We are all heartbroken to see the Bossons Glacier dying before your eyes.
It is giving up its secrets faster and faster: objects, human remains, everything it once swallowed. As though it were ridding itself of burdensome secrets.
The two Air India crashes, which strangely occurred in the same place fifteen years apart, in 1950 and 1966, left the glacier with more than 150 victims who might have been completely forgotten.
Indeed, the second crash, although more recent and more deadly, had truly been forgotten. At the end of the 1980s, when I first became interested in the subject, I was very surprised that no one had undertaken this work before me. I had to jog people's memories by placing evidence in front of those I interviewed.
Since this second crash occurred in the middle of the Cold War, and since Professor Homi Bhabha, the father of India's nuclear programme, was among the victims, this collective lapse of memory immediately aroused my suspicions...
I wrote Crash au Mont-Blanc, les fantômes du Malabar Princess in 1991. Then, in 2013, a box of precious stones was discovered on the glacier. The discovery created a media sensation, and I immersed myself once again in this incredible and fascinating story, in which reality surpasses fiction.
I went on to write Crashs au Mont-Blanc, la fin des secrets ? It is this book that is now, at last, available in English.
(bookshops in Chamonix and on Amazon)