Amazing! Frozen Airman's Identity Still Uncertain on 01/14/06.

http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060114/NEWS08/601140340/1001/NEWS

Posted on: Saturday, January 14, 2006
Report close on airman's remains

By Mike Gordon
Honoluly Advertiser Staff Writer

Forensic anthropologists with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base are trying to match the remains with one of four airmen lost in 1942. That could happen this month.

(snip)

The mummified remains of an airman were discovered by climbers on the slopes of Mount Mendel in California. They found his head and arm jutting out of solid ice. He was still wearing an unopened parachute and a jacket with a corroded military name tag.

His remains were carefully chipped out of the glacier and flown to Hawai'i where the painstaking process of identification began.

The lab won't reveal if its forensic anthropologists have eliminated any of the four men, said Army Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokesman.

"Right now, all four men are candidates until we make a final ID," Nielson-Green said.

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why are thay making these families wait forever. They only need the maternal line to prove or disprove.

It had apparently been exposed for a very long time before it was found, and the parts still below the ice had frozen and thawed many times. That kind of abuse destroys DNA, and makes doing samples very difficult. The bodies have also been up there so long that it apparently took quite some time to track down relatives willing to give samples. Since mitochondrial DNA is maternally passed, it could only be sampled from the mens sisters...and they either didn't all have sisters, or the sisters had since died and they had to track down aunts and cousins to pull the lines from elsewhere. mtDNA testing isn't nearly as precise as regular DNA testing, so they didn't want to release any results until suitable donors from the families of all four missing men were located, so that all the bases would be covered.

These families have waited over 60 years to find out what happened to these guys. Waiting a few months to make sure the identification is correct isn't going to hurt anyone.

We tend to hear about the glaciers in South America, Antarctica, and Alaska melting away, but the glaciers here in the Sierra's are vanishing too. This is generally considered a bad thing, but one interesting benefit is that a lot of "lost" bodies on some of these mountains have been found over the past decade. As the glaciers shrink, the people that died on them are being uncovered. The particular glacier that this guy was pulled from, located in the backcountry in Sequoia National Park, is believed to hold at least five other bodies from plane crashes, and a couple of climbers. Just last year they pulled a couple of old bodies off Mount Shasta, and the year before they pulled a body off a glacier on the eastern slope.