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When adventurer Steve Fossett seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth last September, his many admirers couldn’t quite believe he had perished on something as mundane as a joyride in a light aircraft above the Nevada desert in the U.S.
The round-the-world flying legend had crashed hot-air balloons and planes across the globe but had always emerged unscathed. As far as his fans were concerned, the first man to fly solo around the world in a hot-air balloon was a survivor.
No body or wreckage has ever been found since Fossett failed to return from his last flight. And now — five months after a judge officially declared the 63-year-old financier dead — investigators have made the astonishing suggestion that he faked his own death.
Steve Fossett, right, is kissed by Richard Branson after making an emergency landing in February 2006
The claims come from one of the rescue team leaders and an insurance assessor who spent eight months trying to find out what happened on behalf of Lloyd’s of London, who are said to face a £25 million payout on Fossett’s death.
Both say there are elements of his disappearance that make no sense, and they have independently come to the conclusion that Fossett — a close friend of Virgin tycoon and fellow adventurer Richard Branson — could still be alive.
Their inquiries have revealed that Fossett, married for 38 years to childhood sweetheart Peggy, had at least two mistresses and was living a secret double life. There are suggestions that he was in financial trouble and feared a ruinous divorce if his philandering was discovered.
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Share‘Steve Fossett may have been declared dead, but this is one mystery that is still alive,’ says Lloyd’s risk assessor Robert Davis. ‘All you have in this case is a missing man and a missing plane, no more and no less.’
Mr Davis is baffled by the way law enforcement agents failed to launch a proper investigation into Fossett’s disappearance. He says the only person who claims to have seen Fossett take off has never been interviewed.
‘What I’ve strived to find out is what happened to this man in the run-up to his disappearance. Why did he disappear?’ Mr Davis says. ‘I spoke to anyone I thought could shed some light on this. And what I discovered is that there is absolutely no proof that Steve Fossett is actually dead.
‘I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m a man who deals in facts, and I don’t really care if he is alive or dead, it makes no difference to me.
‘What I am interested in is the truth — and a proper criminal investigation of this man’s disappearance was never undertaken by law officials in the state of Nevada.’
Fossett became famous across the globe for his daredevil exploits, embarking on a personal quest to break as many world records as possible. Of the 116 records he set in five different sports, 60 still stand.
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Fossett went missing in the Nevada Desert in September 2007
He was the first person to fly solo non- stop around the world in a balloon and later made five non-stop circumnavigations of the Earth in his balloon. He was also a masterly sailor and fixed-wing aircraft pilot.
His expeditions were often funded by Branson — whose friendship with Fossett began in 1997 after they met during the course of their separate attempts to break the record for travelling round the world by balloon.
Branson called Fossett ‘one of the most generous, good-natured and kindest people I have ever met’, and joined forces on several round-the-world balloon attempts. In late 1998, they made a record-breaking flight from Morocco to Hawaii, but were unable to complete a global flight before a rival team beat them to it.
The official story of Fossett’s disappearance is that he took off from the hotel heir and close friend Barron Hilton’s million-acre ranch in Nevada at 8.45am on Monday, September 3, 2007 — a bank holiday in America — for a three-hour flight across the desert.
The remote Hilton ranch — named the Flying M after the hotel heir’s late wife Marilyn — is a private playground for celebrities and mega-wealthy flying fans.
Singer John Denver, who died in a plane crash in 1997, was a regular visitor. Actor Sylvester Stallone takes his children on hiking holidays there.
Hilton, 80, has an enviable collection of vintage planes for his guests to use. The ranch also boasts a well-stocked trout river and top-notch hunting.
Fossett and his wife, who did not have children, had been staying at one of the luxurious guest cottages near the main mansion.
Steve Fossett (left) and co-pilot Mark Rebholz after landing a replica First World War bi-plane (below) on the 8th fairway of the Connemara Championship Golf Links in Clifden, Ireland, in July 2005, having recreated a historic 1600-mile transatlantic flight
Peggy quickly raised the alarm when he didn’t return as expected because they were due to fly back to their Chicago home that afternoon. The U.S. Civil Air Patrol immediately sent up Black Hawk helicopters, equipped with infra-red technology, to search for any signs of Fossett or his plane.
Thirty volunteers in private planes joined the search and Branson encouraged 50,000 cyber sleuths to look for clues on satellite pictures of the area on the internet.
Peggy accepted her husband wasn’t going to be found alive two months after he vanished. A Chicago judge declared him officially dead in February.
But Fossett fans have continued to scour Nevada. Earlier this month a team of ten Canadian athletes, mountaineers and geologists trekked across three mountain ranges looking for his plane. They called off the search a week later having failed to find even a sliver of wreckage, let alone a body.
‘We don’t want to speculate. Let’s stick to the facts,’ says Barron Hilton. ‘That’s what we pilots do: facts count, not speculations. Steve had fuel for four hours and flew at 100mph. Those are the facts.’
But Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the U.S. Air Force — who was involved in every aspect of the Air Patrol’s month-long hunt (itself a record breaker as the largest U.S. search-and-rescue mission ever) — finds it bizarre and deeply suspicious that no trace of Fossett has been found.
‘There are a lot of raised eyebrows,’ she says. ‘I know very few people here, friends in law enforcement, that buy this story like the rest of the world has. I’ve been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found.
‘It’s not like we didn’t have our eyes open. We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We’re pretty good at what we do.’
Lt Col Ryan also believes there are many things about Fossett’s supposed last flight that simply don’t add up. He borrowed a tiny Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon plane — a make that Fossett, a serious plane buff, was known to dislike — from Hilton’s vast selection of aircraft.
The plane — used mainly for acrobatics — is made from steel, wood and fabric and is easy to dismantle.
'There is absolutely no proof that he's dead'
Fossett asked one of Hilton’s pilots — the only witness to see him take off — to prepare the plane for flying even though he had never allowed even his most trusted flying companions to do that for him before.
He left his expensive global positioning system watch — something he always wore on solo flights — behind at the guest cottage where he and his wife Peggy were staying on Hilton’s ranch.
And despite a lifetime’s experience of ferociously cold desert nights, he wore only a T-shirt and shorts, and had no parachute or blankets with him.
The plane was fitted with a satellite rescue beacon to alert rescuers to his position if he crashed. But no signal was ever received and the beacon has never been located.
According to the Hilton employee, who has never been questioned by law enforcement agents, Fossett was carrying just one bottle of water. And even though he wasn’t required to file a flight plan, he usually did. On this occasion he just casually told the pilot that he was going up to scout locations for a land speed record attempt.
‘Think about all the things that were atypical about it — like he goes off without his fancy watch, he leaves it at home,’ Lt Col Ryan says.
‘And he goes out without his emergency kit, which he supposedly never, ever did.’
Lt Col Ryan disclosed that Hilton — the billionaire grandfather of party girls Paris and Nicky Hilton — employed mercenaries from the controversial Iraqi security firm Blackwater to guard the ranch during the search.
She also revealed that police had been unable to trace a California highway patrol officer who allegedly saw Fossett’s plane flying low near Mammoth Lakes, 50 miles from Hilton’s Flying M ranch.
And a supposed final sighting of the tiny craft by a ranch hand near Mount Grant, Nevada, has never been corroborated either.
But why would a fabulously wealthy man, living out his dreams of freedom and adventure, want to fake his own demise? One theory is that Fossett feared the exposure of his complicated love life and a multi-million-dollar divorce battle with his wife.
He took off without even a parachute
Lloyd’s risk assessor Robert Davis employed private eyes to dig into Fossett’s personal affairs.
They tracked down a British-born woman who said she’d been chatted up by Fossett on a commercial flight two years earlier and had been seeing him right up until his disappearance.
And she told of a second woman who contacted her after the search had been called off to say she too was his mistress and hoped his body would never be found so that he could be immortalised into legend like Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, who vanished in 1937.
Despite his apparent wealth, Fossett’s financial position may not have been as secure as it seemed. He sold his stock trading companies in the Nineties to concentrate on flying, sailing, swimming, racing and mountaineering. But he still dabbled on the stock market and had invested heavily in troubled financial companies including Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley.
‘His stock-trading habits were legendary,’ says Lt Col Ryan.
Investigators have been searching for hidden bank accounts, believing Fossett could have squirreled away a chunk of his fortune for use after his ‘death’.
His fortune was approximately £20 million, but this is difficult to pin down as Fossett’s financial dealings were notoriously opaque.
At the time of his disappearance, Fossett was making plans to break the world land speed record of 763mph set by British racing driver Andy Green in 1997.
He had sponsored a team of drivers to help him achieve the feat but months after his disappearance his wife Peggy cancelled the funding and had his car locked up.
According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, Peggy was asked to contribute less than £250,000 towards the £800,000 spent on the search. She refused to pay even this, claiming she had spent £500,000 on her own search efforts.
The rescue operation covered 20,000 square miles, stretching across three different mountain ranges to the California border.
But those who knew Fossett best always found it hard to believe he had perished.
Three days after he vanished, William Hasley, who co-wrote Fossett’s autobiography, said: ‘He has unbelievable survival skills, and has crashed all over the world in planes and balloons. I would be very discouraged if he passed in this way.’
In the early days after the plane vanished Branson called Fossett ‘a tough old boot’.
‘If he’s landed and he’s not too badly hurt, he’s the one person in the world who will be mentally and physically equipped to get out of it,’ he said. ‘If anyone’s going to end up walking back up to the ranch and apologising for pranging the Hiltons’ plane, it’s likely to be Steve Fossett.’
In fact, if Fossett really is still alive, the truth is that he’s got rather more to apologise for than a pranged plane.
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