Dyatlov Pass incident


The Dyatlov Pass incident was an event in which nine Russian hikers died in the northern Ural Mountains between 1 and 2 February 1959, in uncertain circumstances. The experienced trekking group, who were all from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, had established a camp on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl, in an area now named in honour of the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov. During the night, something caused them to tear their way out of their tents and flee the campsite, all while inadequately dressed for the heavy snowfall and sub-zero temperatures.
After the group's bodies were discovered, an investigation by Soviet authorities determined that six had died from hypothermia while the other three showed signs of physical trauma. One victim had a fractured skull; two others had major chest fractures and the body of one of the group was missing both its eyes. One of the victims was missing a tongue. The investigation concluded that a "compelling natural force" had caused the deaths. Numerous theories have been put forward to account for the unexplained deaths, including animal attacks, hypothermia, avalanche, katabatic winds, infrasound-induced panic, military involvement, or some combination of these.
Russia opened a new investigation into the incident in 2019, and the conclusions were presented in July 2020: the investigation concluded that the cause of death was hypothermia due to a combination of an avalanche, forcing the group to leave their camp, combined with low visibility. Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the regional prosecutor's office, stated: “It was a heroic struggle. There was no panic. But they had no chance to save themselves under the circumstances.”

Background

In 1959, a group was formed for a skiing expedition across the northern Urals in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Soviet Union. According to Prosecutor Tempalov, documents that were found in the tent of the expedition suggest that the expedition was commemorated to the 21st Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and possibly the expedition was dispatched by local Komsomol organisation. Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old radio engineering student at the Ural Polytechnical Institute was the leader who assembled a group of nine others for the trip, most of whom were fellow students and peers at the university. Each member of the group, which consisted of eight men and two women, was an experienced Grade II-hiker with ski tour experience, and would be receiving Grade III certification upon their return. At the time, this was the highest certification available in the Soviet Union, and required candidates to traverse. The route was designed by the Dyatlov's group and was reaching far norther regions of Sverdlovsk Oblast in vicinity of upper-streams of Lozva river. The route was approved by the Sverdlovsk city route commission of the Sverdlovsk Committee of Physical Culture and Sport on 8 January 1959 and confirmed the group of 10 people. The goal of the expedition was to reach Gora Otorten, a mountain north of the site of the incident. This route, in February, was estimated as Category III, the most difficult.
On 23 January 1959 the Dyatlov group was issued the route book No.5 by the Sverdlovsk City Committee of Physical Culture and Sport listing 11 people. Under No.11 was listed Semyon Zolotaryov who previously was certified to go with another expedition of similar category of difficulty. Same day after receiving their route book, the Dyatlov group left Sverdlovsk on its expedition.

Expedition

The group arrived by train at Ivdel, a town at the centre of the northern province of Sverdlovsk Oblast in the early morning hours of 25 January 1959. They then took a truck to Vizhai – a lorry village that is the last inhabited settlement to the north. While spending the night in Vizhai, the skiers purchased and ate loaves of bread to keep their energy levels up for the following day's hike.
On 27 January, they began their trek toward Gora Otorten from Vizhai. On 28 January, one of the members, Yuri Yudin, who suffered from several health ailments turned back due to knee and joint pain that made him unable to continue the hike. The remaining group of nine people continued the trek.
Diaries and cameras found around their last campsite made it possible to track the group's route up to the day preceding the incident. On 31 January, the group arrived at the edge of a highland area and began to prepare for climbing. In a wooded valley, they cached surplus food and equipment that would be used for the trip back. The following day, the hikers started to move through the pass. It seems they planned to get over the pass and make camp for the next night on the opposite side, but because of worsening weather conditions — snowstorms and decreasing visibility — they lost their direction and deviated west, up towards the top of Kholat Syakhl. When they realised their mistake, the group decided to stop and set up camp there on the slope of the mountain, rather than move downhill to a forested area that would have offered some shelter from the bad weather. Yudin postulated that "Dyatlov probably did not want to lose the altitude they had gained, or he decided to practise camping on the mountain slope."

Search and discovery

Before leaving, Dyatlov had agreed he would send a telegram to their sports club as soon as the group returned to Vizhai. It was expected that this would happen no later than 12 February, but Dyatlov had told Yudin, before he departed from the group, that he expected it to be longer. When the 12th passed and no messages had been received, there was no immediate reaction, as delays of a few days were common with such expeditions. On 20 February, the relatives of the travellers demanded a rescue operation and the head of the institute sent the first rescue groups, consisting of volunteer students and teachers. Later, the army and militsiya forces became involved, with planes and helicopters being ordered to join the rescue operation.
On 26 February, the searchers found the group's abandoned and badly damaged tent on Kholat Syakhl. The campsite baffled the search party. Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said "the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind." Investigators said the tent had been cut open from inside. Nine sets of footprints, left by people who were wearing only socks or a single shoe or were even barefoot, could be followed, leading down towards the edge of a nearby woods, on the opposite side of the pass, to the north-east. However, after these tracks were covered with snow. At the forest's edge, under a large Siberian pine, the searchers found the visible remains of a small fire. There were the first two bodies, those of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko, shoeless and dressed only in their underwear. The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that one of the skiers had climbed up to look for something, perhaps the camp. Between the pine and the camp, the searchers found three more corpses: Dyatlov, Kolmogorova, and Slobodin, who seemed to have died in poses suggesting that they were attempting to return to the tent. They were found separately at distances of from the tree.
Finding the remaining four travellers took more than two months. They were finally found on 4 May under of snow in a ravine further into the woods from the pine tree. Three of those four were better dressed than the others, and there were signs that those who had died first had their clothes relinquished to the others. Dubinina was wearing Krivonishenko's burned, torn trousers and her left foot and shin were wrapped in a torn jacket.

Investigation

A legal inquest started immediately after the first five bodies were found. A medical examination found no injuries that might have led to their deaths, and it was eventually concluded that they had all died of hypothermia. Slobodin had a small crack in his skull, but it was not thought to be a fatal wound.
An examination of the four bodies that were found in May shifted the narrative as to what had occurred during the incident. Three of the ski hikers had fatal injuries: Thibeaux-Brignolles had major skull damage, and both Dubinina and Zolotaryov had major chest fractures. According to Boris Vozrozhdenny, the force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high, comparable to the force of a car crash. Notably, the bodies had no external wounds associated with the bone fractures, as if they had been subjected to a high level of pressure.
All four bodies found at the bottom of the creek in a running stream of water had soft tissue damage to their head and face. For example, Dubinina was missing her tongue, eyes, part of the lips, as well as facial tissue and a fragment of skullbone, while Zolotaryov had his eyeballs missing, and Aleksander Kolevatov his eye-brows. V. A. Vozrozhdenny, the forensic expert performing the post-mortem examination, judged that these injuries happened post-mortem due to the location of the bodies in a stream.
There was initial speculation that the indigenous Mansi people, reindeer herders local to the area, had attacked and murdered the group for encroaching upon their lands. Several Mansi were interrogated, but the investigation indicated that the nature of their deaths did not support this hypothesis; only the hikers' footprints were visible, and they showed no sign of hand-to-hand struggle.
Although the temperature was very low, around with a storm blowing, the dead were only partially dressed. Some of them had only one shoe, while others had no shoes or wore only socks. Some were found wrapped in snips of ripped clothes that seemed to have been cut from those who were already dead.
Journalists reporting on the available parts of the inquest files claim that it states:
At the time the verdict was that the group members had all died because of a compelling natural force. The inquest officially ceased in May 1959 as a result of the absence of a guilty party. The files were sent to a secret archive.
In 1997, it was revealed that the negatives from Krivonischenko's camera were kept in the private archive of one of the investigators, Lev Ivanov. The film material was donated by Ivanov's daughter to the Dyatlov Foundation. The diaries of the hiking party fell into Russia's public domain in 2009.
On 12 April 2018, the remains of Zolotarev were exhumed upon the initiative of journalists of the Russian tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. Contradictory results were obtained: one of the experts stated that the character of the injuries resembled a person knocked down by a car, and the DNA analysis did not reveal any similarity to the DNA of living relatives. In addition, it turned out that the name Semyon Zolotarev was not on the list of buried at the Ivanovskoye cemetery. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the face from the exhumed skull agreed with the post-war photographs of Zolotarev, although journalists expressed suspicions that another person was hiding under Zolotarev's name after World War II.
In February 2019, Russian authorities reopened the investigation into the incident, although only three possible explanations were being considered: an avalanche, a "snow slab" avalanche, or a hurricane. The possibility of a crime has been discounted.

Related reports

Anatoly Gushchin summarized his research in the book The Price of State Secrets Is Nine Lives Some researchers criticised the work for its concentration on the speculative theory of a Soviet secret weapon experiment, but its publication led to public discussion, stimulated by interest in the paranormal. Indeed, many of those who had remained silent for thirty years reported new facts about the accident. One of them was the former police officer, Lev Ivanov, who led the official inquest in 1959. In 1990, he published an article that included his admission that the investigation team had no rational explanation for the incident. He also stated that, after his team reported that they had seen flying spheres, he then received direct orders from high-ranking regional officials to dismiss this claim.
In 2000, a regional television company produced the documentary film The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass. With the help of the film crew, a Yekaterinburg writer, Anna Matveyeva, published a docudrama novella of the same name. A large part of the book includes broad quotations from the official case, diaries of victims, interviews with searchers and other documentaries collected by the film-makers. The narrative line of the book details the everyday life and thoughts of a modern woman who attempts to resolve the case. Despite its fictional narrative, Matveyeva's book remains the largest source of documentary materials ever made available to the public regarding the incident. Also, the pages of the case files and other documentaries are gradually being published on a web forum for enthusiastic researchers.
The Dyatlov Foundation was founded in 1999 at Yekaterinburg, with the help of Ural State Technical University, led by Yuri Kuntsevitch. The foundation's stated aim is to continue investigation of the case and to maintain the Dyatlov Museum to preserve the memory of the dead hikers. On 1 July 2016, a memorial plaque was inaugurated in Solikamsk in Ural's Perm Region, dedicated to Yuri Yudin, who died in 2013.

Explanations

Avalanche

On July 11 2020, Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the Urals Federal District directorate of the Prosecutor-General’s Office, announced an avalanche to be the "official cause of death" for the Dyatlov group in 1959.

Original explanation

Reviewing the sensationalist "Yeti" hypothesis, American skeptic author Benjamin Radford suggests an avalanche as more plausible:
Evidence contradicting the avalanche theory includes:
A review of the 1959 investigation's evidence completed in 2015–2019 by experienced investigators from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation on request of the families confirmed the avalanche with several important details added. First of all, the ICRF investigators confirmed that the weather on the night of the tragedy was very harsh, with wind speeds up to hurricane force,, a snowstorm and temperatures reaching. These factors weren't considered by the 1959 investigators who arrived at the scene of the accident three weeks later when the weather had much improved and any remains of the snow slide settled down and had been covered with fresh snowfall. The harsh weather at the same time played a critical role in the events of the tragic night, which has been reconstructed as follows:
According to the ICRF investigators, the factors contributing to the tragedy were extremely bad weather and lack of experience of the group leader in such conditions, which led to the selection of a dangerous camping place. After the snow slide, another mistake of the group was to split up, rather than building a temporary camping place down in the forest and trying to survive through the night. Negligence of the 1959 investigators contributed to their report creating more questions than answers and inspiring numerous conspiracy theories.

Katabatic wind

In 2019, a Swedish-Russian expedition was made to the site, and after investigations, they proposed that a violent katabatic wind is a likely explanation for the incident. Katabatic winds are somewhat rare events, and can be extremely violent. They were implicated in a 1978 case at Anaris Mountain in Sweden, where eight hikers were killed and one was seriously injured in the aftermath of katabatic wind. The topography of these locations were noted to be very similar according to the expedition.
A sudden katabatic wind would have made it impossible to remain in the tent, and the most rational course of action would be for the hikers to cover the tent with snow and seek shelter among the treeline. There was also a torch left turned on on top of the tent, possibly left there intentionally so the hikers could find their way back to the tent once the winds subsided. The expedition proposed that the group of hikers constructed two bivouac shelters, one of which collapsed, leaving four of the hikers buried with the violent injuries observed.

Infrasound

Another hypothesis popularised by Donnie Eichar's 2013 book Dead Mountain is that wind going around Kholat Syakal created a Kármán vortex street, which can produce infrasound capable of inducing panic attacks in humans.
According to Eichar's theory, the infrasound generated by the wind as it passed over the top of the Holatchahl mountain was responsible for causing physical discomfort and mental distress in the hikers. Eichar claims that, because of their panic, the hikers were driven to leave the tent by whatever means necessary, and fled down the slope. By the time they were further down the hill, they would have been out of the infrasound's path and would have regained their composure, but in the darkness would be unable to return to their shelter. The traumatic injuries suffered by three of the victims were the result of their stumbling over the ledge of a ravine in the darkness and landing on the rocks at the bottom.

Military tests

Speculation exists that the campsite fell within the path of a Soviet parachute mine exercise. This theory alleges that the hikers, woken by loud explosions, fled the tent in a shoeless panic and found themselves unable to return for supply retrieval. After some members froze to death attempting to endure the bombardment, others commandeered their clothing only to be fatally injured by subsequent parachute mine concussions. There are indeed records of parachute mines being tested by the Soviet military in the area around the time the hikers were there. Parachute mines detonate while still in the air rather than upon striking the Earth's surface and produce signature injuries similar to those experienced by the hikers: heavy internal damage with comparably less external trauma. The theory coincides with reported sightings of glowing, orange orbs floating or falling in the sky within the general vicinity of the hikers and allegedly photographed by them, potentially military aircraft or descending parachute mines. This theory uses scavenging animals to explain Dubinina's injuries. Some speculate the bodies were unnaturally manipulated due to characteristic livor mortis markings discovered during an autopsy, as well as burns to hair and skin. Photographs of the tent allegedly show that it was erected incorrectly, something the experienced hikers were unlikely to have done.
A similar theory alleges the testing of radiological weapons and is partly based on the discovery of radioactivity on some of the clothing as well as the bodies being described by relatives as having orange skin and grey hair. However, radioactive dispersal would have affected all of the hikers and equipment instead of just some of it, and the skin and hair discoloration can be explained by a natural process of mummification after three months of exposure to the cold and winds. Furthermore, the initial suppression of files regarding the group's disappearance by Soviet authorities is sometimes mentioned as evidence of a cover-up, but the concealment of information regarding domestic incidents was standard procedure in the USSR and therefore far from peculiar. And by the late 1980s, all Dyatlov files had been released in some manner.

Paradoxical undressing

International Science Times posited that the hikers' deaths were caused by hypothermia, which can induce a behavior known as paradoxical undressing in which hypothermic subjects remove their clothes in response to perceived feelings of burning warmth. It is undisputed that six of the nine hikers died of hypothermia. However, others in the group appear to have acquired additional clothing, which suggests that they were of a sound enough mind to try to add layers.

Other

Keith McCloskey, who has researched the incident for many years and has appeared in several TV documentaries on the subject, traveled to the Dyatlov Pass in 2015 with Yury Kuntsevich of the Dyatlov Foundation and a group. At the Dyatlov Pass he noted:
McCloskey also noted:
Donnie Eichar, who investigated and made a documentary about the incident, evaluated several other theories that are deemed unlikely or have been discredited:
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