‘Indira Gandhi is PM’: melting French glacier yields old newspapers, likely from 1966 Air India plane crash
- The Air India passenger flight from Bombay to London crashed into Mont Blanc in France on January 24, 1966
- Trove of newspapers among numerous discoveries in recent years, including a box of precious stones
The Mont Blanc glacier in the French Alps yields more and more secrets as it melts – this time a clutch of newspapers with banner headlines from when Indira Gandhi became India’s first and so far only woman prime minister in 1966.
The copies of Indian newspapers, the National Herald and The Economic Times, were probably aboard an Air India Boeing 707 that crashed on the mountain on January 24, 1966, claiming 177 lives.
The trove of around a dozen newspapers was found last week by Timothee Mottin, who runs a cafe-restaurant, La Cabane du Cerro, perched at an altitude of 1,350 metres near the Chamonix skiing hub.
“They are drying now but they are in very good condition,” Mottin, 33, said. “You can read them.”
The modest cafe is around 45 minutes by foot from the Bossons glacier where the plane named after the Himalayan peak of Kanchenjunga mysteriously crashed.
Mottin said he was lucky to discover the papers when he did because the ice in which they were encased for nearly six decades “had probably just melted”.