image courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force.

This story amazed me when I first found it.  According to Yahoo! News an airplane that had vanished for 60 years has been found on an Alaska glacier.  The plane, a US Air Force Globemaster, similar to the one pictured on the left, disappeared sometime in 1952, with a crew of 52 servicemen.

The remains were eventually enveloped by ice, and vanished from sight.

To those of us familiar with Captain America’s origin, his plane also crashed into the Arctic, and was recovered after about 65 years.  Despite the similarities, the stories don’t end the same.  In the comics, Captain America is preserved (somehow) by the extreme cold as well as the Super-Soldier Serum he had taken to become one of the greatest heroes of World War II.

The crew of the Globemaster were not able to avail themselves of such a serum–which existed only on the pages of Captain America comics and prior to that, the minds of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby–because unlike the Captain, who was eventually found and thawed out, remains of the Globemaster are still being uncovered, while those of the crew have yet to be found.