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In the winter of 1959 eight men and two women vanished in Russia’s Ural mountains. When a search and rescue team discovered their bodies, some were half-naked and barefoot, others had suspicious-looking injuries. The cause of those tragic, unaccountable deaths remains a source of often dark controversy. The incident has become one of Russia’s best-known unsolved mysteries; in honor of the dead hikers, the area has been renamed Dyatlov Pass.
“If I had a chance to ask God just
one question, it would be,
“What really happened to my
friends that night?”
Yuri Yudin, the sole survivor
On the morning of January 25, 1959, ten students and recent graduates from the Ural Polytechnic University—all experienced hikers and skiers—set off for the northern, 3,540-foot (1,079-m) summit of Russia’s Ural Mountains. The route the group planned was long and the Siberian weather was harsh: They planned to ski 200 miles (322km) over 16 days, scaling several peaks along the way. Each member relished the challenge, having previously completed tough expeditions and lengthy ski tours in the region. The party consisted of: Igor Alekseievich Dyatlov, the leader, 23; Zinaida Alekseevna Kolmogorova, 22; Lyudmila Alexandrovna Dubinina, 20; Aleksander Sergeievich Kolevatov, 23; Yuri Alexeievich Krivonischenko, 23; Yuri Doroshenko, 21; Nicolai Vladimirovich Thibeaux-Brignolles, 23; Seymon Alexandrovich Zolotaryov, 38; Rustem Vladimirovich Slobodin, 23; Yuri Yudin, 22.
The group boarded a train at Ivdel, a town in the province of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), then heading to Vizhay, the last inhabited settlement on their route, by truck. Unable to hitch a ride until the following morning, they stayed in Vizhay overnight. Here, Yuri Yudin contracted dysentery and was forced to turn back, leaving the other nine skiers to continue the expedition. Unbeknown to Yuri, this unfortunate illness would save his life.
Before leaving, Dyatlov had agreed to send a telegram to the Sverdlovsk Sports Committee as soon as the group returned to the village of Vizhay. He estimated that this would be around February 12. Due to the harsh conditions, he had warned that the expedition’s return might take somewhat longer, so when February 12 came and went and Dyatlov still had not made contact, no one was particularly surprised. The skiers were no amateurs. A week went by and still the group’s families were reasonably unconcerned. However, by the end of the second week, it was evident that something was seriously wrong.
The Executive Committee of the Regional Council assembled a volunteer search and rescue team, who were assisted by sapper soldiers as well as aviation support. They struggled through heavy snow and bad weather until, on February 26, they came upon the group’s abandoned tent in an area near Gora Otorten, ominously known by the local Mansi people as Kholat Syakhl or “Mountain of Death.” The tent was flapping in the wind and had been sliced open with a knife from the inside. Days of snow had accumulated on top of it. The group members were nowhere to be seen. The tent appeared to have been abandoned in a great hurry. Inside, clothing was neatly folded and boots tidily grouped. A bag containing bread and cereal was in one corner and an open flask of cocoa sat near the stove, as if ready to be reheated and drunk.11 The search and rescue team also found a camera and diaries. The searchers sighed with relief that there were no bodies. Then they realized the awful truth. It would have been next to impossible for anyone to survive for long outside the tent.
The search revealed nine sets of footprints outside the tent. Bizarrely, these footprints indicated that those that made them were either barefoot or wearing just one shoe. The prints led to a dense forest, but disappeared after around 550 yards (500m).
The first two bodies were discovered on the forest edge. Krivonischenko and Doroshenko were both barefoot and dressed only in their underwear. Nearby, the searchers found evidence of a fire and damage to the branches of a pine tree, as if somebody had attempted to climb it, perhaps to determine their way back to the tent. The bodies of Dyatlov, Kolmogorova and Slobodin were then spotted, scattered respectively 330 yards (300m), 525 yards (480m), and 690 yards (630m) between the tree and the tent. It appeared as though they had been attempting to return to the tent. Despite the sub-zero temperatures, the bodies were only partially clothed and most were missing shoes. Some were face down in the snow, others were curled in a fetal position. The final four bodies—Thibeaux-Brignolles, Kolevatov, Zolotaryov and Dubinina were discovered two months later, when the snow began to thaw. They were found at the bottom of a forest ravine around 80 yards (75m) away from where the first two bodies were discovered. They were wearing more clothing than the others. It appeared that the first five had either given their clothes to these four or more likely, they had died first and the other four had set off clothed in hopes of surviving the bitter cold. Zolotaryov was wearing Dubinina’s fur coat and hat while Dubinina herself, whose body was lying in what was now a stream, had wrapped her feet in pieces of Krivonischenko’s woollen pants.
The bodies were transported back to civilization, where an autopsy confirmed that six of the nine skiers had died from hypothermia, while three had met more brutal deaths. While none of the corpses showed evidence of a struggle, external injuries or bruising, Thibeaux-Brignolles and Slobodin both had fractured skulls; Dubinina and Zolotaryov had broken ribs; Dubinina was also missing her tongue and eyes. The internal injuries that they had sustained were not unlike those sustained in a high-impact car accident, which can occur without external indications. Thibeaux-Brignolles, Dubinina, and Zolotaryov had died from their injuries, while Slobodin had died from hypothermia; his skull fracture was a contributing factor, but not sufficiently severe to cause death.
The expedition had employed cameras and diaries to document their journey. These revealed that the group had skied through desolate mountains and across frozen lakes until it reached the edge of the low-altitude highlands on January 31 and prepared to climb. They traversed the mountain pass but, during the following day, they were caught in a snowstorm and became lost on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl, 6 miles (10km) south of Otorten. When they realized that they had strayed from their route, they decided to stop and pitch their tent on the mountainside for the night. Why Dyatlov chose this location is a mystery. It was at a height of 3,280 feet (1,000m); if they had continued a little further, they would have been able to make camp in a safer location, beside a forest.22 Photographs depicted the group pitching their tent at around 5pm. The final diary entry indicated that the members were in good spirits. Yet something happened later that night that forced them to run, seemingly panic-stricken, from the warmth of their tent into the freezing cold.
Investigators were stumped. The skiers were familiar with the treacherous slopes of the Ural mountains, so what could have caused them to flee their tent to almost certain death? It was thought that the members had regrouped after leaving the tent and, as Dyatlov was the leader, he may have volunteered to venture back to the tent to collect clothing and other items they needed to survive. Slobodin and Kolmogorova may have accompanied him, all three falling victim to the elements before reaching camp. The rest may have sought shelter, before perishing in the harsh conditions. However, the severe injuries sustained by some of the group remained a mystery. A Soviet military inquest concluded that six had died of hypothermia while three had died of major internal injuries. The lead investigator ruled that the cause of death was an “unknown compelling force.” The case was classified as secret, routine in the Soviet Union at the time. The mountain was closed to the public for the next three years. A private investigation was briefly conducted, but called off in May.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 1980s lifted the curtain of official silence. For decades, few people beyond the skiers’ families were even aware of the tragic event. In 1990, Lev Ivanov, an investigator who had originally worked on the case, now known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident after the group’s leader, wrote an article titled: “Secret of the Fireballs” for the newspaper Leninskit Put. Ivanov suggested that the group had been killed by some kind of energy from fireballs that had been spotted in the sky around the time of the ill-fated expedition. On February 18, 1959, the Nizhny Tagil newspaper reported that a fireball had been spotted in the skies of Nizhny Tagil, heading toward the northern peak of the Ural mountains. “At 7:00 a flash appeared inside it, and the very bright core of the ball became visible. It began to glow more intensively, and was enshrouded in a luminous cloud, elongated toward the south,” read part of the article.33 Ivanov confessed that, at the time of publication, the editor of the paper had received harsh criticism from the authorities for publishing the piece and told “not to take this topic any further.” Afterward, A. F. Yeshtokin, Second Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union took control of Ivanov’s investigation.
Ivanov also explained that, at the time, very little was known about UFOs or the effects of radiation, and public discussion of such topics was banned. Despite this, Ivanov continued to secretly investigate the fireballs and the Dyatlov Pass Incident. He communicated with scientists at the Ural Branch of the USSR Academy of Science and conducted extensive research on the clothing of the hikers as well as their internal injuries. He discovered that several items of clothing had an abnormal presence of radioactive dust. However, there could have been an innocent explanation for this: At the time, lamp wicks were commonly made of a ceramic gauze treated with radioactive thorium and would crumple to dust if damaged. Ivanov also questioned local people who might have witnessed fireballs or UFOS in the subpolar Urals on February 17. One of them, A. Savkin, told him that “at 6:40 in the morning . . . a ball of bright white light appeared that [was] periodically enveloped in a cloud of white dense fog. Inside this cloud was a bright, luminous point, [like] a star. Moving toward the north direction, the ball was visible for 8–10 minutes.”44
Ivanov concluded that “the role of UFOs in this tragedy was quite obvious.” He believed that the fireball had released radioactive energy, killing the skiers that had sustained internal injuries. “Someone needed to frighten or punish people, or show their strength, and they did this.” He wrote how the rest of the skiers then carried their comrades away from the tent to be buried, but were themselves overcome by the bitter conditions. “This is how real people behave. We have something to take from the past, and how petty the behavior of other people now seems, who cannot even overcome ordinary difficulties,” he commented. Ivanov detailed how, after reporting his findings to his superior, A. F. Yeshtokin, he was ordered to classify everything, seal it up, hand it over, and forget about it. This was why Ivanov had remained quiet until 1990.
Many other possible explanations for the group’s fate have since been put forward, ranging from the possible to the outlandish, spawned by the Soviet authorities’ hasty conclusion of the original investigation. One is that the group had stumbled across something they shouldn’t have, perhaps a government secret, and were killed to silence them. Another theory is that they were the accidental victims of a Soviet missile test. Some have even speculated that the hikers fell victim to alien predators or attack by a yeti. Those of a more down-to-earth turn of mind maintain that a natural disaster or some freak weather phenomenon could have been the cause.
The incident has also sparked suspicions of foul play. When the case was originally investigated, there was speculation that the indigenous Mansi people could have murdered the skiers for trespassing on sacred land. However, there was no evidence to corroborate these rumors. None of the skiers had sustained soft tissue damage from blows perpetrated by another person or a weapon. Moreover, the Mansi people were friendly to outsiders and no additional footprints were discovered leading away from the tent, other than those of the skiers. Conspiracy theories connecting the Mansi people have continued, however, one being that a Mansi shaman had confessed to putting a hex on the group for invading their holy site.
Theories of foul play continued, however. In 2014, the Discovery Channel produced a documentary titled: Russian Yeti: The Killer Lives that postulated that the hikers had fled from the tent because they had encountered a yeti. According to Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization curator, Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum: “Many, many hypotheses about what transpired and what happened to these people exist. Some have hung the yeti theory on the presence of footprints and that, when you look at the cameras, they found this single shot of a ghostly figure emerging from the treeline.”55 Critics of the documentary’s assertion, however, say that the photograph in question shows an adult male human being and that Dubinina’s tongue and eyes, far from being ripped out by a yeti, were either eaten by a scavenging animal or had decomposed, owing to the effects of the stream in which her body had lain for some time.
Some commentators considered that the group may have somehow been connected to the government. Yuri Kuntsevich, head of the Dyatlov Memory Public Fund, told the state-run TASS news agency in 2016 that he believed that some of the skiers were members of the KGB and that they were on a secret mission to “provide support for a technology-induced experiment.”66 He seemingly reached this conclusion because the skiers were carrying lightweight photographic equipment that he claimed was “completely typical of highly complex expeditions that require maximally alleviating their load.” Kuntsevich suspected that the skiers were double agents who had been tasked by a Western agent named “The Mole” to photograph a secret Soviet missile test in the Ural mountains. However, they were captured and murdered. Those responsible then “moved the tent 1.5 kilometers [1 mile] to an impractical place. That was done by a mop-up team of soldiers; they had several helicopters.”77 According to Kuntsevich, only four of the skiers’ ten rolls of film were recovered, as well as only three diaries when each skier had kept a diary during their trip. “All these factors confirm ties with the KGB: they were not simply hikers: they had been sent to the mountain pass on a special mission,” stated Kuntsevich.
In his investigation, published in 2012 as The Dyatlov Pass Incident, Alexei Rakitin suggests that Zolotaryov, Kolevatov, and Krivonischenko were all members of the KGB on a secret mission. He concluded that they were supposed to meet with American agents and carry out a “controlled delivery,” which included handing over samples of radioactive clothing. When handing over the clothing, it was allegedly Zolotaryov’s role in the mission to photograph the American agents. The mission went awry when the American agents caught on and killed the skiers. This theory makes little sense, however. Why would a “controlled delivery” take place in the wilderness of the Ural mountains when it could have taken place in a city where the KGB agents would more easily blend in? His theory also does not satisfactorily explain the skiers’ cause of death or the strange injuries that four of them sustained. According to Rakitin, however: “There can be only one conclusion—almost the entire group was evenly beaten.”88
Whispers of a military cover-up stem from the fact that fragments of scrap metal were discovered in the area where the skiers were found. Some have speculated that the military were testing a new rocket or missile which may have malfunctioned and exploded, forcing the skiers to make a quick evacuation. According to a doctor who participated in the autopsies, only an explosion of some kind could have caused the sort of injuries that the four hikers had sustained. However, there is no record of rockets being fired around that time from either the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport or military bases in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, both of which were in the vicinity of the group’s last known camp.
The fireball sightings chronicled by Lev Ivanov in 1990 led some to believe that the Soviet army could have been testing parachute mines, an explosive that is dropped from an aircraft by a parachute that detonates 10 feet (3m) from the ground. According to this theory, the group’s tent would have been flattened by the blast, causing them to cut their way out. Shell-shocked from the explosion, the hikers could have staggered from the tent and died. As for the internal injuries, they could have been caused by falling debris.
Keith McCloskey, author of Mountain of the Dead: The Dyatlov Pass Incident, agrees that it is possible that the expedition accidentally stumbled across a military testing area and were either accidentally or deliberately killed by the Soviet military. Building on this supposition, Kizilov Gennadiy Ivanovich, a journalist from Yekaterinburg, also believed that the group was killed by the military and/or KGB after stumbling across something they shouldn’t have. He asserted that the investigation at the scene was sloppy and, after examining related documents, had discovered “about forty signs of the presence in the area of the search of so-called outsiders,” and that there was no way to be sure whether footprints at the scene had come from the group or from somebody else. He also speculated that, after killing the hikers, the military and/or KGB brought their bodies back from the murder scene to the places where they were found and staged the crime scene. To support his supposition, he said that on February 24, a search helicopter flew over the spot where the tent was later discovered, but saw no tent. However, the following day, another helicopter hovering overhead allegedly saw the tent with two corpses next to it. However, the next morning, when the tent was discovered by the search and rescue team on the ground, no bodies were found.99
Another popular theory is that the group’s tent was wiped out by an avalanche and the group had to cut open the tent from the inside to escape. However, if an avalanche had occurred, then the scene inside the tent would have been in total disarray, yet many items were neatly arranged. In addition, the effects of an avalanche does not explain the injuries some of the skiers incurred or the others’ lack of injuries. If the group had been hit with such force as to cause skull fractures and broken ribs, one of which pierced the heart, then it seems unlikely that only four of the skiers would have been affected. Finally, the pass was not an area prone to avalanches, and footprints indicated that the skiers had left the tent with ease; if they had suffered injuries while in the tent, it seems improbable they would have been able to walk at all let alone for any distance.
Donnie Eichar, author of Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident investigated the case for five years and blamed an intriguing phenomenon named a Kármán vortex street. The phenomenon was named after Theodore von Kármán, a Hungarian physicist, and is the result of a rare wind pattern that causes uneasiness, terror, and illness by producing infrasound, a low frequency that is below the limit of human hearing. In the 1960s, the scientist Vladimir Gavreau pioneered research into this strange phenomenon. He discovered it when his laboratory assistants started to complain of earache and queasiness. He deduced that microscopic air waves were projecting from a faulty fan. Although the sound could not be heard, it caused panic, fear, confusion, and sickness.
In 2003, an experiment was conducted in the UK whereby 700 people were exposed to music that had been mixed with infrasound waves. A quarter reported feeling anxiety, sorrow, uneasiness, and a strong pressure on the chest. According to Eichar, strong winds in the Ural mountains could have produced infrasound waves that caused the skiers to experience a range of unexplainable emotions. When wind flow is disrupted, the moving air can create a vortex that then travels away from the source. Eichar maintained that the group’s tent was in the perfect location to feel the effects of minute air waves flowing down from the peak of a nearby mountain. A combination of high winds and the curvature of the mountain terrain could have conspired to produce infrasound waves. These might have caused the skiers irrational panic and fear, leading them to flee their tent, ignoring the obvious dangers. By the time the group were far enough away from the effects of the infrasound waves, they were unable to make their way back to the safety of their camp, and succumbed. Those others who had sustained injury could have done so when they fell down the ravine where they were later discovered. The only flaw in Eichar’s hypothesis is that there is no evidence that Kármán vortex street can cause people to act so irrationally. The group would have known that venturing out of their tent without the proper clothing and equipment was a virtual death sentence.
In February 2019, Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it would be reopening the investigation into the Dyatlov Pass Incident to dispel the “growth of rumors.” The investigation was moved from the regional branch of the Investigative Committee to the federal branch and focused on just three theories: a hurricane, an avalanche of mountain snow, and a type of avalanche known as a snow slab, whereby a slab of compacted snow slides over a weaker layer. The latter is a frequent cause of deaths in mountainous regions in winter. These possibilities had been whittled down from around 75 hypotheses, including a paranormal disaster and a government conspiracy. It was stressed that all conspiracy theories had been ruled out and that the government had played no part in the tragic deaths. “A large part of these 75 versions stem from conspiracy theories this or that way alleging that the entire incident was engineered by the authorities. It is absolutely out of the question, and we have proved that 15 theories explaining the hikers’ deaths by secret activities of law enforcement agencies are ungrounded,” declared Andrei Kuryakov, Chief of Justice Administration Oversight Directorate of the Sverdlovsk region prosecutor’s office.1010
However, the new investigation shed little light and did little to quell speculation. With so many peculiar elements involved in the mystery, it seems unlikely that belief in some kind of Soviet government cover-up or conspiracy will ever entirely disappear.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident has become one of Russia’s best known unsolved mysteries. What happened that night to force nine highly experienced skiers to rip open their tent and rush towards death? Despite all the efforts of modern-day science and technological advances, the crux of the mystery remains. It is a question that haunted the sole survivor, Yuri Yudin, until his death in 2013: “If I had a chance to ask God just one question, it would be, ‘What really happened to my friends that night?’ ”1111