1948 air crash victim in Alaskan glacier identified

Nine years of arduous research, aided by advanced DNA testing and forensic techniques, has led to identifying a man whose “mummified” hand and arm were found in a glacier in Alaska. The severed arm and hand in question belonged to one of the victims an air crash that occurred in Alaska in 1948, media in the United States has reported.

The investigators came to the conclusion that the remains buried in the Alaskan ice belonged to Francis Joseph Van Zandt, 36, a merchant mariner hailing from Roanoke, Virginia, the United States.

Van Zandt had died in the crash on March 12, 1948, of a DC-4 plane along with 23 other sailors and all six crew members.

The crash took place when Northwest Airlines’ Flight 4422 that took off from China to Anchorage, Alaska, ran into Mount Stanford, killing all 30 people on board. It is believed that the pilots were perhaps blinded by an unusually intense aurora borealis that night. The wreckage disappeared into the glacier within a few days.

Newspapers had at the time described the loss of Flight 4422 as one of the worst commercial-airline crashes in the history of Alaska. Soon, the crash also became one of the most mysterious ones.

It was then rumoured that the ill-fated plane was loaded with gold bullion, which was a supposed payoff to the passengers for having just sailed an oil tanker from America to Shanghai to aid Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in his civil war with the Red Army. Some believed that the plane contained a valuable audiotape of a conversation between Chiang Kai-shek and US President Franklin Roosevelt.

While no gold was found, the two commercial-airline pilots who discovered the wreckage found themselves involved in a scientific adventure filled with high-tech sleuthing.

It was only in 1999 that Van Zandt’s severed arm and hand was discovered, nearly two and half miles away from the crash site, the newspaper Anchorage Daily News reported. And, it took a series of state-of-the art scientific investigations for the remains to be identified.

The investigative mission comprised efforts by forensic scientists at George Washington University in Washington, the United States, who used DNA evidence to narrow the search. Michael Grimm Sr., a former fingerprint expert of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), then used a new technique involving hydrating and restoring human flesh to pinpoint Van Zandt’s identity, the report in Anchorage Daily News said.

Michael Grimm Sr was quoted as saying, “This is the oldest identification of fingerprints by post-mortem remains.”