According to police, two French tourists found the human remains and the plane wreckage last Wednesday while climbing the Chessjen glacier, in the canton of Valais. They were taken off the glacier by helicopter.
The human remains were located near an old trail that hadn’t been used for ten years. According to Dario Andenmatten, the guardian of a nearby mountain hut, the alpinists may have made the gruesome discovery because they were using an old map.
May have died in the 70’s or 80’s
The victims have not yet been identified. The state the first person was in doesn’t make that easy. “Only bones have been found,” says Andenmatten. He estimates that the person may have died in the 1970s or 1980s.
A week earlier, a body was also found near Zermatt on the Stockji Glacier, northwest of the Matterhorn. Those human remains have not yet been identified. The DNA test has not yet been completed, police said.
Missing Billionaire?
The local police have a list of about 300 people who have been missing since 1925, including German billionaire Karl-Erivan Haub. The man was in Switzerland training for the Patrouille des Glaciers ski tour in 2018 when he disappeared. The body found on the Stockji Glacier may be Haub, who was declared legally dead in 2021, according to some German media. Luc Lechanoine, one of the hikers who found the human remains, says in the newspaper Blick that the clothes found were neon-colored, “in the style of the eighties.”
Last week, a mountain guide discovered the wreckage of a plane that crashed in June 1968 near the Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland’s largest glacier. “It looked like two backpacks,” says 38-year-old Dominik Nellen. A closer look revealed the wreckage of a Piper Cherokee. The plane crashed with three people on board at the end of June 1968. The bodies of the three Zurich residents were recovered after the crash, but the wreckage was not.
Due to the warm temperatures in the Alps, which mean little snow and glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, some of the mountain range’s most popular hiking trails have been banned this summer.