More than 60 years after an Air Force plane slammed into Alaska's Mount Gannett, killing all 51 men aboard, a glacier miles away has begun giving up their remains. The military decided it would be near-impossible to recover the remains after the C-124 transport crashed in November 1952, but a POW/MIA team was sent to the area after military crews monitoring the area spotted wreckage amid the ice last year, the Anchorage Daily News reports.
More than 100 people are involved in the recovery effort, including helicopter crews and teams scouring crevasses. It has not yet been possible to identify any of the lost soldiers and airmen but the POW/MIA team hopes to make DNA matches with relatives soon, and there are plenty of other clues in the wreckage. "The things that we keep are things that are directly related to an individual on that aircraft, something that we can tie straight back to them," says the team leader, a forensic anthropologist. "A journal or dog tags or clothing items that may have the name in it. This year we're finding many of those same types of items again, out on the ice." (Read more Alaska stories.)