THE DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT - PART ONE

What killed a team of nine accomplished mountain hikers? An avalanche? A UFO? Bigfoot? Military tests? Welcome to the Dyatlov Pass Incident, one of Russia’s ultimate unsolved mysteries.

Dyatlov Pass in Russia’s Ural Mountains got its name in the grisliest way possible: In 1959, Igor Dyatlov led a team of eight other hikers to their deaths under brutal winter conditions. When a rescue team finally found the group’s remains a month later, a bizarre series of clues has baffled investigators ever since.

In late January 1959, 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov was leading a team of eight other young hikers on a trek to scale Mt. Ortoten, which allegedly translates to “Don’t Go There” in the dialect of the local indigenous Mansi people. Dyatlov was one of seven men in the group of nine.

When relatives hadn’t heard from anyone in the team by February 20, search parties were sent out to look for the missing hikers. On February 26 they found their abandoned tent camp.

What researchers found at the camp scene was clear and unequivocal. It’s why it all happened that remains one of the world’s greatest unsolved mysteries. The hikers’ tent had been cut open from the inside, signaling that the campers had abruptly attempted to escape from the tent. Most of their belongings—including cash—were still found inside the tent, putting doubt to any speculation that they had been robbed.

Footprints in the snow revealed that several of the campers had escaped the tent either barefoot or wearing only socks. A few of them were wearing only underwear. The footprints also revealed that there were no other people or animals in the vicinity of whatever disaster befell the nine hikers.
The first two bodies that were found nearest to the camp were of two men who’d burned their hands warming it on a nearby fire. The next three bodies—of Dyatlov plus a man and a woman—were between the fire and the tent, suggesting that they’d tried getting back to the tent. All five bodies were determined to have died of hyperthermia.

The remaining four bodies weren’t found until two months later under about fifteen feet of snow in a nearby ravine. This group was more thoroughly clothed than the first five had been some of them were even wearing items of clothing that they’d apparently plucked off the corpses of those who died nearest the tent.

Three of these final four bodies were found to have died of blunt force trauma—one to the skull, two to the chest. The amount of force necessary to have caused such trauma was gauged to be equivalent to that of a car crash—in other words, a human attacker couldn’t possibly have caused such trauma.
The only corpse of the four found in the ravine that showed significant external trauma was that of Ludmila Dubinina, whose eyes and tongue had been removed.

Strangely, some of the hikers’ clothing showed radiation levels far above normal.

An investigation by Soviet authorities said that the skiers had died of “an unknown compelling force.” The files were classified and the investigation was shut down.

So, what really happened? To this day, 65 years later, no one knows for sure....