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JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- A U.S. Navy ship has picked up signals from the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder of an Indonesian plane that crashed on New Year's Day, killing all 102 people on board, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta said.
The USNS Mary Sears, an oceanographic survey ship, detected signals coming from the area of the ocean where the Adam Air flight is believed to have crashed, the embassy statement said Thursday.
Those signals, or "pingers," are "on the same frequency of the black boxes associated with the missing airplane," the embassy said.
The Adam Air Boeing 737 went missing more than three weeks ago after reporting heavy winds off the western coast of Sulawesi while flying from Indonesia's main island of Java.
The embassy did not say when the black box signals were picked up or where on the ocean floor off Sulawesi they were coming from.
The hull of the aircraft has not yet been recovered, but the statement said that close to where the signals were coming from "the Mary Sears detected heavy debris scattered over a wide area" that was being analyzed to verify if it was from the missing aircraft.
After informing the Indonesian government of its findings, the Mary Sears is scheduled to depart Indonesian waters on Friday.
For more than a week after the Adam Air flight disappeared off the radar screens, Indonesian authorities scoured the mountainous terrain of western Sulawesi province and the Java Sea for any sign of the missing aircraft.
The U.S. Navy was called in to help with the search, providing satellite imaging to help Indonesian authorities locate the crash site.
Nearly 10 days after the crash, an Indonesian fisherman found a piece of the aircraft in the Java Sea, allowing investigators to determine that the plane went down in the ocean.
The Adam Air Flight 574 went down on January 1 in bad weather -- the pilot reported 80mph winds before the plane disappeared.
The flight originated in Jakarta, made a stopover in Surabaya, and was supposed to land in Manado, on the northeastern tip of Sulawesi Island.
A day after the crash, family members were disheartened by reports, which later turned out to be false, that the crash site had been found on land and that there were 12 survivors.
Those 12 survivors, it turned out later, were from an Indonesian ferry which sank four days earlier.
Eddy Suyanto, the Indonesian air force commander in charge of the search and rescue mission, said he had not been formally informed of the ship's findings.
"One thing is for sure, up until this second, I have not received any report from the (Indonesian) liaison officers who were onboard the ship," he told The Associated Press.
Copyright 2007 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report.
A flight data recorder.
The United States military may have found the Black Boxes from a missing Indonesian jetliner that went missing on January 1, 2007.

Using ultrasonic pinger signals, the USNS Mary Sears located debris on the bottom of the ocean that match the signal that they are using to find the boxes. 

"We have detected heavy debris scattered over a wide area," said the U.S. embassy in Indonesia in a statement. Other debris may also have been located at least 1,000 meters below the oceans surface.

"During the search of the projected crash site of Adam Air Flight 574, the Mary Sears, using a Towed Pinger Locator, detected pingers on the same frequency of the black box associated with the missing airplane," added the statement.

Despite the announcement, Indonesia's transport safety board denies receiving any reports that the boxes have been found.

"One thing is for sure, up until this second, I have not received any report from the (Indonesian) liaison officers who were onboard the ship," said Indonesian air force commander who is in charge of the ongoing search to find the plane, Eddy Suyanto.

The largest piece of the plane to be recovered so far, is the tail of the plane, which was discovered by a fisherman. Trays and seats have also been recovered, but so far none of the bodies of the passengers or crew have been found.

The plane, a Adam Air Boeing 737-400 went missing, in flight from Surabaya, on the island of Java, to Manado on the island Sulawesi. All 102 people on board the plane are believed to have been killed.

Just 1 day after the plane crashed, false reports that the wreckage was found on land and 12 survivors were found had began to circulate. The 12 people that were reported to have been survivors, turned out to be the remaining survivors of a ferry crash in the same area 4 days before the plane was reported missing.

The cause of the crash is still not known, and investigations are ongoing.