An aging witness led the US Army team to a crash site, and officials planned to test debris found there to see if it was from the C-47 that presumably went missing during the Cold War period.

Team members said they would take the debris and photos and measurements of the site back to the United States for study, and decide later whether to continue the search in China.

"We will need more investigation," said Aaron Lehl, a civilian analyst for the eight-member team from the US Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.

Lehl said he knew of no other American planes missing in that hilly, wooded area. So if the debris is shown to be US-made aircraft parts, "then we are very hopeful that this is the aircraft that went down on that evening," he said at a news conference at the US Embassy in Beijing.

The team searched for shallow graves where a 78-year-old Chinese villager said he helped to bury the badly burned bodies of the pilots near the crash site, but "we did not find any remains," said Franklin Damann, an anthropologist.

The US team began their search early last week and worked through the weekend. They were guided to the site by the villager who they said was the last survivor of a group that arrived about six hours after the crash and buried the pilots' bodies.

"We did find ... a nice tight pocket of 20 (to) 30 meters of aircraft wreckage," said Damann.

The team used metal detectors to search a 300-square-foot area and dug test pits looking for debris, he said.

Damann said none of the items found bore any serial numbers that would confirm it was from a C-47 or markings from the aircraft manufacturer, McDonnell Douglas.

China decided to permit the US search in the spirit of humanity and to further promote friendly relations between the two countries.

The Chinese government has cooperated with the United States on several projects to recover the remains of World War II-era military personnel lost in China. In 1999, a US-China team recovered the remains of two US airmen whose B-24 bomber crashed into a mountain in today's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in 1944 while returning from a mission.

(China Daily July 30, 2002)