Flight MH370: Who is Blaine Gibson, the real-life 'Indiana Jones' adventurer who found plane debris?

A piece of wreckage found in Mozambique which experts believe could belong to Flight MH370 was found by a US lawyer and blogger, who has funded his own year-long search for the missing airliner.

Blaine Alan Gibson, 58, of Seattle has been travelling to remote islands and coastlines in the Indian Ocean to resolve the mystery of what happened to the flight, which vanished shortly after taking off from Kuala Lumpur with 239 people on board in 2014 almost two years ago.

He has no professional accreditation as an air crash investigator, and claims he is motivated solely by a desire to known what happened to the plane. "I do not have a theory," told the New York Magazine. "I am just looking for evidence that may have been prematurely dismissed."

He was inspired to embark on the search after meeting relatives of missing passengers in Kuala Lumpar. His quest has taken him from the island of Réunion, where he interviewed the local who found the flaperon from MH370, to the Maldives, where he spoke to a villager who saw a passenger plane flying low over the island the day after MH370 vanished, describing his journeys in a blog.

However it was on a break in Mozambique that made what could be a breakthrough discovery. On a sandbank about six miles from the town of Vilankulos Gibson found he believes to a part of the wing from MH370, posting pictures of the discovery on Facebook.

"It was my 177th country to visit. I'm here as a tourist, but since I'm passionately interested in MH370 and I am on the Indian Ocean I thought, 'Why not take a boat out and ask some of the local people where stuff washed ashore from the open ocean?'" he told CNN.

The piece of wreckage was handed in to authorities, and has been sent to Australia for tests.

Australia, which is leading the search for airliner, said in the wake of the discovery that the location is consistent with models of where ocean drifts could take the plane, while Malaysia's transport minister claiming there is a "high possibility" that the debris comes from a Boeing 777, the same model as the missing aircraft.

The mystery of MH370 is not the first to have attracted Gibson, who in the past has travelled to Central America to investigate why the Maya disappeared, and to Ethiopia in search of the Lost Ark.

If the wreckage proves to be from the missing plane Gibson's may have made a key discovery in the investigation into one of the biggest mysteries of recernt years.