Why Can Nobody Solve the Mystery of Dyatlov Pass?

this video is kindly sponsored by the morning brew the free daily newsletter hey 42 here nature is a dangerous place that's why i haven't left this room for the last eight years wild animals extreme weather poisonous plants bacteria those people from the movie deliverance there's basically an endless list of things out there queuing up to kill maim or eat you so when i heard this story about a bunch of hikers who died in the russian wilderness during a winter storm i just shook my head gently and continued sipping my cup of self-righteous tea russia wilderness winter what could go wrong right but this was no ordinary case of a camping trip gone awry the death love pass incident as this misadventure has come to be known is one of the most enduring mysteries of our times and we still don't know for sure what happened 60 years ago on the slopes of death mountain even though some scientists believe they have the answer if you get lost in the russian wilderness then you'll want to have 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you're interested in business tech or finance like i am there's really no reason not to subscribe to the morning brew it's completely free and takes less than 15 seconds and to make it even easier you can just go ahead and click the link in the description to subscribe today it was january 1959 and a group of 10 hikers mostly students at the oral polytechnic institute in western russia set off on their idea of a winter break a hike over the oral mountains a 2500 kilometer range that separates asia from europe the expedition was led by 23 year old igor diatlov an experienced mountaineer who knew how to handle himself in the frozen insanity that russians like to call winter he and every other person in the group was a grade two hiker with ski tour experience and when they returned from their trip they were to be awarded their grade free certification the highest available in russia at the time so not exactly a bunch of amateurs out for a weekend stroll their expedition was planned to last about three weeks reaching a torton mountain a peak not too far south of the arctic circle but none of them would make it back alive well apart from one because he had a funny leg but we'll get to that in a minute the group traveled as far north as was possible by train reaching the town of ivdel in the northern soviet province oxford lost oblast on the 25th of january 1959. from there they caught a bus to a place called vizhai followed by a lorry to a logging base called the 41st settlement beyond that lay an inhospitable winter wasteland populated only by wild animals white walkers and indigenous tribes people known as the mansi after a night's rest the intrepid explorers set off hiking and skiing as they followed the auspia river into the mountains one of the group members an economic student named yuri udin had to turn back due to joint pain induced by his rheumatism but the others continued along the trail never to be heard from again igor the team leader had promised to send a telegram when they arrived safely back in civilization probably around the 12th of february when no message arrived people didn't make much of it it wasn't uncommon for these types of trips to take a little longer than expected but a week later there was still no news and the hikers families called for a search a volunteer group of fellow students went to the region to look for the missing hikers followed by the police and later the military on the 26th of february members of the search party discovered the hikers tent on the slopes of kolatsayakul named by the local mansi people it delightfully translates as death mountain the tent was covered in snow and appeared to have been cut open from the inside out nine sets of footprints led down the mountain to a forest about one and a half kilometers away some prints showed people wearing shoes others socks and the remainder were wearing no shoes at all suggesting they needed to escape the tent in a hurry the same uneasy thoughts swept over the entire search party and no it wasn't did someone just let off a killer fart inside the tent that question was why at the edge of the forest the searchers found two bodies lying next to the remains of a small fire yuri dorichenko and yuri krivanashenko both men were shoeless dressed only in their underwear their hands and feet were badly burnt and quivanashenko had bitten off a piece of his own knuckle then in a landscape thick with snow and temperatures of minus 35 degrees celsius it would take another three months to locate the remaining bodies three of them were discovered between the edge of the forest and the tent igor diatlov the group leader zineda kolmogorova one of the only two women in the party and rustom sloboden kalmar gorova had a long red bruise along the right side of her body as if she'd been hit by a cylindrical object slobodyn had a small fracture in his skull from the position of their bodies it seemed all three may have been trying to climb back up the hill towards their tent only in may two months later did the snow fall sufficiently revealing the other four bodies ludmila dubanina alexander zolotariov nikolai tibo brigno and alexander kolovatov they were discovered in a ravine on the other side of the woods a legal inquest opened immediately after the first five bodies had been found determined the hikers had all died from hypothermia but that changed when the last four bodies were examined two of them had major chest fractures whilst one had major skull damage they were also found wearing an odd mix of cloves ludmila dobbinina's foot was wrapped in a piece of the trousers belonging to yori kravonoshenko one of the men found next to the campfire whilst semyon zolotaryov was found wearing dubba nina's hat and coat dubba nina was missing her tongue eyes and part of her lips while zola tayoff was missing his eyeballs kolavatov had a wound behind his ear and an oddly twisted neck he also had no eyebrows the big question was what had happened usually missing eyebrows would be easy to explain put any bunch of students in a tent with vodka and it's only a matter of time before someone loses a drinking game and forfeits his eyebrows to a razor but the only booze the group had was a small flask of medicinal alcohol besides even if they did have vodka it wouldn't explain the other details of this mystery in the six decades since the incident there have been more than 75 theories about the circumstances that led to the deaths of these nine hikers some people blame the yeti which is simply an abominable idea besides the only footprints discovered on the mountain belong to the hikers and none of them had a particularly big foot another popular suggestion is that this was all the doing of aliens partly because there were reports of golden lights in the sky that night and partly because aliens get blamed for just about everything humans don't have an answer for including the disappearance of my nan's watering cam at one stage the leading suspects in the investigation were members of the mansi tribe known to be peaceful reindeer herders who generally kept to themselves it was thought that perhaps the hikers had crossed onto land sacred to the mansi and paid the ultimate price but this didn't make sense because others had crossed that land before without trouble and as you know by now the only footprints found belonged to the hikers also the coroner confirmed that the injuries sustained by the four hikers in the ravine were too severe to have been caused by humans so it couldn't have been the mansi as a result the investigators cleared the mansi of culpability but not all suspicions faded over the years a book was published in 2015 that reintroduced the sacred land hypothesis saying the mansi hunters may have been high on magic mushrooms and lost their mind when the trekking party suddenly strayed onto their land the russian government closed the investigation into the mata only a few weeks after the final bodies were found with no clear explanation to offer the authorities simply concluded that the deaths were caused by a spontaneous power of nature before marking the files classified and locking them away they may just as well have said this was the work of naughty unicorns and if you don't like that answer please call the kgb these actions have been cited as examples of generally suspicious behavior by the russian authorities that's a new one and conspiracy theories about a potential cover-up are abound the local prosecutor lev ivanov was the first person to investigate the case and led the official inquest in 1959 after initially being extremely focused on the investigation ivanov suddenly withdrew his interest and closed the case apparently under pressure from his superiors then he didn't speak about the event for 30 years until 1990 when he admitted he'd been silenced by the authorities forced to suppress reports of fiery objects in the sky and strange autopsy results from the victims of the disaster when those autopsies were done in the nearest town the medical facility was surrounded by kgb offices not police and a large barrel of alcohol was delivered to the premises some think as a way for the forensics team to help protect themselves against radiation radiation had been found on some of the clothing at the scene in the mountains and the area was scanned with a geiger counter to check for radioactive contamination which is not exactly the usual way to handle a search and rescue mission this weirdness has spawned rumors that the hikers were victims of secret weapons testing and that the government hushed everything up to hide their tracks the soviet military was known to be testing parachute mines in the area around that time these bombs explode in the air which would explain the balls of fire described by eyewitnesses and would also explain the injuries suffered by the students the missing body parts on some of the bodies could then be down to scavenging wild animals as for the people who were half dressed there's an outside chance this was due to paradoxical undressing a strange phenomenon that occurs when people develop hypothermia suddenly they feel incredibly warm and have the need to take their clothes off where i come from we call that something quite different when the soviet regime finally collapsed in the 90s the files belonging to the prosecutor ivanov and the rest of the establishment were released sparking a massive surge in interest around the death loft incident as a result of public pressure and the need to respond to cray-cray conspiracy theories the russian government reopened the case in 2019 but was only willing to investigate three possible outcomes an avalanche a slab avalanche or a hurricane criminal action was excluded as a possibility because you know weather never breaks the law though wind speeds on the night in question would have reached hurricane force the probability of a hurricane causing the incident was eventually ruled out but there have been some pretty innovative ideas about how wind could have caused a disaster catabotic winds which are winds caused by cold air rushing down slopes due to gravity can sometimes reach hurricane speeds though this is rare a strong catabolic wind would theoretically have forced the climbers out of their tent and sent them downhill seeking shelter another theory is that strong winds moving around the mountain created extremely low frequency sounds called infrasound which is known to cause panic attacks in humans the discomfort and distress might have driven the hikers to escape in the dark in both scenarios the rest of the details of the scene are explained away by hyperthermia and the last four people falling to their death into a ravine in 2020 russian authorities announced the official cause of death to be an avalanche this conclusion met a number of criticisms especially since the report lacked any clear explanation for how the avalanche happened there were no conventional signs of an avalanche at the scene and an assessment of the terrain using more advanced technology showed an avalanche to be extremely unlikely the group had cut their camping site into a slope that didn't seem steep enough to cause an avalanche and there was no snow on the night of the event so there couldn't have been more snow weight to trigger a collapse of the slope the footprints leading away from the tent indicated nine people walking down the hill not running in panic and hikers with their level of experience would have been very unlikely to camp anywhere near the potential path of an avalanche the climber's injuries also didn't match up with typical avalanche injuries most strangely for an avalanche though there was a nine hour gap between the group cutting into the snow to set up camp and the point at which they escaped the tent usually in avalanche would start soon after the snow bank had been disturbed recently though two scientists in switzerland alexander pushrin and johann gum seem to have solved the puzzle of what happens that dark night in 1959 they used computer software originally developed for the disney movie frozen to simulate various possibilities concluding that it was a rare type of avalanche that had forced the hikers to let it go let it go they learned that the slope was not actually so shallow after all and that it was totally possible for a slab of heavy snow to slide down the mountain and land on the tent the snow slab itself wouldn't have needed to be particularly large but the weight of the snow could have done serious damage in the 70s general motors ran a range of tests on a hundred cadavers to see what happened to the bodies in simulated car crashes the results were used to design car safety belts but puzzle puzrin angum used the data to understand what would happen when the force from a massive weight landed on a human body they discovered that when a person is pushed against a rigid structure the force could create internal injuries similar to those suffered by the hikers that night the hikers would have been sleeping on their skis so when the snow slabs landed on top of them it would have crushed them causing chest fractures and skull fractures that would have badly wounded the climbers but not immediately killed them the avalanche would have forced them out of the tent and down the slope where they would have hoped to be safer from further avalanches this new study seems to offer a plausible explanation for what first went wrong that night in february 1959 but it can't explain the bizarre events that unfolded afterwards it doesn't provide an answer for lights in the sky or radiation on people's clothes or missing eyebrows but these questions will probably forever remain shrouded in mystery thanks for watching

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 1,108,558

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Id: zKTOMQNAL44

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021