose eyeballs had been recruited to help out in the search, and who would, with the aid of all the fresh satellite imagery generously provided to them by Google Earth, surely find Fossett's downed plane. This story line -- crowd sourcing meets search and rescue -- did not stand up to scrutiny. As it turned out, the Internet searchers failed to contribute any significant information. On the contrary, they muddied the waters by spotting hundreds of bogus crash sites in the fuzzy satellite photos, leading to countless wasted hours for the people on the official search teams.

In fact, despite the newspapers' trumpeting of the Google Earth angle, the most promising lead to emerge during the entire search came as a result of old-school skip tracing.

On September 3, 2007, at about eight-thirty in the morning, Steve Fossett borrowed a blue-and-white Bellanca Super Decathlon from Barron Hilton, Paris's grandfather, and taxied onto a runway at Hilton's million-acre Flying M Ranch. Just before Fossett took off, Hilton's staff pilot, a guy named Mike Gilles, carefully went over the preflight and landing procedures with him. As Gilles explained later, Steve Fossett was "not a stick-and-rudder man" and "could get in over his head" in this type of aircraft. Although Gilles was the last person to speak to Steve Fossett that morning, he was not the last person to see Steve Fossett's plane. That would be Rawley Bigsby.

Rawley Bigsby is a ranch hand at the Flying M. At around eleven, just before embarking on a multiday road trip, he spotted the Bellanca overhead. He had also seen the plane a few hours earlier and had mentioned that sighting to another ranch worker in passing. The search for Fossett didn't get under way until noon, and by the time word filtered back to the search team that Rawley might have valuable information, he was long gone. Over the next few days, the hunt for Rawley Bigsby became a sort of search within a search: He was tracked -- with the aid of his girlfriend -- first to Texas and then to Oregon. Finally, local sheriff's deputies caught up with him at a rodeo in Pendleton.

Here, taken from the notes of his debriefing, is what Rawley saw:

"Rawley stated the plane was flying very low (approx 60-80 off deck) as if he was looking for a place to land and flying at slow speed. Rawley said it looked like the pilot was playing around, because the plane was rocking slightly from side to side and the tail was pitching up and down. Rawley watched as the plane continued east at same speed and altitude and appeared to be following the road (NFD 026 road) and lost sight of the plane as it flew over the Mud Springs area."

That information -- the final sighting of Steve Fossett -- is the result of a decidedly low-tech manhunt, but it remains to this day the best clue anyone has to Fossett's whereabouts.

Nevada Won.

Of course, even Rawley's lead, the best of a meager bunch, wasn't enough. Ultimately, boot leather proved as ineffective as crowd sourcing in the search for Steve Fossett. The final story line, the one that remained after all the others fizzled out, was this: A wild state swallowed a big man and refused to give him up.

Blue Is Not Always the Blue.

After the initial on- and off-line efforts to find her husband had failed, Peggy Fossett hired a team composed of people from two companies, one called Fireball Information Technologies and the other called High Altitude Mapping Missions, to try a different approach. In late October, the team began using a camera-equipped jet to photograph the entire search area from above, eventually accumulating ten terabytes worth of imagery, all of it much higher resolution than what satellites can provide. The photographs covered an area as large as Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined and were sharp enough to make objects as small as this magazine distinguishable.

One morning more than a month after the last photographs had been taken, Peggy sent Mark Marshall, Steve Fossett's staff pilot, to Fireball's offices to get a progress report. I accompanied him.

John Arvesen, the former head of NASA's U-2 program, did most of the talking. The team's major obstacle, he explained, had to do with the color blue. The blue paint that covered much of its wings and fuselage was the most distinguishing thing about the airplane Steve Fossett had disappeared in, so Fireball had written a computer program that was scanning through the immense database of imagery, flagging any photographs that contained a similar hue. What Arvesen and the others soon discovered was that blue is everywhere.

"The Sierras were a big problem," he explained. "There's a lot of snow in the crevices. And when they're illuminated by skylight, they're blue. . . . " He points at a blueish spot on a printout of one of the photographs. "This kind of looks blue. It's a lone piece of snow, I think. I'm almost positive that's snow."

He moved to a large computer monitor that displayed another photograph the program had flagged.

"So blue, the definition of blue, is kind of interesting," he continued. "It's difficult, because sometimes in the shadows things will look more blue than they do in the sunlight. Pieces of snow look blue. Tarps. Camping equipment. We have spent a lot of time really defining what is the blue. Trying to separate it from . . . " He leaned over the workstation, clicked the mouse a few times. The image on the screen zoomed all the way in to what the program had noticed, a pale-blue handicapped symbol painted on an empty space in an asphalt parking lot.

The World's Fastest Car Will Be Driven by a Woman.

The fastest car in the world is basically a jet engine yanked out of a Vietnam-era fighter jet and welded to a cockpit on wheels. Steve Fossett was planning to drive it eight hundred miles per hour sometime this year, which would have bested the existing land-speed record by a good margin. When I saw it, a couple of months after Fossett's disappearance, the car was sitting in a Reno warehouse, looking dangerous and leaking fuel. Though the team that Fossett had hired to facilitate his record attempt was still laboring over the vehicle -- prepping it, getting it ready -- it had no replacement driver and was running on financial fumes. It wasn't clear how long Peggy Fossett would continue funding it. Team leader Eric Ahlstrom, an engineer who used to work on one of the Star Wars programs for Boeing, avoided speculating about the project's future and instead talked to me about the surprising ways in which his old and new lines of work overlapped. For example, the "ultra-high-speed supersonic-capable parachutes" that would be deployed to slow the car down had once been attached to nuclear bombs.

A car that can move very fast in a straight line is both impressive and useless. There is no prize money to be won for building the fastest car in the world, no motivation other than the record, which is why it often takes someone like Steve Fossett, a rich man who valued records more than money, to spur efforts like this one into motion.

A few weeks after I saw the car, I learned that Eric Ahlstrom and his team had decided to consider a woman to replace Fossett as the driver. They hoped the resulting novelty factor might make the project more attractive to potential sponsors.

Balloons Are Everywhere.

Steve Fossett's autobiography is called Chasing the Wind, and on the back cover there's a photograph of a silver balloon. It is several stories high and cost more than $1 million to build and fly. In 2002, it carried Fossett around the world, earning him one of his 115 world records. By his own admission Fossett was obsessed with, perhaps addicted to, setting records, and he spent a lot of his money and most of his time doing so. A combination of innate physical endurance and funds ample enough to purchase the very best technology allowed him to achieve numerous firsts. He was the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world. He was the first person to fly an airplane solo nonstop around the world. He was the first person to sail around the world in less than sixty days. A year before he disappeared, he made the first stratospheric glider flight.

He always wanted to be first.

I did, too -- with Fossett's story. But I wasn't. An early piece, by National Geographic Adventure writer James Vlahos, came out while I was still in Nevada. It contained a tidbit that was, to me, resonant. Vlahos described walking near a ridgeline, looking for Fossett, when he spotted a flash of something metallic that he thought might be a piece of airplane. It turned out to be a silver birthday balloon.

The same thing had happened to me. Twice. Once during each of my wreck hikes. Both balloons had been in remote areas, and the second was the only man-made object I'd come across in eight hours.

I did a little research.

Turns out toy balloons are amazingly intrepid and can travel long distances. How long? A story ran in a British newspaper last year about some kids who'd attached notes with return addresses to a bunch of balloons and released them from a school in Manchester. One of the kids got a letter back from China.

I imagine you can find old balloons in even the remotest parts of the world. They fly high, go wherever the wind takes them, and eventually fall to earth. There are plenty in the wilds of Nevada.

Most will never be found.

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