” The Dyatlov Pass Incident ” I A Mysterious Tragedy – Bizarre Buffet Podcast
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The Dyatlov Pass incident (Russian: гибель тургруппы Дятлова, lit. ’The Dyatlov Group demise’) 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 from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, led by Igor Dyatlov, had established a camp on the eastern slopes of Kholat Syakhl. During the night, something caused them to cut their way out of their tent and flee the campsite while inadequately dressed for the heavy snowfall and subzero temperatures.
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The Dyatlov Pass Incident – Episode Details
Episode Story Concept By Jen Wilson
Original Episode Art By Mark Tauriello
Production By Marc Bluestein
Hosted By Mark Tauriello, Jen Wilson, & Marc Bluestein
S2E40
Released On August 9th, 2021
The Dyatlov Pass Incident – Episode Show Notes
Igor Dyatlov
- Tinker, engineer, inventor, and lover of the wilderness.
- He was an engineer student at UPI → Ural Polytechnic Institute. One of the leading technical universities in the Soviet Union Turned out topflight engineers to work in the nuclear-power and weapons industries, communications, and military engineering.
- During his years there, Dyatlov led a number of arduous wilderness trips, often using outdoor equipment that he had invented or improved on.
- In 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik (the first artificial earth satellite), he created a telescope so that he and his friends could watch the satellite travel across the night sky.
- This was also a time in Soviet Russia where the economic growth was robust and the standard of living was rising.
Igor Dyatlovs Proposal
- In 1958, Dyatlov began planning a winter expedition that would exemplify the boldness and vigor of the new Soviet Union.
- It was a 16 day cross country ski trip in the Ural Mountains. It was the north-south mountain range that divides western Russia from Siberia, and thus Europe from Asia.
- Dyatlov’s itinerary lay three hundred and fifty miles north of Sverdlovsk, in the traditional territory of the Mansi, an indigenous people. His group would ski two hundred miles, on a route that no Russian, as far as anyone knew, had taken before.
- The mountains were gentle and rounded, their barren slopes rising from a vast boreal forest of birch and fir. The challenge wouldn’t be rugged terrain but brutally cold temperatures, deep snow, and high winds.
Who Was On The Trip?
- Dyatlov recruited his classmates, and recent graduates. There was a total of 10 including Dyatlov.
- They were among the élite of Soviet youth and all highly experienced winter campers and cross-country skiers.
The List Of People On The Trip
- Zina Kolmogorova 22 year old female and fellow classmate.
- Georgy Krivonishchenko, 23 year old male a close friend who had graduated from U.P.I. two years before and worked as an engineer at the Mayak nuclear complex.
- Rustem Slobodin 23 year old male and recent graduate.
- Nikolay Thibault-Brignoles, 23 year old male of French descent, whose father had been worked nearly to death in one of Stalin’s camps.
- Yuri Yudin – 21 male
- Yuri Doroshenk 21 year old male.
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- Aleksandr Kolevatov 24 year old male.
- Lyuda Dubinina, The youngest of the crew at 20 years old. an economics major, a track athlete, and an ardent Communist, who wore her long blond hair in braids tied with silk ribbons. On a previous wilderness outing, Dubinina had been accidentally shot by a hunter, and survived—quite cheerfully, it was said—a fifty-mile journey back to civilization.
- Semyon Zolotaryov, a thirty-seven-year-old veteran of the Second World War with an old-fashioned mustache, stainless-steel crowns on his teeth, and tattoos. He was brought on couple of days before the group was due to set off, the U.P.I. administration unexpectedly added a new member, much older than the others and largely unknown to them.
The Trip Begins !
- The party left by train on January 23rd, 1959.
- Several of them hid under seats to avoid buying tickets. They were in high spirits—so high that on a layover between trains Krivonishchenko was briefly detained by police for playing his mandolin and pretending to panhandle in the train station.
- We know these details because there was a communal journal, and many of the skiers also kept personal journals. At least five had cameras, and the pictures they took show a lively and strikingly handsome group of young people having the adventure of their lives—skiing, laughing, playing in the snow, and mugging for the camera.
- After two days on trains, the party reached Ivdel, a remote town with a Stalin-era prison camp that, by then, held mostly criminals.
- From there the group travelled another day by bus, then in the back of a woodcutter’s truck, and finally by ski, guided by a horse-drawn sleigh.
- They slept in an abandoned logging camp called Second Northern.
Yuri Yudin Leaves The Expedition
- There Yuri Yudin had a flareup of sciatica that forced him to pull out of the trip. The next day, January 28th, he turned back, while the remaining nine set off toward the mountains. The plan was to end up at the tiny village of Vizhai around February 12th, and telegram the U.P.I. sports club that they had arrived safely. The expected telegram never came.
What Happened !?
- It was assumed that the group had been held up due to heavy wind and snow storms. Several days passed, and the families began to worry.
Dyatlov Pass Search Party Begins
- February 20th a search party began. It included student volunteers from UPI, prison guards, Mansi hunters, local police, and the military deployed planes and helicopters.
What Was Discovered At Dyatlov Pass
- On February 25th, students found ski tracks.
- The following day they discovered the skiers tent above a treeline that Soviet officials referred to as Height 1079 and the Mansi called Dead mountain.There was no one inside the tent.
- The tent was partly collapsed and largely buried in snow. After digging it out, the search party saw that the tent appeared to have been deliberately slashed in several places.
- Yet, inside, everything was neat and orderly. The skiers’ boots, axes, and other equipment were arranged on either side of the door. Food was laid out as if about to be eaten; there was a stack of wood for a heating stove, and clothes, cameras, and journals.
- About a hundred feet downhill, the search party found “very distinct” footprints of eight or nine people, walking (not running) toward the tree line. Almost all the prints were of stockinged feet, some even bare. One person appeared to be wearing a single ski boot. “Some of the prints indicated that the person was either barefoot or in socks because you could see the toes,” a searcher later testified. The party followed the prints downhill for six to seven hundred yards, until they vanished near the tree line.
The Aftermath
- The next morning, searchers found the bodies of the mandolin player Krivonishchenko and the student Doroshenko under a tall cedar tree at the edge of the forest. They were lying next to a dead fire, wearing only underwear. Twelve to fifteen feet up the tree were some recently broken branches, and on the trunk bits of skin and torn clothes were found.
- Later that day, a search party discovered the bodies of Dyatlov and Kolmogorova. Both were farther up the slope, facing in the direction of the tent, their fists tightly clenched. They seemed to have been trying to get back there.
- The four bodies were autopsied, while the search for the others continued. The medical examiner noted a number of bizarre features. Krivonishchenko had blackened fingers and third-degree burns on a shin and a foot. Inside his mouth was a chunk of flesh that he had bitten off his right hand.
- Doroshenko’s body had burned hair on one side of the head and a charred sock. All the bodies were covered with bruises, abrasions, scratches, and cuts, as was a fifth body, that of the recent graduate Slobodin, which was discovered a few days later.
- Like Dyatlov and Kolmogorova, Slobodin was on the slope leading back to the tent, with a sock on one foot and a felt bootie on the other; his autopsy noted a minor fracture to his skull.
The Professionals Step In
Toxicology Reports / Seamstress Makes A Bizarre Discovery
- Toxicology tests were done, witness testimony taken, diagrams and maps made of the scene, and evidence gathered and forensically analyzed. The tent and its contents were helicoptered out of the mountains and set up again inside a police station. This led to a key discovery: a seamstress who came to the station to do a uniform fitting happened to notice that the slashes in the tent had been made from the inside.
- Something had happened that induced the skiers to cut their way out of the tent and flee into the night, into a howling blizzard, in twenty-below-zero temperatures, in bare feet or socks. They were not novices to the winter mountains; they would have been acutely aware of the fatal consequences of leaving the tent half dressed in those conditions. This is the central, and apparently inexplicable, mystery of the incident.
Four Bodies Are Still Missing, Soon To Be Discovered
- A Mansi hunter and his dog came across the remains of a makeshift snow den in the woods, two hundred and fifty feet from the cedar tree.
- A floor of branches laid in a deep hole in the snow. Pieces of tattered clothing were found strewn about: black cotton sweatpants with the right leg cut off, the left half of a woman’s sweater.
- Another search team arrived and, using avalanche probes around the den, they brought up a piece of flesh. Excavation uncovered the four remaining victims, lying together in a rocky streambed under at least ten feet of snow.
More Autopsie Discoveries
- The autopsies revealed catastrophic injuries to three of them. One’s skull was fractured so severely that pieces of bone had been driven into the brain. Two had crushed chests with multiple broken ribs, and the autopsy report noted a massive hemorrhage in the right ventricle one of their Dubinina’s hearts. The medical examiner said the damage was similar to what is typically seen as the “result of an impact of an automobile moving at high speed.” Yet none of the bodies had external penetrating wounds, though Zolotaryov’s was missing his eyes, and Dubinina’s was missing its eyes, tongue, and part of the upper lip.
- A careful inventory of clothing recovered from the bodies revealed that some of these victims were wearing clothes taken or cut off the bodies of others, and a laboratory found that several items emitted unnaturally high levels of radiation. A radiological expert testified that, because the bodies had been exposed to running water for months, these levels of radiation must originally have been “many times greater.”
The Dyatlov Pass Investigation Closes
- On May 28th, The investigation was closed. It was to determine whether a crime had been committed, not to clarify what had happened, and he concluded that homicide was not a factor.The report was ended with a non-explanation that has bedevilled Dyatlov researchers ever since: “It should be concluded that the cause of the hikers’ demise was an overwhelming force, which they were not able to overcome.”
No One Held Accountable In Dyatlov Pass Deaths
In classic Soviet style, a number of officials who had little to do with the tragedy were either punished or fired, including the director of U.P.I. and the chairman of its sports club, the local Communist Party secretary, the chairmen of two workers’ unions, and a union inspector.
Dyatlov Pass Evidence
The investigative files, photographs, and journals were classified and the area around Dead Mountain was placed off limits to skiers and outdoor enthusiasts for years. The tent was stored but eventually became moldy and had to be thrown out. The saddle in the mountains which the skiers were heading for but never reached was named the Dyatlov Pass.
Dyatlov Pass – The Victims Families
The victims’ families were left deeply dissatisfied. Many of them wrote to officials, including Khrushchev, demanding a more thorough investigation. But nothing more was done, and the mysterious deaths of the nine skiers subsided into relative obscurity.
Dyatlov Pass Conspiracy Theories – ” The Enigma Of The Fireballs “
n 1990, the prosecutor Ivanov, who had retired, published an article in which he claimed that, while compiling his 1959 report, he’d been pressured not to include his views on what happened.
The article, titled “The Enigma of the Fireballs,” said that the skiers had been killed by heat rays or balls of fire associated with U.F.O.s. In his original examination of the scene, Ivanov had found trees with unusual burn marks, which “confirmed that some kind of heat ray, say, or a powerful force whose nature is completely unknown (to us, at least) acted selectively on specific objects”—in this case, people.
The last photograph in Krivonishchenko’s camera showed flares and streaks of light against a black background.
Dyatlov Pass K.G.B Theory
The K.G.B. theory centers on Zolotaryov, the man who was foisted on the group at the last minute. A book published in Russia claims that he and two other skiers were K.G.B. agents on an assignment to meet with a group of C.I.A. operatives, to furnish them with deliberately misleading information.
Samples of clothing contaminated by radioactive isotopes were to be offered as bait; the C.I.A. agents discovered the deception, killed them, and staged the scene.
It is certainly possible that Zolotaryov had a K.G.B. link. His service record in the Second World War had holes and inconsistencies, and his sudden inclusion certainly seems suspicious. Still, a K.G.B. connection, even if proved, wouldn’t mean much; many people were low-level informants at the time. And the idea that the C.I.A. would have chosen a place like Dead Mountain for a rendezvous strains credulity.
Dyatlov Pass Yetti Theory
By far the most entertaining theory is that the party was attacked by a yeti.
The final photograph found in Thibault-Brignoles’s camera has become famous: a dark figure advancing through the snowy forest, hunched and menacing, with no facial features.
The Discovery Channel built an entire show, “Russian Yeti : The Killer Lives,” around the image. The skiers actually had been joking about yetis a few hours before they died.
A spoof propaganda leaflet was found in the tent. Alongside such items as “Greeting the XXI Congress with increased birthrate among hikers” was the following: “Science: In recent years there has been a heated debate about the existence of the Yeti. Latest evidence indicates that the Yeti lives in the northern Urals, near Mount Otorten.”
Still, the photograph, though blurry, pretty clearly shows a member of the group. Similarly, the Krivonishchenko image of streaks of light, which has been used to bolster the U.F.O. and weapons-test theories, is typical of the end of a film roll.
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