Regarding your doubt that an actual search of the site ever took place, I'm pasting a quote from Kenneth Bacon, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs..and chief spokesman for the Pentagon: "They have claimed that they don't have records. But some of their statements have been somewhat disingenuous, because they only go back to 1995, when we, as you know, sent a representative in with the International Committee for the Red Cross to look at the crash site. And that was a mission on which we developed some of the information on which we subsequently based the change in status."
This quote came from the DOD News/DefenseLink website: DoD News Briefing