Posted on 10/18/2004 10:22:51 AM PDT by 11th_VA
VIENNA (Reuters) - The man who 13 years ago found the frozen remains of a prehistoric iceman in an Alpine glacier has disappeared in the snow-covered Alps with little hope of being found.
A member of the mountain rescue team at Bad Hofgastein in Austria told Reuters on Monday that Helmut Simon, the German man who found the 5,300-year-old mummified body while hiking on the border of Austria and Italy in 1991 has been missing for three days.
"There's a lot of snow up there," the rescuer, who did not want to be named, said about the 2,467-metre (8,000-ft) Garmskarkogel mountain in the Salzburg region, where Simon vanished. "We've looked everywhere. He was hiking alone."
"We employed 93 men and search dogs in the search but we didn't find him," he said, adding that the team had suspended the rescue mission.
Simon, 67, and his wife, Erika, from Nuremberg in Germany found the neolithic iceman in September 1991 on the 3,000-metre (9,000-feet) high Similaun glacier in the Tyrolean Oetz Valley. The mummy was named "Oetzi" after the valley.
The rescuer said Simon probably did not have a tent with him and there were no signs he had been at any of the permanent huts on the mountain.
"You can imagine that the chances of survival outside in the snow are quite slim," the rescuer said.
Maybe they'll find him in 5,000 years.
This one merits nomination for irony of the year.
Irony at its finest. And who says God doesn't have a sense of humor.
Well, the world DID need another iceman.
Apparently, the Alps giveth, and the Alps taketh away.
In a related story, 21 Dec, 5072.
A frozen man was found in the former Swiss Alps. Muslim spokesman Hamid Ali Benghazi said that the humanoid was oddly shaped with only TWO hands and not the normal three as seen in the Greater European Islamic Empire. An Imam appeared on the scene to quickly shoo everyone away saying, "nothing here folks, move along!"
"Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes." - Bill Shatner Airplane II.
One night, I stepped on a Tylenal pain reliever tablet in our kitchen and hurt my foot. (True story.) Anyone else got real ironies?
Now it's his turn to be lost and found, Right out of The Twilight Zone...
What goes around comes around.
Help me out. Someone in a previous thread mentioned a book about WW1 soldiers serving in the Alps. I can't remember the title of the book.
Irony bump.
Just damn alert!
I have it on good authority that this is GWB and the JOOOOS fault
nothing is popping into my head but I am still laughing at your reply. When I stop laughing I will be back.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.