I watched Lemmino's mini documentary on the subject and can only recommend it [1]. He spent a month going through the Russian original evidence and is surprised why it is still considered an "unresolved mystery".
Some take-aways that I remember:
* They had a self-made, wood-fired oven in the tent, which had already burned one of the hikers a couple of days before (documented in a picture) and could have malfunctioned, leading to the burn marks and them having to abandon the tent (including slashing it open)
* Radioactivity: Both hikers that had traces worked previously in a nuclear facility.
* Missing organs: Exactly what you would expect from scavenging animals.
* Missing clothes: Exactly what is expected when dying from hypothermia.
* Bodily injuries: Suspected avalanche.
* Glowing orange spheres: Possibly space debris, a meteor or nuclear testing. In any case, no immediate connection to the accident.
And alcohol. There is precious little inquiry as to how much alcohol was present at the campsite. Some of the strange behaviors make more sense if one is open to the possibility that some people may have been drunk.
> There were no drugs present and the only alcohol was a small flask of medicinal alcohol, found intact at the scene. The group had even sworn off cigarettes for the expedition.
Loved that video. The avalanche theory still has some explanatory power as the proximate cause of the first point, although Lemmino points out how crappy the design of the stove was in the first place IIRC.
Still no explanation about the "numerous unexplained observations. While hypothermia was determined to be the main cause of death, four hikers had severe thorax or skull injuries, two were found with missing eyes and one without tongue; some were almost naked and barefoot, traces of radioactivity were found on some of their clothes, and signs of glowing orange spheres floating in the sky were reported that night"
People taking off their clothes is common with severe hypothermia. Lacerations and blunt trauma is common for avalanche victims. The soft/detachable parts (eyes, tongue) can be still eaten by scavengers while frozen.
So the only unusual part would be the radioactivity, strange lights, and what triggered the avalanche. Which could all be explained by some classified military test.
The two people in the group with radioactive clothing worked in
a nuclear facility.
As another commenter pointed out, the YT channel Lemmino made an
excellent video with research based on the primary sources, and
the conclusion is, unsurprisingly, not aliens. When all the
facts are considered, the whole incident is probably only
still considered mysterious because it makes a better story.
Some of them may also have been sleeping nude or nearly so, particularly if their clothes were damp. At least, that's the cold weather camping advice I've received. Maybe they did things differently.
A somewhat detailed explanation with pictures of the injuries of each body found [0]. The info that Dubinina's tongue seems to had been _removed_ while still allegedly alive seems a bit odd to me.
The site was created by web designer and mountain hiker Teodora Hadjiyska [1].
never seen this website before. impressive, that all docs, photos are there. also quite useful, that according to med examination someone made pictures with all the injuries.
i personally believe in the most simple explanation. no conspiracy, no supernatural.
Why are you downvoted? This is not at all a simple theory. It’s interesting but it defies the Occam’s razor principle. It would involve a very specific combination of natural events. So-called skeptics will spend their lives trying to explain very strange things with everyday normal causes such as « swamp gas » or « reflection on the windshield » when obviously a larger curiosity and openness of mind would be required.
Take a closer look at roadkill the next few times you see it. You'll often notice the eyes, tongue, etc are missing. Sometimes the corpse will look like a skeleton with skin but no organs.
These are circumstances commonly attributed to aliens or cuppracabra attacking cattle. However it's very common in roadkill when you start to look for it. It's pretty mundane, though I understand some people will find it startling the first time they see or hear of it.
The „conspiracy theorists“ often seem to dismiss multi-factor explanations. When in fact they may be rare when you calculate for a single event, but if you consider how many events are happening across the globe it’s just not that improbable that a medial sensation was in fact the result of an - individually unlikely - chain of events
When George Mallory was found on Everest, scavengers had eaten his internal organs from one hole in his (frozen) skin. He was like a human-shaped shell.
What scavengers would that be? No small animal capable of doing that is known to be able to survive at that height. small number of birds can fly that high, that's about it.
"ossifrage" is interesting to see in a sentence because the word appeared in a famous 1977 RSA cryptographic challenge with the solution "The magic words are squeamish ossifrage". The challenge appeared in Martin Gardner's Scientific American column and took 17 years to break.
Occam's razor does not actually mean the simplest explanation is correct. If that was the case you could explain anything with "a wizard did it." Occam's razor says that if you have 2 possible explanations, but one adds unnecessary clauses, the one with only the necessary clauses is more likely right.
For example, two explanations:
1. There was an avalanche and birds ate the soft tissue
2. There was an avalanche, birds ate the soft tissue, and Mars was in retrograde
Occam's razor tells you the first explanation is more likely to be correct. It does not tell you 4 or 5 natural events occurring can't be the best explanation if there isn't a more parsimonious alternative explanation.
“I’m absolutely convinced that the tragedy was the result of wind and snow deposition, and the fact that they pitched camp in the lee of a ridge,” Wilkinson adds. “I’ve made this mistake in my mountaineering career more than once.” During an expedition to Antarctica in 2012, tents belonging to Wilkinson’s team were pitched inside a circle of wind-deflecting snow walls they made. Returning to camp after three days, his team found that two tents tucked in the wind-shielded wall were completely buried."
I and two friends made exactly that mistake too.. the only difference is that we didn't leave the tent, we just observed how, instead of being shielded from the wind, we got more and more buried! After two days we dug out and moved away. We were young then. A mistake we never repeated. A small slightly sloping snow wall no higher than two or three inches works, a higher wall looks like it would work better.. big mistake.
A local guide told me one of the scientific versions, which is common among local experts. It is quite simple: the missile test scared a herd of reindeer and they ran along a path known to them, which passed through the tent. The Russian authorities even now cannot disclose information about the tests, because those who launched the missiles are still alive and have high ranks (and if the information is disclosed, these military personnel would have to be jailed for causing death by negligence). The Mansi wouldn't tell about the reindeer because they were afraid they would be exterminated. That's where the science ends, the rest is just the tour guide's thoughts.
Also, the tour guide said that Dyatlov's group was not an exploratory group, but just a few students going on a hike. It was known about the snowstorm in advance, but for some reason it was still decided to go on, rather than wait out the good weather. Another important factor was that the group had left warm clothes for the return trip, so those who got out of the tent just froze.
Sorry if there are mistakes, I used DeepL.
I don't know Russian law, but the idea a missile test has to be kept secret because some reindeer got spooked and the spooked reindeer trampled some people and senior military officials would go to jail for it sounds very much like an urban legend.
I think death is not the only factor. The tests were conducted in an open area, the territory of Novaya Zemlya still has an elevated radiation background, and the winds bring it all to Western Siberia and the Urals. People live there, and if government disclose the information, they will have to pay compensation, which is a very decent amount of money. You may also have to disclose the location of active bases. Military secrecy is a case where what seems like a trifle can actually have huge consequences and it is easier to hide everything.
In any case, it has little to do with the incident, since herd of reindeer might have been spooked by something other than a rocket, or they might have just been wandering the usual road for no reason. The theory as a whole may be wrong, but the important fact is that there are even several scientific versions. This should put those who talk with a serious face about Yeti and UFOs in their place.
Wouldn't the tent have been damaged had the avalanche actually caused such severe bodily injuries? From what I remember, the tent only had a knife cut in it, done from the inside.
What the actual schnitzel National Geographic! 289 HTTP requests, 12.53 MB / 4.77 MB transferred, Finish: 2.47 min. The article has litteraly 2 pictures. This is insane. I just added the domain to my pi-hole.
The book "Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident" goes into this.
IIRC, an avalanche as an explanation was rejected.
The conclusion was something like a harmonic wind incident. This caused the hikers to be highly uncomfortable and disoriented, so they left the tent and later died in the confusion.
Yes, but the dupe detector is weak, so articles can be resubmitted after some time when they didn't get enough traction. The rues are not very clear (How much time? How many upvotes? How many comments?), it's art of the secret sauce and perhaps the mods change the details from time to time.
So, here we usually link the previous submission if it has a lot of upvotes or comments. But in this had one upvote and one comment (and the URL is wrong?), that is clearly too few.
As always, there are exceptions, when the previous post has a very good comment. I like to link to the comment and perhaps copy a small part.
I still wonder how could nine experienced hikers decide to flee without clothes in extreme weather conditions for about a mile after a visually relatively small avalanche.
In the Dyatlov group there was a real "liquidator" of a nuclear disaster Kystym-57 (the 2nd worst in history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster) https://dyatlovpass.com/yuri-krivonischenko - an engineer at the USSR version of Hanford. Later he tried to resign very disgruntled from his job, and instead they reassigned him to the most polluted site. Given the level of secrecy back then, especially considering that it was a weapon plutonium facility, and what he may have known and what shape his disgruntlement may have taken... so i wouldn't be surprised if the issue was taken care about in this way of "accident" (people were killed for less - for example in 1962 USSR shot a peaceful demonstration of regular workers in Novocherkassk who wanted better living conditions, and that was much less important than anything related to nuclear weapons in those years)
add to that that his father was a big boss in the industry at the time, so they couldn't apply openly all the harshness that would be applied otherwise.
Some take-aways that I remember:
* They had a self-made, wood-fired oven in the tent, which had already burned one of the hikers a couple of days before (documented in a picture) and could have malfunctioned, leading to the burn marks and them having to abandon the tent (including slashing it open)
* Radioactivity: Both hikers that had traces worked previously in a nuclear facility.
* Missing organs: Exactly what you would expect from scavenging animals.
* Missing clothes: Exactly what is expected when dying from hypothermia.
* Bodily injuries: Suspected avalanche.
* Glowing orange spheres: Possibly space debris, a meteor or nuclear testing. In any case, no immediate connection to the accident.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RigxxiilI (conclusion from 12:42)
edit: formatting