Friday, August 30, 2019

The Dyatlov Pass Incident: Was It A Government Exercise Gone Wrong, Or Did One Of The Skiers Go Nuts?

๐ŸŽฟThe Dyatlov Pass Incident๐ŸŽฟ
The Mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
๐ŸŽฟOn January 25th, 1959, a ski instructor, 3 engineers and 7 students from the former Soviet Union's Ural Polytechnical Institute, set out on a journey that would bring their lives to a disturbing and tragic end. The group was formed for a skiing expedition across the northern Urals in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Soviet Union. 
Igor Dyatlov
The leader of the trip was 23 year old radio engineering student Igor Dyatlov. All of the members of the group were highly experienced skiers and and upon their return, would have gotten the highest certification in the Soviet Union.
Dubinina, Krivonischenko, Thibeaux-Brignolles, and Slobodin
๐ŸŽฟThe group arrived by train at the town of Ivdel, then took a truck to Vizhai, where they purchased loaves of bread to add to their supplies. This would be the last inhabited settlement before their trek up the mountain.
๐ŸŽฟOn January 28th, 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 9 people marched on.

๐ŸŽฟThe group made it to the edge of a highland area on January 31st. This is were they began to prepare for climbing. They they then stored their extra supplies and in a wooded valley that were to be used for their trip back.

๐ŸŽฟOn February 1st,  they began to move through the pass that would come to be called the Dyatlov Pass. The group hoped to make camp that night on the opposite side of the pass. That day however,  snowstorms and decreasing visibility caused them to lose their direction and they deviated west, up towards the top of Kholat Syakhl. 
Photo from Dyatlov's camera showing the last camp
When they realized their mistake, rather than trek down to the forested area, they camped on the slope of the mountain. Temperatures that night were -13 - -22 degrees F.

๐ŸŽฟThe group was suppose to send a telegram their sports club when they returned from their trip. A week after the telegram didn't arrive, Yudin alerted the authorities. 

๐ŸŽฟThe head of the Ural Polytechnical Institute assembled a rescue team comprised of students and teachers.
Tent cut from the inside
 On February 26, 1959, the rescue team came across a disturbing site when they discovered Dyatlov's group tent having been cut in half from the inside. Inside the tent were the group's belongings including their shoes. Outside the tent were nine sets of footprints made by people who were wearing only socks, a single shoe, or were barefoot. The team then followed some of the tracks and found the remains of a campfire 1,500 feet away along with two shoe-less bodies from Dyatlov's group. 

It was Krivonischenko and Doroshenko and they were dressed only in their underwear. Above the bodies, branches on the pine tree were broken, indicating that the men had tried to climb up in a frantic attempted and left behind traces of skin the the bark. Their hands were just pulpy fresh.Bodies of Dyatlov, Kolomogorova and Slobodin
Between the tree and the camp there were three more bodies, Dyatlov, Kolomogorova and Slobodin. They each lay several hundred meters apart from one another. Dyatlov was found on his back with one hand clinging onto a small tree branch while the other was in a defensive position by his head.


๐ŸŽฟOn May 4th, the rest of the bodies were finally found further into the woods from the pine tree, in a ravine. Three of the four bodies had been wearing more clothes than the others, and there were signs that as each died, their clothes were appropriated by those still alive. Dubinina’s foot was wrapped in a piece of Krivonischenko’s wool pants, while Zolotaryov was found wearing Dubinina’s coat and hat. 

๐ŸŽฟWhen the autopsies were preformed, the results showed that 6 out of the 9 people in Dyatlov's group had died of hypothermia while the other 3 died of some kind of weird trauma. 
Bodies of Kolevatov, Zolotaryov and Thibeaux-Brignoles
Thibeaux-Brignolles was found, face down with several fractures to his skull. Lyudmila Dubinina and Semyon Zolotaryov had major chest fractures, but none of the bodies showed signs of external injury. The force needed to cause the fractures as being comparable to that of a car crash. Semyon Zolotaryov was missing his eyes and so were Dubinina's. 
Body of Dubinina
Dubinina was the farthest away of all the bodies. She was the only one that showed external injuries. When she was found her head was tilted back and her mouth stretched as if she was trying to scream. Besides her missing her eyes, she was also missing her tongue, which was pulled out by the roots, and part of her lips, part of her face, and a fragment of skull bone. The skin on her hands were macerated.

๐ŸŽฟAll expedition members died between 6 and 8 hours after eating their last meal. Three separate articles of clothing found on two of the bodies were radioactive.

๐ŸŽฟAs for who did this or what happened to Dyatlov's group, there were no signs of anyone else being up there with the group. Only the hikers' footprints were visible in the snow, and none of the bodies showed signs of a struggle. The area showed no signs of an avalanche having taken place, and the bodies that were found within ten days of the event were covered with only a very shallow layer of snow. 

๐ŸŽฟThere were journals and rolls of film discovered at the scene.

๐ŸŽฟThe results of the investigation remained classified until the 1970's. The official conclusions that the hikers' deaths were as a result of "a compelling natural force."

๐ŸŽฟAnother group of hikers reported that they saw strange orange spheres in the sky to the north on the night of the incident. Similar spheres were observed in Ivdel and adjacent areas continually during the period from February to March 1959, by various independent witnesses These sightings were not noted in the initial investigation and these various independent witnesses only came forward years later.

๐ŸŽฟAt the hikers' funerals,  some friends and family members recalled that all the hikers' skin had a "deep brown tan" color or an orange color. The victims also appeared to have a little hair loss and what hair remained had turned dark grey.

๐ŸŽฟThe area where all of the hikers died was closed for 3 years after.

๐ŸŽฟThe lone survivor, Yuri, the one who became ill and had to turn back, was asked to identify some of the group's clothing found at the scene. He allegedly identified a torn piece of military clothing among the personal effects along with glasses and a pair of skis that didn't belong to the group. Yuri also claimed that he saw documents that showed an official investigation into the site started two-weeks before it's initial discovery. He a stated that there were boxes of the groups organs that had been sent out for examination as well.

๐ŸŽฟOn April 12th, 2018, the remains of Zolotarev were exhumed and 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 is not on the list of buried at the Ivanovskoye cemetery. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the face from the exhumed skull agrees with the post-war photographs of Semyon.

๐ŸŽฟThe investigation was reopened in February of this year.
Monument to the students
๐ŸŽฟTomb of the deceased at Mikhailovskoe Cemetery in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

๐ŸŽฟWhat Had The Experience Hikers So Frightened That They Ran Away Without Their Shoes?

No comments:

Post a Comment