The Repository Last Known Position

Colony Glacier C-124: How All 52 Men Got Their Names

October 16, 2026 · Runtime 12:31 · Watch on YouTube

On 22 November 1952 an Air Force C-124 Globemaster flying from McChord Air Force Base to Elmendorf flew into Mount Gannett, in Alaska's Chugach Mountains, with 52 men aboard. A ground team reached the tail in a blizzard on 9 December, and within days new snow and avalanches had buried the site. In June 2012 a National Guard helicopter crew saw a yellow life raft on Colony Glacier, more than twelve miles from the impact. In January 2026 the Air Force announced that all 52 had been identified.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Colony Glacier, 2012
  2. 0:33 52 of 52
  3. 1:02 Old Shaky
  4. 1:38 Middleton Island
  5. 2:02 The last call
  6. 2:26 Mount Gannett
  7. 2:39 The search
  8. 3:50 The ground team
  9. 4:16 Buried in ten days
  10. 4:28 A river of ice
  11. 4:48 The yellow raft
  12. 5:17 Twelve miles in sixty years
  13. 5:45 2013: none identified
  14. 6:11 June is the month
  15. 7:12 What comes up
  16. 7:39 The case changes hands
  17. 8:11 The DNA laboratory
  18. 8:24 The first 17
  19. 8:53 When there is no relative
  20. 9:16 Costley's fingerprint
  21. 9:33 The 50th
  22. 10:52 All 52
  23. 11:34 The account
  24. 12:09 Next: the USS Arizona

Transcript

Colony Glacier, 2012 0:00

This is Colony Glacier, in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska, filmed from a helicopter in June 2012. Somewhere on this ice is an Air Force transport plane that disappeared sixty years earlier.

A few days before this was filmed, a National Guard helicopter crew on a training flight saw something yellow on the glacier. It was a life raft.

The raft came from a C-124 Globemaster that flew into Mount Gannett on November 22nd, 1952. Fifty-two men were aboard.

52 of 52 0:33

In 1952, the search was called off within weeks. In January 2026, the Air Force announced that all fifty-two had been identified. How does a glacier give back fifty-two men? And how do you put a name on each of them, after sixty years in the ice?

The footage in this episode comes from the recovery missions themselves, filmed by military crews from 2012 to 2024. No human remains are shown.

Old Shaky 1:02

The C-124 Globemaster II was the largest cargo plane in the American arsenal at the time. Crews called it Old Shaky, for the racket of its big piston engines.

On November 22nd, 1952, this one was flying from McChord Air Force Base, in Washington State, to Elmendorf Air Force Base, in Alaska. Eleven crew. Forty-one passengers.

They were not all airmen. By the Defense Department's count, forty-two were Air Force, eight were Army, one was a Marine, and one was a sailor. The Korean War was in its third year.

Middleton Island 1:38

The plane passed Middleton Island, in the Gulf of Alaska, and turned for Anchorage through heavy cloud. The crew had no visual references. They were flying by altitude, a radio beacon, and a stopwatch.

According to accident reports from the time, cited by the Anchorage Daily News, the plane was blown thirty miles off course after Middleton Island.

The last call 2:02

At about four in the afternoon, the captain of a Northwest Orient airliner picked up a distress call. The signal was scratchy. What the pilot heard was this: as long as we have to land, we might as well land here.

Then silence. No one heard from the plane again. That line survives because a base historian read the official reports off microfilm, sixty years later.

Mount Gannett 2:26

The C-124 had flown into Mount Gannett, a peak of about nine thousand feet, roughly fifty miles east of Anchorage. It hit near the top, at about eight thousand feet.

The search 2:39

Bad weather held the search back for three days. On November 25th, thirty-two military planes began to scour the region, and four Coast Guard vessels searched Prince William Sound.

It was the third military plane lost in Alaska in fifteen days. A week earlier, a C-119 had vanished with twenty men on its way to Kodiak.

On November 28th, six days after the crash, Terris Moore, a mountain pilot who was then president of the University of Alaska, flew over the mountain with Lieutenant Thomas Sullivan. They saw what looked like a tail section, sticking out of the snow.

They landed a Piper Super Cub on the ice and spent hours confirming that it was the C-124. Their report: wreckage scattered over at least two acres, under eight feet of fresh powder snow.

Sullivan wrote that drifted snow near the wreckage had piled up hundreds of feet, and that the impact seemed to have set off avalanches.

Moore concluded that the pilot was on instruments, flying blind, and probably hit with no warning at all, straight into the south face of the mountain.

The ground team 3:50

On November 29th, a ground team left the port of Whittier by barge. They set up a base camp at fifty-five hundred feet, still eight miles from the tail.

On December 9th, in a blizzard, they reached the tail section. They found no survivors, and no other wreckage. One officer reported that what they had seen from the air was now barely visible, under about three feet of snow.

Buried in ten days 4:16

The recovery was called off. Within ten days of the crash, new snow and avalanches had buried the site completely. Fifty-two men stayed on the mountain.

A river of ice 4:28

But snow on Mount Gannett does not stay where it falls. Year after year it packs down into ice, and the ice feeds Colony Glacier, which flows north, off the mountain, toward a lake.

For sixty years the C-124 traveled inside that river of ice, crushed and carried down the valley, with no one watching.

The yellow raft 4:48

In early June 2012, the Black Hawk crew flew over the lower end of the glacier and saw the yellow raft. Three days later, another Guard team landed beside it.

They found clothing with name patches, chess pieces, parachutes, a flight suit, and a schedule of Catholic Masses printed in 1952.

The debris lay more than twelve miles from the impact site, near the end of the glacier, where the ice meets Inner Lake George.

Twelve miles in sixty years 5:17

That distance is a measurement in itself. Twelve miles in sixty years averages about three hundred and fifty yards a year. In 2013, a marker the team had left on the debris moved three hundred yards down the glacier in a single year.

Within weeks, investigators from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command were on the ice. The evidence, they said, positively correlated to the 1952 wreck.

2013: none identified 5:45

In 2013, more of the plane came to the surface. About eighteen hundred pounds of material came off the glacier in the first haul of the year, with more than a hundred people involved.

That summer, the debris field stretched about two-thirds of a mile down the glacier, and a third of a mile across.

And still, by July 2013, not one of the fifty-two had been positively identified.

June is the month 6:11

The work has a window. Before June, the debris is still under snow. After June, the melt opens huge crevasses, and the glacier becomes unsafe. June is the month.

Each day starts with a twenty-minute flight in an Alaska National Guard Black Hawk. The site can be reached only by helicopter. The team on the ice is about seven people.

The glacier is hard ice under loose rock, with steep slopes and hidden crevasses. On blue ice the team does not rope together: one person sliding into a crevasse could pull the others in.

The operation also has a rule for when to stop. When the debris reaches ice too dangerous to enter, the team leaves it for another year. As one mortuary affairs official put it, there is no reason to have two deaths.

And the ice is always melting. Meltwater cuts new channels across the surface, and small things are easy to lose.

What comes up 7:12

What comes up is small. Over the years, the finds have included a lucky Buddha figurine, a flight suit, three-cent stamps, and a crumpled schedule of Masses from a church in Washington.

By 2020, the Associated Press counted four hundred and eighty bags of individual human remains brought off the ice. In 2018, the team found three gold wedding rings, the most in any single year.

The case changes hands 7:39

In 2015, the case changed hands. According to Air and Space Forces Magazine, a legal review found that a crash at home, outside a war zone, fell outside the accounting command's mission.

The Air Force took it over. Since then, Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, has led the recovery, with the Alaska National Guard flying the team in.

The work is split into two phases each summer, and the recovery team lead flies in from Delaware for both.

The DNA laboratory 8:11

What comes off the ice goes to the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. Its DNA laboratory compares each sample against reference samples given by the men's families, gathered over decades.

The first 17 8:24

The first names came in June 2014: seventeen of them. An Army lieutenant colonel, two Army privates, a Marine major, a Navy commander, and twelve airmen, from two colonels to an airman third class.

Then the count climbed slowly. Thirty-seven by June 2017. Forty by July 2019. Forty-seven by September 2023. Forty-nine by June 2025.

When there is no relative 8:53

The last names were the hardest, and the reason is in the method. A DNA match needs something to match against: a sample from a relative.

Sometimes what came off the ice was very little. In 2018, a mortuary affairs official told Air and Space Forces Magazine that a single tooth found on the glacier had led to a positive identification.

Costley's fingerprint 9:16

There was another way. In 2018, Staff Sergeant Eugene Costley, a flight engineer with the 34th Air Transport Squadron and a veteran of the Berlin Airlift, became the thirty-ninth man identified. From a fingerprint, nearly sixty-six years after the crash.

The 50th 9:33

The fiftieth was Airman Third Class James Kimball, a flight steward on the crew. The examiners had been told they had very little chance with him. He had been adopted, and he had no children. There was no family DNA to compare.

What he did have was a set of fingerprints on file. His right thumb had a very distinctive pattern, and his right index finger carried what looked like a burn scar.

And his personnel file had survived. In 1973, a fire at the National Personnel Records Center destroyed between sixteen and eighteen million military personnel files. Kimball's was not one of them.

The investigator sent pictures to a fingerprint expert at the FBI. Within six hours, they had a positive identification. It was, the investigator said, the fastest identification they had ever made.

Kimball was one name among thousands of samples. In the medical examiner's first five years on the glacier, its teams collected 4,520 specimens, against 585 in the five years before.

In the summer of 2025, the team collected three hundred and seventy-three samples in five days, a record.

All 52 10:52

By September 2025, fifty were named. On January 12th, 2026, Air Force Mortuary Affairs announced that all fifty-two had been positively identified.

The Air Force is now assessing whether to close Operation Colony Glacier. The site, it says, no longer shows evidence of more remains or material coming out of the ice.

At the Air Mobility Command Museum, at Dover, part of the C-124 is now on display, with personal effects that could not be traced to any one man.

In 2018, an Air Force colonel on the operation estimated two to five more years. It took seven and a half.

The account 11:34

So here is the account. Fifty-two men. Lost on Mount Gannett in November 1952. Buried by snow within ten days. Carried twelve miles by the ice. Found by a yellow raft in 2012. All fifty-two named by 2026.

For sixty years, the last known position of this C-124 was a peak in the Chugach Mountains, and the glacier kept moving it. What turned it into fifty-two names was a team that came back every June, families who gave a sample, and a fingerprint card that survived a fire.

Next: the USS Arizona 12:09

Next, the USS Arizona. Its unknowns from Pearl Harbor lie in the Punchbowl cemetery, in Honolulu. The agency waited until it held DNA samples from sixty percent of the missing men's families. In December 2026, it plans to begin bringing them up. That is the next episode.

Description and sources

We follow the case through the record: the 1952 search as the official reports describe it (Terris Moore and Lt. Thomas Sullivan landing a Super Cub by the tail on 28 November), the glacier that carried the wreck for sixty years, and Operation Colony Glacier, the recovery that has gone back every June since 2012, first under the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and, since 2015, under Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System compared DNA against family reference samples; 17 men were named in June 2014, 49 by June 2025. Two identifications came from fingerprints: Staff Sgt. Eugene Costley, a flight engineer, in 2018, and Airman 3rd Class James Kimball, the 50th, who had no family DNA reference and whose personnel file had survived the 1973 records fire.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES: all 8 are credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Last Known Position reads a missing-in-action case through the record that closed it: the loss report, the excavation and the laboratory.

About the material. Video: the recovery missions on Colony Glacier, filmed by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (2012), Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and Alaskan Command (2012-2019, 2024) and Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations (2020), via DVIDS. Photographs: U.S. Air Force (the C-124, 1950s; Colony Glacier, 2021-2025) via Wikimedia Commons. No film of this aircraft from 1952 is used. All public domain. No human remains are shown. Diagrams are drawn in code. Nothing here is AI-generated imagery.

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement. This channel is independent and not affiliated with the U.S. Air Force, Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations, the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, the Alaska National Guard or the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

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