If I had the opportunity to ask God a question, I would ask, "What happened to my friends that night?" These are the words of Yuri Yudin, the sole survivor of the mysterious death that occurred in the region of the Ural Mountains 62 years ago, in an interview. This was called the strangest mountaineering accident in human history, and after an official investigation, it ended with death by unknown forces. Not only that, the Soviet Union also classified the investigation results of the incident as a state secret, and blocked the place of the incident for three years. In 2013, the incident was adapted into a pseudo-documentary "Tricky Mountain".
At the beginning of 1959, nine mountaineers from the Ural Technical Institute came to the Otolten Mountains, located in the northern part of the Ural Mountains. Their plan this time was to reach the summit and get a third-class mountaineering certificate issued by the Soviet Union (the highest level of mountaineering permit in the country at that time).
The altitude of the Outolten Mountain is not particularly high, only 1234.2 meters, but the high latitude makes it blessed with natural slopes, which attract many skiers. But it is not an ordinary snowy mountain, it is dangerous, and it can reach a low temperature of more than minus 40 degrees in winter, so it is at the most difficult level in the mountaineering difficulty index. And otorten" means "don't go" in the language of the indigenous Mansi, which means that it is dangerous, and strange things happen from time to time, and even people see UFOs there.
But these 9 staunch materialists do not seem to take these words to heart. Most of them were young people between the ages of 21 and 24, including two women, except for the temporary addition of Zorothalov, who was 37 years old (later according to investigations, this person was very suspicious). All of them have a second-class mountaineering certificate and extensive mountaineering and skiing experience, including Diatrov who has received professional training as a captain. But no one expected that such an experienced team would not get out of here alive. In fact, they were originally a team of 10 people, but the day before they entered the mountain, a team member named Yudin was unable to continue due to a rheumatoid arthritis attack and had to return to Yvejerly, making him the only survivor.
Before departure, the captain had made a promise with Yudin that he would come down from the mountain in about 2 weeks and send him and the school a telegram. But two weeks later, Yoddin in Yvesjelli still hasn't heard anything from the climbing team. On February 16, parents of other team members began to frequently contact the Ural Polytechnic Institute to ask about their families. After contacting Yudin, the school realized that the team members might have encountered some kind of emergency.
So on February 20, a rescue team organized by students and teachers of the Ural Technical Institute, guided by Yudin, went to the Otolten Mountains and began a carpet search along the route of the Diatlov team, and the police and military later sent helicopters to find the missing members.
First, we reconstruct their experiences before their death, based on the diary of Dyatlov that people later found and the photos from the cameras they carried with them.
The person in the photo is the young and experienced captain Diatlov. The photo was taken on January 23, 1959, and he was hastily packing his luggage in the club's activity room.
It was January 27, a clear day, and after a few days of rest and adaptation in the small town of Serov, the squad set off in the hay carriage of the local grandfather, who was in a good mood and even sang counter-revolutionary songs that would send them to prison. That night, they stayed in an abandoned village.
The next day, Yudin, who was unwell, said goodbye to his teammates. Captain Diatlov agreed with Yudin that the remaining nine would return around February 12, and if they were two days late, they would keep in touch with the school. So the nine set off, and that night they camped on the Loziva River, during which Grivoniřenko was dissatisfied with being named by others to sleep by the cooking stove and had a big fight with the team.
On January 31, the team reached the edge of the highlands, and further up there were steep hills, and the forest gradually became thinner. The team decided to set up a camp at the foot of the mountain, where the surplus supplies would be temporarily stored for the return journey.
On February 1, nine men traveled lightly, and they could only travel about 1.5 kilometers per hour.
On this day, a sudden snowstorm hit them, and because of the poor visibility, they lost their way and inadvertently climbed a mountain called Horat Shavor, which the locals call "the mountain of death", which seemed to foreshadow their fate afterwards.
After the deviation from the route, Captain Dyatlov made a perverse decision to have everyone camp on the hillside instead of heading to the woods at the foot of the mountain, 1.5 kilometers away. At half past five in the afternoon, the camp was set up, and around six or seven o'clock in the evening, the team members had dinner together, during which something happened, we don't know, and then one of the team members left the tent to urinate outside.
In the last photo of the night, everyone has a serious expression, and there seems to be a person hiding behind the table.
That's part of what diaries and photos can tell us, set on the evening of February 1st. Investigators also obtained several photos of UFOs and a dark shadow resembling snow monsters from the films of the team's cameras.
On February 26, the 25th day after the incident, the search and rescue team discovered the abandoned camp of the team on the slopes of the Horatschafort Mountain, 5 kilometers from the summit of the Otolten Mountains. A half-sloping tent remains.
The search and rescue team at the time recorded this: "The tent is located on the hillside at a height of 1,079 meters, 300 meters from the summit, and the slope is 18-20 degrees shallow. The tent entrance faces the passage, the tent is almost completely covered with snow, the entrance is open, and the sheets stick out as a floor. The tent facing the slope side was torn closer to the entrance. A fur coat sticks out from the tear. The part of the slope facing the slope was torn to pieces. There is a pair of bound skis in front of the entrance. Inside the entrance there is a stove, a wine cellar, a bucket, a saw, an axe. In the far corner of the tent are the map strip, Dyatlov's camera and Kormogolova's diary and money. To the right of the entrance are the regulations and two pairs of shoes, the other six pairs are located opposite. There are 3.5 pairs of fur snow boots in the middle of the tent. Near the dry bread there was a log brought from the former camp, packed at the bottom, cotton coats and blankets on top, some blankets were not arranged, and blankets were covered with warm clothes. Halfway through the entrance, dry bread was found scattered on blankets and fur.
These dry language descriptions are considered the most objective records, and it turns out that the tent was torn in two places, shoes and warm clothes were left inside, but the inside was empty. It can be seen that the situation when they escaped from the tent was very urgent, but they counted to 8 or 9 people on the snow measured in meters in thickness, and it was not difficult to judge according to the footprints, some of them were wearing only socks, some were wearing a shoe or a sock, and some were barefoot. Officials later claimed that the tent had been torn from the inside, and that they matched the footprints with the missing soldiers, believing that no outsiders had entered the camp and that there was no evidence of fighting. The direction of the footprints points to the forest below the hillside. The search and rescue team followed the footprints, but after 500 meters, the footprints disappeared.
The search and rescue team then carried out a meticulous search within a radius of footprints to where they disappeared. On March 2, they finally found two bodies under a tall cedar tree on the edge of the forest, which were later confirmed to be those of team members Grivonyhichenko and Doroshenko, both barefoot and almost naked in their close-fitting underwear and panties. In addition, there is an extinguished fire nearby. The cedar had branches broken, and the highest of the broken marks was 5 meters, which means that someone may have climbed a large tree at that time. Doroshenko had blood stains on his ears, nose and lips, bruises on his right armpit and right forearm, a burnt sole and hair on his right temple, scraped skin tissue on both hands, and gray discharge from his mouth.
Grivony Shichenko had multiple bruises on his body, the tip of his nose was missing, and there was a skin of his own fingers that had been bitten off his mouth, indicating that he was in a state of extreme pain at the time, and that his legs were burned, and the shin burns were 31×10 centimeters, which at first investigators thought he may have been burned by falling from a tree and falling into the fire, but the burn marks did not seem to show this. Combined with part of human skin tissue embedded in the bark of a broken branch, the medical examiner believes that he was most likely hung from a stick through his body and roasted on a fire, or that someone took a burning root from a campfire and burned him from the bottom up, causing him to climb up desperately.
Since 3 March, the search and rescue team has found three more bodies. Dyatlov, Kolmogorova and Slobuddin. They were 300 meters, 480 meters and 630 meters away from the tree, almost in a straight line. The posture of the body falling to the ground indicates that the three were trying to return to the camp when they died. It is worth noting that the medical examiner later found that Diatlov was missing a front tooth, with dried blood on his lip and some abrasions on his face, which they believed had hit the ground first, because his limbs were bound by handcuffs or ropes or the like, because the body had reddish-brown abrasions and dents on both ankles. He also had abrasions on the back of his hands and knuckles. Kolmogorova had bruises on her face and hands, and a bright red bruise 29 cm long and 6 cm wide in the waist area, presumably caused by sticks. Taken together, there was a fight. Although Slobodin had swollen lips, bruises on his left eye and hands, and a gap in his skull 6 cm long and 1 cm deep, there was internal bleeding, presumably caused by a blunt object, the medical examiner decided that it was not fatal enough.
Later, after the autopsy of the remains, it was found that all five people had 3 to 4 degrees of frostbite, about 6-8 hours after the last meal, and the corpse had internal bleeding, abrasions, scratches, coagulation, and more interestingly, at that time, the official declared that there were no scars on the body.
Two months later, as the snow began to melt, a Mancy hound found some clothing half-buried in the snow. After police investigation, it belonged to the four missing team members, and the bodies of the other missing team members were later found in the forest valley 75 meters away from the cedar tree. They were all lying almost in the same position, covered in snow up to four meters thick.
Contrary to expectations, none of the four people froze to death, but were fatally injured. Chipobri has a break behind the ear, the neck is twisted and deformed, the skull is ruptured, Kolevatov has a lighter injury, the frontal bone is burst, there is a bruise on the upper lip, Zorotalov's eyeball is missing, the five ribs on the right chest are completely broken, Dubinina died in the most terrifying state, she died on a large rock in a kneeling position, her ribs were regularly broken and she lost her eyeballs, and her nose collapsed deep into her skull, the strangest thing is that her tongue has disappeared, and her stomach contains about a hundred grams of blood, That is to say, her tongue was most likely forced out of her mouth during her lifetime. All four were severely injured, but officials claimed that the soft tissues of the body, including skin, muscles, blood vessels, etc. - did not have any serious damage. For example, if a person's leg is broken by a stick or something, not only will there be a fracture, but also a certain tear in the muscle, a rupture of blood vessels, and so on. However, on the remains of the four climbers, the medical examiner found only broken bones, but no severe muscle tears and subcutaneous bleeding.
In addition, Dubinina's leatherette jacket and hat were worn by Zorotaliav, while Dubinina's feet were wrapped in a piece of Kolmogorova's woolen pants. Adding to the mystery of the incident, the researchers analyzed a large amount of radioactive residue from the clothing of three of the four bodies, the lowest of which was also DPM (decay) 5,000 times, almost as strong as once carried directly in a pocket. And some metal fragments were also found around.
Here are a few widely circulated conjectures about the Dyatlov affair
It is speculated that one was killed by the local Mansi people
In 1930, a female geographer was brutally murdered for breaking into the sacred site of the Mansi, the indigenous people of the Ural Mountains. Some believe that the Mansi sent hunting dogs to force the climbing party out of the tent, starving them and killing them one by one. And cutting off the invaders' tongues is also in line with Mansi customs. However, follow-up investigation data showed that the "Mountain of Death" was not a sacred place for the Mansi. It is unlikely that the serious injuries on the mountaineers were caused by humans, because such a force is equivalent to the impact of a high-speed car, and according to the locals, the Mansi only hunt there in the summer (around May), and when it snows, they hide in the forest. And afterwards, they also took the initiative to participate in the search and rescue operation.
Guess 2 - Mistakenly entering a military restricted zone
Because the location of the incident happened to be in the path from the Baikonur Cosmodrome (the main nuclear test site of the Soviet Union) to Novaya Zemlya, and witnesses saw a mysterious fire in the air that night, most likely the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile. And the orange glowing objects in the air in the players' camera rolls. As well as the large number of metal fragments left at the scene, this seems to be corroborated, which is why their skin color was seen orange and their hair gray when they were buried. The radioactive material remaining on the clothes also shows that there are indeed nuclear tests in the local area. It is believed that the missile accidentally killed some of the team members, after which the military took some measures against the remaining living mouths. However, no traces of the explosion were found in the area around Mount Havor in Horat.
Guess three - the snowman kills and says
This is a curious conjecture, but it is not a rhetoric. Because they really saw in Zorotalov's camera a tall snowman-like monster hiding behind a pine tree. And a female team member's diary also recorded such a sentence, "It really exists." Some people think that this monster has been following them from a distance since some time, and later the team discovered it, which may explain why they camped on a relatively open slope at that time, because the snowman was hiding in the woods, they did not dare to enter, such terrain in addition to running away with them, but also good observation from inside the torn tent. In the middle of the night, the snowman was frightened by the sound of missiles passing by the place and began to attack the team members, so frightened that the team members fled from the tent in a hurry, so that some of the team members were frozen to death, and some of the team members were brutally killed by the snowman, who gouged out their eyes and pulled out the tongue of the female team members. But that doesn't seem to explain why the four crew members had no skin trauma and radioactive residue on their clothes, and no snowman footprints were found at the scene.
Guess 4 – Mistaken for an avalanche
The noise from the low-altitude flight of Soviet MiG jet fighters who were doing night training that night was mistaken by the team members for the sound of an avalanche. This also explains the fact that another group of climbers saw a bright light over the site of the incident. And the noise emitted by this Soviet jet fighter is indeed somewhat similar to an avalanche. After hearing these strange sounds, the team members hurriedly escaped from the tent, and before they had time to get dressed, the five were frozen to death one after another. The survivors pulled out the victims' clothes to keep warm and continued to search for the camp, until a real avalanche appeared, and the remaining four fell into a deep ditch and eventually died. And the disappearance of tongues and eyeballs is most likely caused by nearby scavengers. However, people who died in avalanches usually died of suffocation, and it is difficult for avalanches to cause such serious internal injuries.
Seeing that everyone here is also very confused like me, there are too many doubts about this matter. It seems that every reasonable explanation will soon be overturned by new evidence.
So what really happened to them at that time, we consulted a lot of materials as well as documentaries and interviews made in the Soviet Union at that time. Came to an amazing conclusion, subverting the final result given by almost every other blogger, follow me in the next issue we will be infinitely closer to the truth of the Dyatlov affair.