Industry News
After years of combing the Bossons Glacier, Mont Blanc, Daniel Roche finally found human remains last Thursday. The remains have been removed for expert analysis, but it is expected that they will be confirmed as victims of the Air India Boeing 707 that came down in that area in 1966, killing all on board. A fully preserved hand and the upper part of a leg were uncovered although it’s unlikely they belonged to the same person.
Two different Air India flights crashed on Mont Blanc in a fifteen year span. On 3rd November 1950, Air India Flight 245 from Mumbai to London went down, killing all 40 passengers and 8 crew on board. And then on 24th Jan 1966, all 117 on board Air India Flight 101 perished en route from Mumbai to London near the summit of Mont Blanc.
For the conspiracy theorists among us, the 1966 flight had Homi Bhabha onboard, the father of the Indian nuclear programme, on his way to a conference in Vienna. There was speculation at the time surrounding the circumstances of the crash, and suspicions were raised that the CIA were involved in an attempt to paralyze India’s nuclear programme.
However, the official explanation was that a radio navigation defect made the captain wrongly assume that he had passed over the mountain, and as he began his descent in a snow storm, flew in to the Mont Blanc massif.
Five years ago a bag stamped ‘diplomatic mail’ and ‘ministry of external affairs’ was found on the mountain. And in 2013 a French climber found a metal box containing rubies, sapphires and emeralds worth in excess of $330,000. He handed the treasure in to the police.
The Bossons glacier is one of the larger glaciers of the Mont Blanc massif in the Alps. Close to Chamonix, France, it is currently approximately 7.5km long.
As reported right here on SnowBrains, in July 2017 the remains of Marcela and Francine Dumoulin were found in a shrinking glacier in the Swiss Alps near Diablerets. The couple had been missing since 1942 when they did not return from tending to their cows.
