THE DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT - PART TWO

One of the more popular explanations for what happened at Dyatlov Pass is that the team heard the rumblings of an oncoming avalanche and panicked, cutting their way out of the tent and scrambling down the hill without putting on heavier clothes.

The main problem with this theory is that there has never been evidence of an avalanche occurring at this location. There’s also the fact that the footprints found near the camp were not buried under any snow. And the footprints also indicate that those who left the tent did so in an orderly and slow fashion.

Another group of hikers that were in the vicinity of the Dyatlov Nine reported seeing odd orange spheres in the sky on the night of the incident. Russian police officer Lev Ivanov, who led the investigation in 1959, finally revealed in 1990 that members of his team had also seen strange flying spheres around the time of the deaths. Ivanov wrote that he had orders to never discuss the sightings:

"When E. P. Maslennikov and I examined the scene in May, we found that some young pine trees at the edge of the forest had burn marks, but those marks did not have a concentric form or some other pattern. There was no epicenter. This once again confirmed that heated beams of a strong, but completely unknown, at least to us, energy, were directing their firepower toward specific objects (in this case, people), acting selectively."

It has been speculated that these strange balls of light were either alien spacecraft (the crazy explanation) or Russian military aircraft on covert bombing missions.

A once-popular theory that had floated around regarding the Dyatlov Pass Incident was that they hikers were attacked by indigenous Mansi tribesmen for trespassing on sacred ground.

This theory has been discredited for several reasons: There were no footprints to indicate anyone besides the hikers had occupied the area on the night they died.

At the time of the hikers’ deaths, no crimes had been committed in the area for three decades.

The blunt force trauma that killed three of the hikers required power far beyond the capability of any humans.

Robbery had been ruled out as a motive since the campers’ belongings remained untouched inside their tent.

A wind phenomenon known as a “Karman vortex street,” caused by fierce winds blowing over specifically shaped geological structures, can cause very low-vibration sound frequencies called “infrasound” that is known to cause fear and irrational dread in humans. As the theory goes, an infrasound blast disoriented the campers to the point where they cut themselves and ran out of their own tent in a panic, only to freeze to death in the dark as they attempted to make their way back.

The problem with this theory is that there is no documentation of a Karman vortex street ever causing humans to act so irrationally that they’ll run half-naked down a snow-covered slope to escape it. Plus, a sound blast doesn’t explain the blunt-force trauma to three of the bodies.

In 2014 the Discovery Channel aired a film called Russian Yeti: The Killer Lives. It attempted to explain that the hiking team suffered a fatal encounter with the Abominable Snowman due to the fact that one of the victims had a missing tongue and also based on a blurry photo shortly before everyone died that shows a shadowy figure peeking out near a tree.

The problem with this theory is that the picture could have been of one of the hikers. And any kind of wildlife predator could have eaten the girl’s tongue during the three months it took searchers to finally locate her corpse.

There’s all that, plus the fact that there is no evidence that the Abominable Snowman, the Yeti, or Bigfoot—whatever you want to call that hairy, smelly predator¬—has ever existed outside the realm of legend.

We may never know what happened to these hikers in Russia in 1959, and it's sad to think of their sad deaths, but something was going on there that is yet another mystery....