Haunted Cosmos - The Incident at Dyatlov Pass

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, Brian and Ben continue Season Two by exploring a story that has captivated both hosts for many years: The Dyatlov Pass. What exactly happened to cause the deaths of nine expert Russian hikers in the remote Ural mountains of Siberia?Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!This episode is also sponsored by Bible Discovery Television. Check them out at their website here.This episode is also sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee.Visit their website here to purchase your first bag! Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully. This episode is also sponsored by Private Family Banking Partners. Email them at:  [e-mail] For a free copy of a new book "Protect Your Money Now!  How to Build Multi-Generational Wealth Outside of Wall Street and Avoid the Coming Banking Meltdown" by Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey,   go to www.protectyourmoneynow.netOr, if you want to make an appointment to talk to a wealth advisor, click on the calendar link here: https://calendly.com/familybankingnow/30min.This episode is also sponsored by Ideal Poultry, America's #1 backyard poultry supplier! Visit Ideal Poultry today by clicking here and put in your order for some brand new chicks. Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Right Response Ministries, Bible Discovery TV, private family banking, ideal poultry, and Squirrely Joe's Coffee, and our supporters at patreon.com. Did you know that patrons get early access to ad-free main episodes, as well as an exclusive weekly show, The Dusty Tome? Support the show today and get these benefits and more. And now, on with the show. It is the glory of God to conceal things.

but the glory of kings is to search things out. Proverbs 252. Western Siberia is, as you might already know, a brutal place. Environmental extremes mark this region of the world. A region that due to the noticeable lack of modern development already has an almost tangible feeling of mystery and intrigue hanging in the air. The instinct of wonder at this remote region is well warranted. Western Siberia is a poorly drained floodplain

whose prevalent swamps and marshes create a heavy air of warm humidity in the summers, but it's the winters that are the real beasts. The cold season in the western Siberian plain is harsh and long. Without the help of modern technology and utilities, few people have the skill and grit required to weather them. The eastern side of this inhospitable plain is guarded by the foreboding Ural Mountains, thought by the ancients to be the Riffian boundary of the northern world,

or the legendary dwelling of the Hyperbarian peoples. This great chain of raised earth cuts all of Russia down its center, forming a natural boundary for Europe to the west and Asia to the east. The mountains may add variety to the landscape, but they do not provide any hospitality. Rugged and dark, unknown and in many places uncharted, few people have the necessary chops to live in a place like this. But people do live here.

In fact, they have for millennia. One such group is the Manci. people. The Mansee began as semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, drifting northwest from the Ural step as they followed fauna about 2,000 years ago. Eventually, they settled in right at the foot of the mountains, enjoying the cover of the tree-filled plain and the hunting offered above that tree line. Winter after winter, the people pressed on, carving out a tough life of staying alive. They found the best hunting spots and then steered clear of the fruitless areas, although sometimes they would have to pass through those gameless regions on their way to the more promising parts.

There's a Mancy legend surrounding one of these barren regions, a mountain called Coletziacl, which means lack of gain or dead mountain. As the story goes, nine hunters were wading through the snow on the foothill of this mountain. And while they would certainly not waste time hunting here, it still was a good place to set up camp. They made their way down to the trees for some added cover and prepared for a cold night. They were never seen alive again. The nine men, again according to the legend, perished in some sinister flare of fire from an unknown source. Maybe it was an angry god or goddess out on a hunt.

But this is just a legend, right? Maybe. But before we assume that it was made up out of whole cloth, you know, just the wild campfire tale of a primitive people, maybe we should pause. Maybe something did happen on that mountain. After all, the loss of nine strong men for your tribe would leave a mark, the kind of mark that stories of dread and danger might grow up out of. One reason we might need to slow down in our dismissal of their tale?

I'm glad you asked, Hunning Cosmonauts. Get ready for a true story of mystery, fear, and loss in the high passes of these same craggy slopes, a mountain that seems to swallow people whole. This is the strange and tragic tale of the Diatlov Pass. In the winter of 1959, at the peak of the Soviet control of Russia, a group of 10 very experienced hikers set out on a daunting trip. The team, made up of students from Ural Polytechnic Institute,

and led by a no-nonsense 23-year-old radio engineering student named Igor Diatlov would be ski touring some 100,000. 90 miles over the remote Ural terrain at the most difficult time of the year in hopes of gaining their Grade 3 hiking certification, the highest outdoor certification in Russia at the time. Deatloff, with seven other men and two women, all of them close friends, had been approved for the trip and left on the 23rd of January, 1959, boarding a train that would take them far into the more remote section of Siberia. Eventually, on January 27th, the actual hiking and ski touring began. But after, just one day, the team suffered their first setback. Yuri Uden, one of the most outgoing and kind members of the group, was forced to turn back after his rheumatism and congenital heart

defect started to flare up, giving him crippling pain in his knee. His body would not be able to handle the increased altitude and slope they would begin to see as they got deeper into the wild. Nonetheless, the remaining nine hikers pressed on, storing caches of food for the return journey, practicing some rescue skills on the bare slopes when weather permitted and never missing an opportunity to crack a joke. Remember, after all, these were friends. They were enjoying the trip as much as they were enjoying one another's company, which is to say they were enjoying both quite a bit.

On February 1st, they started one of the more perilous sections of their route, an exposed and technical pass crossing over the saddle formed between two peaks on the shoulder of Kolat-Siackel, the Dead Mountain. The plan was to cross the entire pass that day and then make camp on the opposite side. But due to a heavy snowstorm decreasing visibility dramatically, they drifted too far west, higher up the mountain toward the peak of Colat Seackel.

This wasn't a huge mistake, really only costing the group the energy they had all expended in gaining that unnecessary altitude. They realized what they had done when they failed to make it through the pass in the time they expected. After consulting the map right there on the mountain, With the wind tearing rivers of snow around them, they decided to make camp where they stood.

Now, you should know, dear listener, that less than a mile away and downhill was the tree line. Many people have wondered why they didn't just go back down and get a bit of extra cover in the forest. The common answer is that Diatloff did not want to lose the altitude they'd work so hard to gain. If you've ever hiked up a steep mountain, you know how disheartening it is to go back downhill, knowing you'll just have to cover that ground all over again. Plus, it gave them the opportunity to practice very exposed camping on a slope with a low enough angle and solid enough snowpack that avalanches weren't a concern. Remember, the hikers were actually pursuing that highest hiking certification the Soviet Union offered at the time,

which required a candidate to hike a route of almost 200 miles, 300 kilometers. This was a serious undertaking, and the route even needed to be approved by a special commission to meet the requirements before they set out. So these were not amateurs. They were all intentionally trying to learn new skills to prove their medal and win that grade three certification. They were already grade two, just aiming for that highest one. So with an opportunity to practice such an important skill, establishing camp in an exposed area, they pitched their tent and night began to fall. As the group crowded close in their tent, a winter storm raging outside of its canvas, they told stories, sang songs, wrote journal entries, passing the time as friends in the mountains do.

They were not overly concerned with the storm, nor really should they have been. They'd all seen much worse. The only thing worth being nervous about, and albeit the nerves should have still been small, was where they had placed the tent on such an exposed place. Overall, the scene was a tranquil one, at least in the shelter and in the minds of the nine friends. Everything had gone pretty well so far. The slight hiccup of going around the pass wasn't so bad. After all, they planned for some extra days in the journey just in case such a thing happened a time or two or three.

They would get some halfway decent sleep and wake up to a hopefully clear morning that would allow them to press on towards their goal. But suddenly, everything changed. something happened. Nobody could quite tell what, but one or some or all of the hikers knew one thing with certainty. They have to get out of the tent now, right now. Whatever madness drove the intrepid team out into the merciless elements would prove fatal. The tent was cut open from the inside, urgency demanding a quicker exit than that afforded by the shelter's doorway. The tent was empty.

each skier jumping into the storm's fray with little clothing and even less sense of what was happening. The wind howled and spat pellets of snow, each gust ripping into the skin like a cruel blade, tearing away the heat of their blood with every moment that passed. As they ran, as they shouted, as their voices drowned in the ocean of wind, as they strained to stay together in the dark, the steps of doom grew louder and closer to each of them, until finally it overtook, and a shadow of mystery swallowed them up. The Diatlov Pass incident remains a true mystery.

Nine friends, driven to apparent lunacy by some unknown, compelling force, found dead and strange states of body, with no conspicuous explanation that links them all together. Join us as we quest for an answer to the strange tale of the incident at Diatlov Pass. Well, welcome back. Faithful, haunted cosmonauts, listeners. Welcome new listeners. Welcome old listeners. Welcome young listeners. Red listeners. Blue listeners. One listener, two listeners. It is good to be back here with you. Our new host, Dr. Seuss. I'm Brian Sovey, and I'm joined by my good friend, Ben. Say hi to the listeners, Ben. Cheers, everybody. I'm over here drinking my English breakfast tea. I got my... 3.04 p.m. ice coffee. Ben, Ben, why are we recording it? 3.04 p.m. Wouldn't it make more sense to record in the morning? It would. Now, there's a reason we're not. Uh-huh. The first is that Brian delayed us for two hours this morning. Okay.

Reviewing the notes. Okay. Yeah. But also just talking to people on the phone. Oh, true. The second reason, the bigger reason, is that we actually recorded an hour and a half of this show. And then when I had to take a bathroom break, we realized that we never actually pressed record. When Ben says we recorded an hour and a half, what he means is that we sat here. and talked. We talked through the outline by ourselves. Yeah. We didn't hit record.

No. All set up. Wonderful. So this is actually take two. Take two. There's no other way to say it. Of season two episode five. This is take two.

There's no other way to say it. And you know what? F's in the chat. You know what? The way that I want to kick off take two episode five is a little promo for my guy, Brian Sovay. And I know. I'm sure you can't see this because it's so backlit.

And most of you are listening on a podcast anyway. But what I'm holding up is a vinyl casing. Is that what you call it? a casing. I have no idea. A vinyl disc holder. Yes. For his latest psalms album, Even Dragons Shall Him Praise. Look at this. This is a two vinyl collection, a gold vinyl and a teal vinyl. It's got 10 songs that Brian set and two original songs that Brian wrote. And it's amazing. The reason I'm doing this is because he ordered 250 more vinals. So we have to sell these. I had a whole set sold out, $250. And I was like, I'm going to order another one.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have promoted. Hopefully by the time season two episode five comes out, I've sold them all out, and that was totally unnecessary. And this is a completely irrelevant plug. If not, please buy them because it was thousands of dollars. Anyway. Thanks, Ben. I appreciate that. And thanks to everybody who, you know, if you didn't know, if you're just a haunted cosmonaut, you have no idea.

I do a lot of music. Go check it out. We'll put a link in the description. Brian is a very talented musician. All joking aside. Very talented musician. But we're good. We're all hyped up on some chilies.

And caffeine, we're ready to go. We said it's so. We walked out of the room. We literally went to Chili's. Immediately went to Chili's. We ate lunch. We talked about Honest Cosmos and we consoled ourselves with El Presente Margaritas. We're back. We're so back. We are so back. And we're ready to talk about one of my favorite mysteries. Really, it's a tragic, it's one of those mysteries that has, that tragedy in it is what makes it stick in my mind. Yeah. Because I think about these nine hikers and I think about, you know, the joy of their friendship. I identify a lot with, you know, we all like getting, we live in Utah. We like to get out backpack, you know, rock climb, do fun stuff like that. And that sadness and the mystery together has made this for years from the first time I heard about it. Just stick my head and the lack of closure.

Yeah. Even still, we're going to talk theories about what we think might have happened. But it's- Ultimately, there's no solid answers. We just don't know. We're not sure. Yeah. Ben, how long have you known about the at-law?

I think that I've known about this for almost 10 years. I learned about it late high school, early college, so about 2013, 2014. Yeah. And even then, I remember reading an article that my friend posted on Facebook or something, immediately closing the article and Googling it. Yeah. Because I didn't believe that. Come on. I didn't believe it. I thought maybe it was based on a true story, but really it wasn't that weird. No, this is one of the weirdest things. as we get into some of the injuries, and every time you think you figure out what's happened. There's just a monkey wrench that's thrown in

that you can't avoid. Yeah. It's not something that you can just gloss over. And you realize that you don't have a good answer. Some fact from the findings or the reason has been intensely investigated by the Russian government twice at this point. Yeah. And though they have come to conclusions or what they suspect happened,

even the official story, it just has some holes in it. There's irreconcilable problems with the official story. So today, the way that we're going to take you through this, before we get into any theories, we're going to tell you the cast of characters, the real people who are involved, a little bit more about them. Because it's important with these tragedies and with these stories that we understand that these are real people. Yeah. These are people who are someone's son, someone's daughter, real interest, just like you and me. And they're interesting people.

in fact, these are some, some of these guys are just, and ladies are just absolute ballers. Almost the entire list, you know, you read the description and you're like, yeah, I would love to, I would love to grab a beer with that. I'd love to hang out that guy. We're talking Soviet Russia, just to, you know, not quite a generation after World War II. Yeah. They've just lost like 20 million people in this war. And so a lot of them have fathers and grandfathers and uncles and friends who have fought and died in World War II. Yeah. A culture in Soviet Russia, many faults, obviously, the largest bureaucracy ever to have existed. So obviously not.

Millions dead. Yeah. Millions dead. But the culture had its, just like every culture, had its high points. Yeah. And the courage and the tenacity of the Soviet, the Russian culture for physical competency, for accomplishment, for this hiking culture and outdoorsmanship. and they were very survivalist culture was very strong. Yeah. So you'll find, I think, that these were very competent hikers and mountaineers. Especially among the youth. Yeah. They'd come out of this tragic time of war.

And, you know, they're still young. They don't understand the full bureaucracy that they're under. And so they actually have a great culture of youth, of camaraderie and friendship and trying to prove themselves in the world. I think really anyone can look at it and admire it. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to meet all the people.

And then we're going to just take you through the scene and the evidence, the physical layout of the thing where people were found. Because every single one of them that remained on the trip, other than Yuri, the Yuri who turned back, was killed mysteriously. They were found dead. And we're going to work through the scene. And then they're injuries specifically. And then we're going to start talking through some of the theories, the official story. some of the strangenesses that go along with it to invent a word. I'm going to try to steer us all.

Ben is going to try to convince us of an absolutely unhinged theory. This one idea that I think is really, really good. And Mike, I'm just going to tell you right now, I don't know what happened. I have instincts. You make it sound like I know. Ben, if you made it sound like that, you'd be right. Okay. No, I also don't know.

I just have an idea that I like your theory. I think it's very interesting. It's interesting. And then we're going to talk about some, some stories surrounding so that you'd understand that some of the theories we're talking about that are a little stranger are not like one-off. We're saying this is the only time this ever happened. Right. There's some other elements in the area and also other people have experienced that could be just some kind of physical phenomena that we're not yet familiar with.

Physics we don't understand. Atmospheric science that we don't understand yet. So we're going to get into some of that to lay a few Easter eggs now. That's lay a few Easter eggs is kind of a creepy thing to say. I'm a bunny. Like I'm a bunny laying eggs here on. But let's start Ben with getting just a higher resolution

look at the hikers, at the characters themselves in this strange story that has just remained a mystery for more than half a century at this point. Hi there, faithful listener. If you've been enjoying the Haunted Cosmos podcast and you'd like to see Ben and I

live, then come and meet us in person at the Right Response Ministries Conference, happening March 1st, second and third. The title of the conference is Blueprints for Christendom 2.0, seven doctrines for ruling the world. Some of our other speakers include Doug Wilson, Joe Boot, and the host of the conference, our friend Joel Webbin. Yes, the whole conference is going to be really awesome. But the best part to me is that Brian and I will be on stage with Joel talking about the most unhinged things imaginable. Plus, by coming to the conference,

it will give us a chance to meet each of you in person. You can register for for the conference by going to writeresponseconference.com. Again, that's rightresponseconference.com. And don't forget to use the promo code haunted to get 20% off of registration exclusively for our listeners. Lastly, if you're looking for another fantastic podcast, you've got to check out Joel's podcast called Theology Applied. It's on Apple and Spotify, but you can also watch Theology Applied by searching Right Response Ministries on YouTube. Check the links in the description. Brian, you know how sometimes you wake up in the morning? Yeah, hopefully everybody does that.

Sure, maybe. But do you ever feel tired when you wake up? Well, yeah, Ben, I used to all the time. But then I started drinking this new drink. It's actually called coffee, and it helps you wake up. No way. There's a drink that does that. Man, I should give it a shot.

You definitely need to try this. And when you do, you should buy your coffee from Squirley Joe's coffee. They're a thoroughly Christian company who sends you a great coffee at an affordable price. Plus, they even donate some of their proceeds to Operation Underground Railroad, helping the effort to end child trafficking. Okay, wait, I actually have heard of Squirley Joe's Coffee, and they are really great. They make it super easy to order exactly what you want if you go to www. That's www.squarelyjo's.com and click shop coffee.

And first-time buyers can sign up to receive 20% off of their first order. Just go to www.squarelyjo's.com or use the link in the description below. Squirrely Joe's Coffee. Share coffee, serve humbly, live faithfully. Brian, did you know that raising poultry in your own backyard is a well-documented and confirmed mothman deterrent? No. Ben, no. It isn't. But we do know for sure that raising chickens and dogs. ducks and such in your backyard is a great way to turn a profit on that space that is also fun for the whole family. God, so true, King. If you want to embark on this great adventure with your people,

visit IdealPoltery.com today and order some chicks. They're the number one backyard poultry supplier in the country, and they are wonderful Christians as well. Remember, a poultry a day keeps the mothman away. Visit Idealpultery.com today and start your order, or click the link in the description below. Cheers. Yeah, yeah. I like to comment real quick, too, on why are we talking about this at all? Yeah.

This isn't necessarily a supernatural thing. It's strange in the sense that no one can really explain what happened, but that doesn't mean that it's unexplainable. Right. The reason that we're talking about this is because this took place in the world that God made. Yeah. And it's an insane mystery that I think grips the minds of everyone that really looks into it. And if we're image bearers of God, we ought to be able to retell these stories and

compelling way so that their memory doesn't get lost. Yeah, honor the the real image bearers and the humans that were involved in this story, that were lost tragically. That took place in a, in a tragic adventure, I'll call it. Yeah. And that's, that's the, at the heart of haunted cosmos, we're not just interested in talking about supernatural. We're talking about a world that is shot through with this natural and the supernatural, but all of that together, the natural and the supernatural is a God's spoken world. This is in a story that he is telling. Yeah. And he is telling millions and millions of stories every day all across history that are absolutely interesting and fascinating. And if we're interested, we will be interesting people. Right. So we want to be able to

latch onto these stories and just see, you know, the compelling stories that God is telling in his history. Yeah. And I think we should be interested in those. Yeah. And, So, no, there's not necessarily a point where we're going to twist and be like, It was a ghost. It was the demons. Although it could have been a Yeti. Could have been a Yeti. We'll get there.

It probably wasn't a Yet. The first character that we're going to talk about is the leader of this expedition. And it's namesake. And it's namesake. That's right. And you heard him mentioned in the cold open. A guy named Igor Diatlov. He's the group leader, a radio engineering student at this Polytechnic University in Russia. avid hiker, avid ski touring guy.

I mean, he's borderline expert. If you're getting a level three certification, you are really good at your craft in the outdoors. You've been through a lot. And he had this added benefit of carrying a lot of gravity effortlessly. He was a no-nonsense guy, but not in the way that made him like callous or anything. He was still very kind and very friendly.

But he just clearly was the person that everyone naturally looked to. If he was there and said, like, okay, well, this is the guy that's going to lead us. And so he organized this expedition and he, you know, developed the team. Yep. He was going to take them all away. And these guys just have, I mean, Russian names. Oh, Igor Diatlov.

Igor Diatlov. My name is Boris. My name is Boris. And we're going to see a Boris later. We are the guy named Boris. So we got Igor. We have another gentleman who was actually a little bit of a different character. There was like a core group of four men who had been on many different expeditions together.

and then we had some other cast of characters with that some of that group had done other expeditions together but they kind of cohered around this group of four led by Igor Tiatlov and then this next gentleman his name was Semyon Zolotariof and he was a little older.

So he was 38 and actually a veteran if you think about 30K 58 or 1959 minus 38 years so World War II he is in his mid he's in his 20s yeah so he's I had to you the map out there.

38, 959, minus 308, you know, that sounds right. That tracks. So he fought, he was a war veteran, front line,

decorated war veteran. Yeah, combat veteran. He was passionate about mountaineering and his goal was to become a senior instructor. The journals,

we have a lot of journals from multiple of these men and women that they kept along the trip. And it just shows that Semyon, he brought a level of maturity to the group

that was this older gentleman. He fit well in, though. And what they really liked about him was that he sang very well. So they all loved singing. They would sing together. This is that rich, youthful culture I was talking about.

Yeah. We're back in the day when kids would get together and they would just sing songs. Should we sing Why do the he the nations vainly rage right now?

Why do the he the nations vainly rage? So good. Let's finish you. You're welcome. Yeah. For like four minutes. We're just going to sing

an entire set of songs too. Also, you started the bass part and I was confused. Okay, anyway. So that is Semyon and our next cast. The next one, Ben, why don't you introduce the first lady in the group? Yeah, the first female. Her name is Zenaida Kolmogorova, but we just call her Zena. She kind of goes by Zena. She was also a radio engineering student with Igor, a beautiful woman that everyone was just drawn to. You know, you know the popular girl in high school that everyone wants to go on a date with and get the dance. this was Zena.

But apparently she was also a really just pleasant, friendly gal. And she actually was in a bit of a, not a competing high tension kind of love triangle, but a little bit of a love triangle. With her, Igor, and then this other guy on the trip named Yuri. And... Yuri. There's like eight Uries.

So it's Yuri Dorshenko, but we'll get to him later. But she and Yuri had just broken up, but she still kind of had feelings for him. based on stuff she'd written in her journal. And at the same time, Igor was kind of writing in his journal about how he was starting to have feelings for Zena. Yeah, not Yuri Udhuden. Not Yuri Udhuden.

Not Yuri Krivlenoshenko. Krivlenoshenko. But Yuri Dora Shanko. Yes. And, but just because she's, you know, a college-age beautiful girl, we don't want you to get the wrong idea. She actually was very tough herself. One time on a separate trip, she was bitten by a pit viper.

A pit viper. Jumped out from under a rock. Not the sunglasses. Right. The snake version. The real thing. Snake one. And bitten the leg. And so everyone else on the trip is like, well, let me take some of your...

Can we take your pack? Yeah, let me take your pack. You've been bitten by a poisonous pit viper. You're going to be... Sorry, you might die. Venomous pit viper. Right, right, right. Not poisonous. It's so over.

It's not a plant. It's so over. Come on. Anyway, anyway. And she said, no, you're not allowed to take any of my pack. I'm going to carry what I brought and we're all going to get out. If I lose the leg, I lose the leg. Right.

Right. The pride is more important. Zenaida. I mean... Yes, so that's Zenaida. Wow. And then next we have Brian Nikolai... Nikolai Thibodo Brignoli.

Tibo Brignoli. Tibo, yeah. Brignoli. And it's hard not to say that in Italian accent. So Nikolai... Nikolai. Nikolai. Nikolai.

Nicky. We're going to call him Nikki. Yeah. His father was actually sent to the gulag. The gulag? On false charges. You go to gulag? He go straight to jail.

straight to Gulloch. He's another guy that was involved. You'll see these guys were friends because they connected around there. Engineering, tech physics. Yeah, they were kind of went to the same school.

You're like the STEM nerds? Yeah. But they also Chad Kings and Queens. Yeah. So Nikolai, his father had been sent to the Gulag on false charges and later like exonerated at this time. But he had already graduated with a degree in civil engineering.

So civil engineer, a natural leader similar to Igor, and just, and had everybody's respect. Yep. So he was a part of the group. He was kind of part of that inner circle. Inner circle, yeah.

Yeah. Then we have another guy whose name is just very weird. Rustim Slobodin. Slobodin. It's a good name. Rustum. The name Rustim is really nice. It sounds like a spray paint brand.

Right. But also a spray paint brand that I would name one of my own sons. Let's be honest. Rustim is a good name. Yes. So he also, just like Nikolai, had already graduated from the same school. And he had actually grown up in Moscow. But when the Soviet revolution took place, he was banished from Moscow and quartered off to

Siberia because his parents were of the intellectual class. But the intellectual class that wasn't, you know, inducted into the Soviet regime. And so they were very afraid that they would cause trouble among the rest of the people. So they were banished off to Siberia. What the class we would have been in. Right. As podcasters. I mean, we would have been above.

We would have been the ruling class. In the 50s. I would have been telling. the KJB, KGB. The KJB. It's not the King James Bible. I would have been telling the KGB, who to go kill.

Yeah, yeah. You would have been telling the secret police. Yeah. You would have been telling the GRE. But what is it the, what is the military version of the KJB? I don't know, but the NICE also would have been telling them. The NICIS. CIS, CIS, CSI Miami.

CIS. Yeah. We're so dumb. Okay, Rustam. One of the cool things about Rustim. Rustim. I just got to say it. King Energy. Yeah, this guy brought a harmonica with him. No, he didn't.

So close, though. But he brought him, it's not close. So close. It's a mandolin. It is so close. Ben agrees. Harmonicas are, like, if you had to assign animals to it, like, harmonicas would be, like, the poop that comes out of a cat. No, listen. And a mandolin would be like a loyal dog.

No, the mandolin is the harmonica of stringed in. Okay, that's fine. but the harmonica is like the flaming trash of garbage of every other instrument. Ben is jealous that I am able to seamlessly integrate my harmonica playing into any social set. He carries around his harmonica in his pocket. I might start playing one right now. And he'll just start playing it. And you're like, my guy.

Everyone appreciates it. Okay, anyway. He brought it on the trip. He had a mandolin. And you have to respect the guy. We're going to go hike and ski 200 miles through the winters of Siberia. What am I going to bring with a mandolin? I got just the fifth.

Essential kit. a mandolin. What a king. Like they're going to sing, play the mandolin around the fire at night. Like, I wish I had gone on the street, except for what happened. Except for all dying. Seriously, though. These are people that I would have hung out with them.

I would have loved to be with these people. So who's next? You've got another Yuri. Yuri Krivenoshenko, and he graduated from, again, the Polytechnic Institute of Ural with a degree in construction and hydraulics. And this Uri just seems like kind of the class clown of the group. He's super extroverted. He was always joking with the others in the group.

And he was very close friends with Igor, with Igor Diatloff. So he's part of that inner circle, one of the Uri's. Everyone loved it. Yeah. And then the next Uri... We've got another Uri. Yuri Dori Dori Dorychenko. Dorochenko.

Now this is... So this guy was the ex-boyfriend of Zena. He's the third leg of the triangle. Igor is into Zena. Igor's into Zena. Zina is kind of into him, but maybe not yet. Right. an ex-boyfriend, ex-girlfriend to Doryshanko.

Yeah, who is now on the trip too. And who's just vibing? He's not interested in Zina anymore. No, he doesn't care. And it also seems like Zena, from her journals, has some feelings for him still. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, by the way, how could you not?

Because not only is he a student at UPI, but he's also, like, once so brave, such a man, he once fought a bear with a geologist hammer. This man, this man, in the moment. middle of the Russian woods. Yeah. Sees a bear coming up. Everyone else flees and he's like, I know just the thing.

Yes. I will fight the bear. Yeah, with a hammer. By hitting him on the head with a hammer. Have you seen that gif of the guys hanging from the tree doing the legups? Oh, yeah. And another guy's hitting him with a pole. And then the bear's the one pushing the tree.

And it's in the winter. That's Russia. That is Russia. And Duraschenko is like the peak Russian. I had a friend once who, I worked with him when we were both like janitors and at this big church. And he was a rodeo clown? Australian rodeo clowns.

Aye. I might. Right. Like, we need to get our, our cauldron pool friends. Yeah. Yeah, to come down and show us the correct. Shrimp on the Barbie,

which apparently they don't say. But let's be honest. They really do. He was a rodeo clown. So we'd like fight bulls and protect the rodeo riders from the bulls. Like, yeah. The part of his brain that controlled fear was just missing. They're like the Sherpa version of rodeo.

Exactly. Yeah. So there was a time, though, when he was hiking, and he saw a black bear in the black. Blackbirds are kind of spooked easy. So it ran away from him, climbed up a tree, a lodgepole pine. He sees that there's another pine tree, like three feet away from it growing the same, like straight, right parallel. He climbs the other tree to attempt, I don't know, to fight the bear.

I don't know. When I think, when I hear about Yuri Doroshenko, this is the kind of guy that I'm picturing, is my rodeo clown friend. So what woman would not be attracted to that guy? Look, I get it. I get it. I get it. If my daughter brought home, which I don't have. Igor should be a little worried.

Yeah, I mean, if I was Igor, I'd be so, I'd be so insecure. But he's over it enough, Yuri, that he's on the trip, just like, I don't even care. You're just here to ski. We're going to go skiing? Dude, I'm here for some fun. So we got Yuri, we got another Alexandra Kolaevatov. Alexander. Alexander.

Alexander. Alexander. Kolevatovatov. Another student at UPI. Physics. Yeah, majoring in physics. Very bold, very opinionated. This guy was like the bull shark of the group, like the high tea.

Okay, don't want to really mess with him because he has a short fuse. Yeah. But at the same time, you do want him on your trip because he's super tough and he is like still fun to be around. Yes. It's just that his brashness kind of bothered the two ladies. The two ladies didn't like him. Where he's just always on and he's laying it on thick all the time. I think we know which of our friends this.

This is. This is Mr. We're not allowed to mention one on this podcast. Alexander Klovatov. So he's a very driven guy, a smart guy, I mean, majoring in physics. Yeah. So, and then lastly, we've got the last lady in the group and tell us a little bit about her, Ben. Her name is Ludmila Dumanina.

And what you'll find is that Russian parents at the time of this story named all Russian girls except Zina. Ludmila. 37 out of 39 Russian women were named Ludmila. Real statistic. I didn't just make up. Oh, is that for real?

Okay, so he made it up. I fell for it. Ludmila Dubanina. She's the second girl of the group. She's the youngest member of the team. But she was very bold as well. She was very outspoken and extroverted.

Easy to like and get along with. Very into art, like photography. But really, her passion was in mountaineering. Now, just like Zena. This is so weird. Okay. Ludmila. also had a great opportunity to prove her toughness one time.

Yeah. She was on a trip and she got shot in the leg. So Pit Viper bites the one girl on the leg. Not on this trip, to be clear. Other home girl gets shot by a rifle. Not just a handgun. A rifle. A rifle in the leg because another member of the team was cleaning his gun while it's loaded.

Pulls the trigger for some reason. Negligent discharge. And yeah, just like manslaughter's. Well, not quite. Yeah, could have. Yeah. could have manslaughter this girl. And the thing is, is she didn't complain.

Yeah, she didn't fuss. I mean, she's like, ouch. She said sorry. But she started apologizing for catching the bullet because it meant they had to cut their trip short. Such a girl move. Like, ladies, you've got to stop doing this. Yeah, just stop apologizing for everything. Except the fact that no one is mad at you for getting shot.

For getting shot. We're mad at the guy who did not practice any of the gun safety rules. Like, clear the chamber before you clean your gun. Guys, this is a lot of. the haunted cosmos note, gun safety. Clear the chamber visually and with a physical inspection before you clean your weapon. And even if it's unloaded, maintain muscle control. Don't point a rifle at another person and pull the trigger.

Especially if their name is Ludmila, because clearly they have bad luck. Unless it is... Unless it's a bad guy. A bad person. Like, Ludmila's doppelganger, is an evil twin. If it's like... She's not actually human. and then you fire her.

A doppelganger episode will do at some point. You'll know. But you have to have a safety question. You ask your loved one so that you can tell whether they're the doppelganger or not. Oh, yeah. Anyway, Lude Mela, last member of the cast. Other than Yuri Udin, who had to turn around. And he's actually who we know these detailed sketches.

We have, like, from family interviews too, but we have a lot of these personality sketches from Yuri Udun, the one surviving team member who wasn't at the event that actually took place because he turned around. He was the one that really, I think, brought everything down to a human level. Because, you know, families know the most about their children, of course. But there's something about the way that friends know friends. It's just a little bit different.

And so Yuri was able to provide a lot of insight. Dude, I have such a big headache from recording this episode twice. Spooky. Okay. Dude, Ludmila didn't complain about getting shot. I know. And here I am podcasting. Okay.

Let's talk through this scene. What actually, so we get to this. Point in the hike where they're faced with a very serious storm. They've erred a little bit to the west from what they intended and gone to a higher elevation than they really wanted to at this point. They realize they're not going to make it over the pass. They need a make camp and they don't want to go down to the tree line like a ways away. So like a waste of energy. Like half a mile to a mile away to the cedar forest.

So they're going to pitch camp here. This storm that's winding up became a storm. some accounts say up to hurricane force winds 60 70 mile an hour winds the snow and 40 below zero yeah very that's how cold it was borderline wide out conditions but that's what they expect on these hikes they're prepared for that those conditions right that wasn't catching them by surprise anything like that so ben tell us a little bit more about the scene where they pitched their tent what kind of slope the terrain yeah and what was on what what the investigators discovered when they turn up at the scene this scene, what we're talking about now is that

at the end of the expedition, they had told Yuri Uden who turned back, hey, add a few more days, we're going to be a little bit behind schedule. So they're like 90 miles from the nearest little podunk town. Not expected for at least, I think, another 10 days. Well, yeah, they're close to

their objective. Yeah, and then they turn around. And then they turn around. So they had the return trip, like another day or two, and then the return trip. But there's always like a few days added in there of Wiggle Room. So no one would have been alarmed that they were late for weeks. So this camp wasn't discovered until Yuri and others realized they haven't returned on time.

They wait a little bit. And then they're just late. And then they have to go do the trip. Yeah, then they have to do the days of travel to get to this. This isn't an accessible part of the world. So it was about three weeks. Yeah, it was three weeks before they got to the camp. And once they get there, here's kind of the scene that they discovered.

So they find that they had pitched the tent on one of the bald patches of the saddle. in between these two peaks. And it really is like a tundra. It's above the tree line. There's no trees. It's very bald and exposed. But the slope that they had pitched the tent on was like at 18 to 20 degree slope.

20 degree slope, not very steep. It's nothing crazy. Not for a mountain. But it is extremely exposed to the elements. Now, when the scene was found, they still had skis and ski poles that were standing up in the snow as they had been placed the night of the incident.

They actually used some of the ski poles to erect the tent. That's part of how it all worked. It's how they do it. Inside the tent, they found a functioning flashlight, and then they also found another flashlight about a quarter mile down the hill, and this one no longer worked. Inside the tent also, there was a camera

that was set on top of a, like, a makeshift tripod, and then there was also one other camera on one of the student's persons. They found boots and jackets that were laid out on the floor of the tent, and they found food remains in the tent, indicating that the group was maybe in the midst of a meal, even though it was around the middle of the night.

Or they had just left some food out, knowing that in this cold of conditions, bears weren't going to be a concern. Yeah. And so here's where it starts to get weird. Yeah. Where it starts to get weird, so a lot of their clothing and their warm clothing

is there in the tent still. Boots. Yeah. Don't let, they found most of their clothes still in the tent. No one's in the tent. Their clothing is in a tent. 40 below zero, hurricane winds, storm. And they find that nobody's in a tent, but they didn't leave through the door.

No. The tent had clearly been cut from the inside to achieve a fast escape. Frantically slashed open with a knife. Yeah, in multiple attempts, too. There were multiple gashes in the tent as if it was frantically being, being cut at, this could be because of a number of things. Maybe the entrance was obstructed. Somehow, maybe the tent had partially collapsed,

and so it was just harder to get to the entrance. But the point is, none of that really changes the fact that something was so urgent to them that they felt it would be the best decision and the best chance of staying alive if they cut the tent open from the inside, not able to repair it again, and then left without taking,

hardly any clothing. This is the crux of the issue, of the mystery, is what happened that made these nine very experienced hikers conclude that the thing they needed to do in the middle of the night, half dressed, no shoes on, cut their tent, which is their shelter in the Siberian wilderness, 90 miles at least, days from help, to cut that open and render it,

like I'm sure they could have partially used it if they had been able to escape and come back, Maybe they could patch something. But, I mean, cutting open their own thing and fleeing the tent in a state of partial clothing out into the wilderness. Right. And so now the scene, we're shifting in the scene. And now we're going to start telling you about the people. Because they didn't disappear.

We found. The investigators found every single one of these nine hikers were found. So, Ben, let's start talking about some of these where we found them. So as they cut their way out of the tent, the footprints and everything seemed to indicate that they all were. walking, not necessarily running. Not even running. It doesn't seem like they were stumbling down the mountain, but they were all together walking down towards

the tree line where they made it about 500 meters into the tree line and all gathered around under this one cedar tree and somehow were able to light a fire. Which that in itself is very impressive. We'll talk more about that later. And at

this fire pit is where the first two bodies were found. Krivenoshenko and Dora Shanko, which are two of the Uries. Yeah. That's why I'm using the long forms of the names. Yeah. They were found dead right next to the fire completely without clothing.

You know, this is probably because they were the first ones to die. Yeah. And so once they passed, the other team members put them there, laid them to rest, and then used their clothes so that they might survive. The next three bodies that were found were Zena, that first woman, who Igor was interested in, Slobodin, and then also Igor Diatlov himself. And they were all found at different points along the trail leading back up the hill towards the tent. So they were trying to get back to the tent.

And Zena actually made it the furthest. She was closest to the tent, but still like 300 meters away. Yeah. And she was dead, and then behind her Slobodan, and then behind right at the end of the tree line was Diatlov himself. And all five of those men and women died from exposure. Yes. So we will talk about other injuries that sometimes. of them sustained.

Right, right. But basically this group of five, it seemed like, made it all the way. It was like they linked arms and walked this eastern escape route down the mountain towards the Cedar Force and he was there. And they made it into that shelter, lit the fire, which is, I mean, that's impressive. That's insane. In this condition. Somehow they light a fire.

And at this point, the storm wasn't raging anymore. The weather had cleared up some. But it's still fresh snowfall. So anything is going to be wet once it's heated up at all. And we know this fire burned for at least a few hours. Yeah, about one and a half to two hours had to be burning. They were, you know, cutting tree branches down. And then it also appeared as if the two guys Doroshenko and Krovonoshenko had climbed up one of the trees and had strategically removed a couple branches so that they could see a window through the woods back to the tent.

as if they were looking to see if the tent was still there or if some threat had left it or something like that. If whatever made them flee was different, and we're unsure. This is part of the mystery. That part's a bit speculative. Yeah. It just, they left other branches that were lower than those uncut.

And they were scraped up along, so they didn't have much clothes on. They were scraped up along their chests. And it was concluded that they had been scraped in that manner from climbing the tree. Yeah, so they would have been climbing. awful lot. Absolutely 40 below, freezing, climbing a tree. Very few of them had any boots on. Slobodin was found wearing one boot. Yeah. I think most of them had no boots at all.

There was Slobodan was wearing one and then one other guy had his boots on. I can remember who it was. It may be the older gentleman, Simian. Yeah. But no one else had boots. And it seems like all the signs point to all of them together going in to make this fire. Yeah, all nine. All of them being together. And then something happening there, which then caused those three to start making their way back to the tent. And then the remaining four corpses, the last group of four, they were found much deeper into the cedar forest. And they were found lying underneath about 14 to 20 feet of soggy and heavy compressed snow that had collapsed over them

and overtopped some rudimentary shelter that they had built. Turns out they had built that shelter over a creek. And so the four of them were, lying in the running water of the creek now. It took three months to find them. It took three months to find them. It was very difficult. And they had substantial injuries.

Far worse than what the first five had, even though all of them had injuries. These were especially bad, and we'll get into those later. One of these victims, Zolotariev, one of the four in the ravine, is what they call it, in this little gully. He had a camera around his neck.

Now, nine frames of the 19 that he had on that camera remain unavailable to the public. Classified for whatever reason by the Russian government, but of the 10 publicly available images, one of them is especially interesting. We'll get into this a little bit later, but there's a picture,

and it appears to be potentially a bright object in the night sky. There's debate about whether or not that is what it is. But nonetheless, we just want to plant some seeds to start talking about potential theories of what happened. later on. So one of these cameras was found on this guy's body. And then they also found a camera in the tent. Yeah, they found the camera in the tent. And one of those, it's K-34, that picture shows a cloudy, bright blob at the outer edge of the photo with some lens flare in the center of the frame. So some of these photos were damaged. Yeah. Some of the film was damaged. And there's a

huge amount of speculation surrounding like, what are we looking at in some of these different photos where there's weird anomalies or people have written hundreds of pages. I mean, you can go to Diatloffpass.com and you can see all the cameras, all the photos, where they came from. And then also actually disturbingly, they have photos from the recovery efforts with the bodies. So you can also see some of the what we're going to talk about in a moment here. But one of the big takeaways that we should have right off the bat is that they were able to get down calmly enough to stay together into the cedar forest.

They were able to light a fire that lasted for a couple hours. And it seems like it could have gone on longer. And it seems like they just abandoned it. Either they failed to tend it. They had dry wood there. The fire just burned out. Right. Or they just gave up. Yeah, there were dry wood all around.

Yeah. And then something happened to where only after that time, some of them thought, okay, now we can go back to the tent. others of them thought, no, we got to go this opposite direction to figure something else out. And at that point, two of them were already dead. So the point is that whatever drove them from that tent was some kind of lasting threat. It wasn't just an immediate thing where they were panicked, they ran away, and then they immediately came back and realized like, oh, man, what did we just do? No, it was they panicked and ran away for hours.

And only then did they try to get back. Yeah. One of the other interesting things is that on some of the bodies, high levels of beta radiation. Yeah, we're found. We're found. On four of the... The bodies in the ravine. Yeah. And so it seems like they had two parties split out.

Like they got to that fire, two people died of hypothermia. Maybe they decided we've got to do something. This fire's not enough. We're going to die. Right. Because in 40 below, one fire is probably not going to be enough. Right. Some of them had severe burns on them, their hands, their legs.

Yeah, the guys that... were left next to the fire. Both of them had third degree burns on their bodies. Very bizarre. Yeah, really bizarre. And then there were also branches that were still attached to the surrounding trees that were charred as if they too had been burned. Yeah. But how would they have been burned because they weren't cut off of the tree?

They were just near the fire, but not near enough to be like smoked by the fire. Very weird. As if it had flared up really big and then came back down. Something strange. I mean, very strange scenario. Yes, yes. So we have, at this point, we've now accounted for the party going to the fire. Two of them go up in the tree, cut the branches,

seem to be maybe observing the tent area, looking to see if they can go back for whatever reason drove them out of it. We have some party then at some point, two of them die. Three of them head back to the tent and die in the way, and four of them head out and fall through. or I guess we haven't necessarily. Well, we don't totally know. We don't know.

But presumably they fell through some sort of ice bridge or this creek. And then more ice and snow collapsed on top of them. Yeah, that's the idea. So that's where we've gotten them now. Why don't we talk through, unless there's more than I'm missing. I was going to say one more thing. This isn't as interesting, but I think it's important. Around the tent area in some pretty big radius around it,

the snow was, it was as if the snow had been melted and then really, re-frozen, as if there was some big heat source that slightly melted the surface of the snow and then refroze it so that it was much more piesty, like a groomed run at a ski resort or something. Yeah, and it had some ridges and... Yeah, and it was really clearly defined, where it was like, within this circle, within this perimeter, the snow is noticeably different than it is outside of it. That's just one more little interesting thing. Yes.

But I think now we should get into the injuries. Yeah, because this adds a whole other element. Yeah. of intrigue and mystery to the question, because they had obviously extensive autopsies and investigation into what caused these injuries and death for these young people. So pathologist, Dr. Boris Vos...

Wow. Vos Ros Rosdioni. Vos Rostjoni, of course. Boris Vos Rzrizjani. We sound Italian. Vaz Rzrazjon. No matter how we do it, we sound Italian. Gracias.

Boris. Any language can be made into Italian. It can be made in Italian, I firmly believe. So he's a pathologist. This is public. You can get incredibly extensive detail on the reports from the autopsies and the investigation. You can actually also, wouldn't necessarily recommend it for everybody. They have photos of the victims.

Yeah. Prior to autopsy as well. Yeah, if you're squeamish, don't. Don't do it. Yeah, I don't know. Even if you're not squeamish, it's like really disturbing. That's disturbing. So the injuries and cause of death by Dr. Boris were split into two groups.

Yes. We have a five-person hypothermia group that definitely died from exposure. Yeah. And then we have four that died from something else. Unknown. Maybe exposure, maybe. Well, here's the thing. This is a really key point.

Just because five of them are sanctioned off into the exposure. hypothermia group, that was their determined final cause of death. Yeah. That's not the only injuries that they received. No, and we'll go through. They had more. We'll get into this. But, and then the four ravine group, that doesn't mean they didn't die from hypothermia.

It's just that there are much more question marks. They could have died of other things. Right. And other things might have contributed to dying of exposure as well. So exposure played into all of the deaths. Of course, yeah. But it's minus 40. They had some severe injury.

So, yeah, go ahead. Let's work through some of these injuries. Yeah, so the first in the hypothermia group is Zena Kolmogarrova. She's that girl that Igor is interested in. And she was found about 700 meters down the hill from the tent. She was the closest one, or she was able to make it the furthest back up the hill. And she's facing towards the tent as if she's going to it. She's in the fetal position, which is common in hypothermic victims.

The other injuries that she had that are worth noting, is that she had a massive bruise on her right side that passed into her back, as if she had been hit by some big thing. Yeah. I don't think she had any broken ribs, but potentially cracked ribs, but either way, just, I mean,

a big streak of black, purple all around her side. Yeah. She also had internal bleeding, internal organs filled with blood, and her lungs indicated that she suffered hypothermia. She essentially suffocated under blood coming into her lungs. Yep. The next person is this guy Rustam, the mandolin guy.

Now, he was found 150 meters behind Zena, also heading towards the tent. And he was in a dynamic pose, which the only important thing is that it means that it could have been a more sudden death. Yeah. As opposed to hypothermia, which is usually slower and the person is more calm. And they lay down. They lay down in the fetal position. Rust him, it seemed like he was in the middle of, like, crawling, and then he just died. Yeah, right there. Yeah, so he's face down, facing towards the tent.

Now, as opposed to the rest of the hypothermia group, his official cause of death is still hypothermia, but he had severe external trauma, even to the point of his head being fractured. His skull was broken. He had a skull fracture. Yeah, and Boris, I believe Boris went on record saying that if it wouldn't have been hypothermia,

he could have died from that. It was bad enough to kill him. And his lungs were also bright red, and they had the same liquid. Yeah, which indicates exposure. The next, the leader, Igor is the next hypothermia victim. He was found another 180 meters back from Slobodan. So he was like 300 plus meters away from Zena, who got the furthest.

And again, he was tucked into some tree branches as if he had stopped along the way and sought shelter. He realized, like, I'm not going to make the tent. I need to seek shelter. he's found, again, on his back with his hands clenched in a fist in front of his chest. And we're not 100% sure why this conclusion was drawn,

but Dr. Boris reported that Igor was likely in extreme agony when he died. I think that he takes that from the facial expression. Okay. Because usually someone who dies of hypothermia has a pretty calm expression on their face, because it's a slower death.

But you enter almost a euphoric state. You feel warm? You actually feel warm. You actually feel warm. Some, a lot of hypothermia victims even start shedding clothing. They'll take their boots off. They'll start taking clothes off for no reason. But they feel warm. It's like their brain is telling them like, let's get comfortable.

You're actually really hot. You're not freezing cold. And then you die. And then you die. That actually makes it go faster. But Igor looked like he was struggling very, very hard on his face. And he had his hands clenched up as if he was desperately trying to stay warm. He also had more clothes on as if he had been able to take some clothes from the

to men tending the fire who had already died. And so they think maybe he was in severe pain. But other than that, his lungs looked the same. He had internal bleeding as well. Yeah, like Zena, he had massive internal bleeding. Blood clotted on his lips and frozen. Yes, he would cough up some. Coffing up blood.

Yuri Krivonashenko was found an additional 300 meters down from Dietloff, and he was next to the fireplace the group made. So presumably when they were still together, was one of the two. It seems like Doroshenko and Krivonashenko had, they had been the first to die and their friends laid them out by the fire and then took their clothing and tried to, you know, get some shelter for themselves or get some better situation for themselves. But Krivonashenko, he had bruises across his forehead. And then he was the one that had third degree burns on the sole of his foot and up his left leg and his hands were charred. Yeah. And a

lot of people read that and they assume, oh, well, he accidentally stepped on the fire, and then in an act of desperation, he shoved his hands into the fire to get warm. And I mean, yeah, like, I think that's possible for sure. But just because you're hypothermic doesn't mean you go insane. It just means you stop thinking so clearly. I can't think of a single case where someone in a hypothermic state has tried to burn themselves. it's not like you forget the laws of physics. It's just, it's fuzzy.

So he had charred hands. At any rate, it's weird. And he too had massive internal bleeding. And then the other guy tending the fire, Yuri Doryshenko, he was found next to Kravonashenko at the fire pit, burns on his body, much more widespread than Kravonashenko.

He had much more burns. And he was covered in scratches. And a lot of people think this is because he was the one climbing the tree. And some have wondered if the reason he had such widespread burning is because he actually fell out of the tree at one point and landed in the coals of the fire. We don't know. We don't know. We do know that his brain showed signs of swelling as if he had been hemorrhaging in his brain.

And he had strange patches of dark brown on his skin as if he had been radiated. He also had a well-defined vein pattern on both arms. So weird. Yeah. And on his inner thighs and lower legs. So basically all over his limbs, it was like someone had put black dye into his veins, and then they had risen up to the surface. Yeah, it's disgusting. There's picture of this online.

And really, the only time that you see this on somebody is when they've been struck by lightning or when they've suffered some other massive electrical accident. And they've had high voltage running through their body. So that's just really weird. like why would he have signs of suffering a high voltage event when all he was doing was sitting next to a fire freezing to death and maybe getting burned because he was being driven crazy. That doesn't fit. He had a foamy gray liquid found in the mouth and lungs,

consistent with hypothermia, and his lungs also looked the same as the rest of them. They were filled with that disgusting red, purple, brown liquid. It's very gross. And now we're going to move on to the reveal, group, so the last four victims, and we'll start with Nikolai Tebow Brignoli.

He had no visible external injuries, but they did find a severe depression fracture on his skull right at the temple, as if he'd been hit with like a baseball bat or something in the temple. And this is what Dr. Boris determined would have been the cause

of death, because it was horrible and no one could survive it. When asked by investigators, how he could have gotten these injuries, given Given what they knew about the situation, Boris responded by saying it couldn't have been from just slipping and falling on a rock. Right. Like a normal person couldn't just fall right onto a rock with their temple first and suffer this level of fracture. It was too severe and widespread.

The severity of the injury, according to Dr. Boris, was more akin to getting hit by a car and thrown into a wall. An insanely strong wind could conceivably explain this. Like, I'm talking to Category 5 Hurricane Force Wind that throws only him into some pointed object on the ground. This is weird. But the odds of that happening are impossible to determine. The investigator said that, you know, what if he was hit by a stone?

Could that explain it? And Boris said no, because then there would have been external soft tissue that would have been damaged. But his skin wasn't damaged, is what he's saying. So somehow he fractured his skull without cutting skin. Could it have been a long fall, like a 20-foot fall onto a rock kind of situation? Yeah, I think that's the idea with the wind.

Okay, like throwing you. Yeah, but the thing, but even still you're like, well, how would that not upset the skin? I don't know. Yeah, weird. The way that Boris explains it, I don't fully understand. Yeah, yeah. The next person is Ludmila. Yeah.

So Ludmila had, she was missing. Remember, these people took three months to discover and they were in water. Yeah. So there are... Freezing water. Aspects of the state of their bodies that is less preserved and leads to more mystery than some of the other bodies that were found in the snow quicker and they were more well preserved. So she's missing soft tissue in several regions of the face and head. Her eyes were missing.

her tongue was missing, her lips were missing. But she had multiple broken ribs that likely caused massive congestion in her chest and like heart failure type of issue. One of the broken ribs had pressed against and damaged her heart

and that trauma by itself is enough to cause death. A very painful death in 10 or 20 minutes. So it again seems like she had a massive force or a very long fall. Yeah. Again, these are like car accident trauma, level of trauma, not falling over,

even like falling and hitting a rock or something. It's not going to cause. Like, you have to fall a distance in land on rocks or something like that. The missing eyes, tongue, and lips are attributed to decomposition or animal scavengers from the water, being in the water as well. So she was one of these ravine victims that was severely damaged as well. And then the next is Simeon Zolotarov, and he's the older guy. He's the 38-year-old war. veteran and he also was the one that was found with that other camera around his neck the one with that really strange frame that we'll talk about more later he had missing skin tissue around his left eyebrow his the bone was exposed there you could see his his face bone his orbital i guess

missing eyeballs again explained away by scavenging and decomposition he had a neck wound that was pretty severe that exposed his bone his backbone he had multiple ribs that were fractured on the right side that actually congested the local muscles and punctured lungs. So again, massive force that's squeezing him, essentially. All the organs in his rib cage were pushed down into the abdominal cavity by some unknown force or influence. It could have been a big fall, crushing pressure, impact, something like that. It's interesting that the doctor said that one thing that causes these kind of injuries was explosion. Yeah. Large explosions because it didn't visibly damage the outside is much, but it's like a shockwave

that would pass through and break bones internally or cause some of this internal damage. So he compared it to that, which is interesting. He said that the ideal explanation is a shockwave, essentially, like a big one. And then many think that his, especially Simeon and Ludmila as well, their injuries could be explained by the crushing weight of that ice bridge. I mean, if you have 14 to 20 feet of snow about,

you, snow's very heavy. I don't know if people know this. Yeah. Snow's that much snow. Snow's extremely heavy. Yeah, if you get buried in an avalanche, you can't breathe. And so, yeah, exactly. At the very least, it would have been crushing enough to where they couldn't breathe. And perhaps it could have been heavy enough to cause these injuries. But Dr. Boris seemed skeptical that that was the only thing that happened. He kept indicating, like, no, there's something more. Something else would have had to do this. And then the last victim is Alexander Kolovatov. He had a deformed neck in the thyroid area. I have no idea

what would have caused that. He had a head wound that penetrated into the temporal bone. He had missing tissue on the right cheek, probably from decomposition. And the most likely cause of death for this guy is hypothermia, but he was found with the rest of the ravine crew. He didn't have any massive trauma, at least none that Dr. Boris found. And the clothes of these, these four victims had a high amount of beta radiation on them. This was caused by some introduction of radioactive particles into the setting, which is to say they didn't experience radioactivity somewhere else and then go on the trip. Yeah.

And they're still there. No. It would have worn, like the massive amount that was there would have worn off by the time they were actually found. Because remember it was three months later. And their clothes are still leaking with radioactive material. it was something that had to have happened at death. Otherwise, they would have been dead before they ever went on the trip.

That's how bad it was. And the last food intake of the team was approximated by Boris to be about six to eight hours before death. So the food that they found in the tent, they were thinking like, okay, well, they must have just left that out then or left it out to eat in the morning. It appears that the last four victims in the ravine did not outlive the five hikers that died near the fire or on the slope for very long, though they did outlive them for a short time. And it's interesting that their injuries were so different. And they were more externally dramatic, it seems. And people still can't really settle on a good explanation as to why that is.

So why don't we talk about the official explanation? Yeah. For what happened here? Because this was obviously investigated by the Russian government, the Soviet. I'm going to call it the Russian government. whatever. The Russian government at this at the initial time, this was a big story. A lot of people investigated it. And it was also then investigated again at the request of family from 2015 to 2019. So the official explanation of the incident. And I'm going to just read, I'm actually going to read this. The Wikipedia page is a really well-documented explanation of it. It was an avalanche explanation. I'll explain what they mean. And this is from the later investigation,

but it was also a similar conclusion initially. So on a, this is quote, on 11 July 2020, Andre Kyriekhov, deputy head of the Earl's Federal District Directorate of the Prosecutor General's Office, announced an avalanche to be the, quote, official cause of death for the Dietlaf Pass

group in 1959. Later independent computer simulation in analysis by Swiss researchers also suggest avalanche has the cause. Summarizing Kiriakov's report in the New Yorker, Douglas Preston writes, quote, The most appealing aspect of Kiriakov's scenario is that the Diatlov Party's actions no longer seem irrational. The snow slab, according to Green, would have probably have made loud cracks and rumbles as it fell across the tent.

I'm going to explain for a minute here. The specific type of avalanche that they hypothesize is a slab avalanche. So you can have different scenarios, steep hills. This hill wasn't very steep relatively for a mountain size. But what they were thinking is that there's a layer of snow and snow accumulates in layers like this through the winter where you have melting cycles. So if you cut down through 20 feet of snow in Utah,

like we had record snow last year. You're going to see you like distinct layers. Layer, layer, layer. And the most dangerous times for avalanches tend to be either after very heavy snowfall in specific conditions or especially heavy wet snowfall or warm conditions that heat up a layer. So you have a heavy layer on top of a lighter layer,

it will tend to break away and slide. and a slab. So the hypothesis was that there's a very small, localized slab of snow like this that crushed the tent and forced them out, injured some of the people as they fled. So I'm going to continue with the quote here now. He said it probably would have made loud cracks and rumbles as it fell across the tent, making an avalanche seem imminent. So a bigger avalanche. Kureikov noted that although the skiers made an error in the placement of their tent, everything they did subsubes. subsequently was textbook. They conducted an emergency evacuation to ground that would be safe from

an avalanche. They took shelter in the woods. They started a fire. They dug a snow cave. Had they been less experienced, they might have remained near the tent, dug it out, and survived. But avalanches are by far the biggest risk in the mountains in winter. And the more experience you have, the more you fear them. The skier's expertise doomed them. Interesting point. So yeah, it's an interesting point. because it, this was, the hypothesis, it respects the weirdness of the circumstance, at least enough. We're going to criticize it here,

but it respects the circumstance enough to admit that if it was an avalanche, it was an unusual one. Right. Because the normal thing to do, run would have been correct. Right. And this, though, was like a tiny little slab

that basically the idea is they disrupted a layer when they cut down for their tent and walked around. Yeah. And that caused a small slab to go over their tent enough to hurt them and cause them to have to

slash their way at a tent because it obstructed the entrance. But it actually wasn't the whole mountain wasn't coming down. Right. And so maybe that's why they were looking, like, yeah, to see, like, is there going to be more,

are we going to hear more cracking? Or we're going to see more slabs come down. And when you have an avalanche, it can cause more instability, so you don't want to go across the avalanche area again if it hasn't slid. Right. So the idea is basically that they,

And this sounds bad. I don't mean it this way. The slab, they heard the slab. They panicked. They ran. And then they were paranoid because they thought, well, certainly, if that went, then more is going to go to. We can't go back.

Yeah. Right. Because the whole thing could go. And then eventually, enough of them grew desperate to where those three members tried to get back. They died. And then the other four perished as well. At that point, they're going hypothermic.

Several people have already died. So they're going hypothermic. They're losing their judgment. and they're starting to make questionable and strange decisions. Another idea is that one of part of the group was maybe seeking for a cash of supplies that they had left. Yeah, a lot of people think that the four ravine hikers were actually trying to go around this ridge to get to a cache. They had just left that day, some short distance away. Of supplies.

And they ended up just not being able to make it. And they just didn't. They fell through the ice bridge collapsed with the water running underneath the snow, and they fell 20 feet and got really banged up. and died of injuries or exposure being stuck down there. Yeah. And so that's the official explanation. The later 2015 explanation or investigation also concluded that, yeah, that's what they agreed.

Right. That is what happened. Right. But there is contradictory evidence to this. Yeah, there is. It's not so simple as just a slab avalanche. The location of the incident didn't have any obvious signs that an avalanche had taken place. So they were looking at the layers.

around the tent and the snow, and they weren't seeing any layers anywhere else that weren't also right where the tent was. So it was like none of the layers had slipped around the tent. Now, maybe they were looking the wrong place, sure, but they didn't see any obvious evidence. This is still from that same section in the Wikipedia article. So they acknowledge, it's acknowledged that this isn't just us going, hey, we don't like this theory. Well, who are you? We weren't there. these are a bunch of experts, but this is acknowledged criticism.

Right. The experts are trying to do their best to explain a really weird situation. But the point is, even people who know what they're talking about don't agree. And ultimately, everyone admits that an avalanche that would have been strong enough to cause this, even though it wouldn't have been like a world-shattering avalanche. Right. Anyone that would have been strong enough to cause this would have damaged the tree line below them. Yeah, it would have been more evidence.

the tree line, and there's no evidence of that whatsoever. Yeah. This isn't a normal avalanche shoot area, but there is one close by. And so you do see avalanches near, but the slope angle on this exposed hill is not steep enough for avalanches to be a big concern. And the hikers would have known this. Yeah, the other thing is Diatlov was experienced, very experienced in hiking and also skiing, and so was Zolotario.

Yeah, Simeon. He was trying to go for his ski instructor, master hiking instructor. So they would have been, again, avalanches are the number one cause of death in these situations. Exposure and avalanches. So you're going to do, you're going to know when you're setting your camp up that this slope is not prone to avalanches. Right, right, right. And there's been more than a hundred, according to this, there have been over a hundred expeditions to this region since the incident. And not one of them ever had an inkling of an avalanche in that area or condition.

that would have created an avalanche in the spot where they were camping, which is why they camped there. Right. Because it's not an avalanche area. And then also the tent kind of fell. If it was an avalanche, the tent would have fallen a different way. Right. It collapsed in a different way. It didn't seem to be consistent.

Right. The avalanche would have gone past to the tent, making it collapse in a horizontal direction, kind of. This is kind of hard to describe. Yeah. But instead, it collapsed. from the side, which, again, it's difficult to describe. But the point is that it was partially collapsed and in the way that would have been opposite of what you'd expect

from a normal avalanche, unless it was some really, like, completely act of God avalanche type thing. Also, the footprint patterns, again, weren't consistent. If you think about avalanche cracking, the whole mountain's going to come down, and they believe that, hey, guys, we got to cut out of the tent. There's no time to get closed. Don't get your boots.

We got to go fast. We got to go. You would think that you would have seen them run out. Right. And the footprints show that they all run out and maybe follow each other. But instead, they walked out. Their gate, the length of the steps were consistent with walking. Right. With arms linked, not as if they were fleeing from the mountain coming down. Right. It was as if something about the tent only was threatening. And they just had to get away from the tent. But then it's like, well, if you're out of the tent and on an exposed face, you may as well go down to the tree line because you're going to be you're going to be better off waiting there than just in the middle of the wind so that's the idea there the biggest thing for me is the slope angle and in the how cold the weather was at the night i'm at 40 below yeah it just such a light slope and such cold conditions it just seems really difficult for me to buy into the fact that an avalanche could have happened i have to suspend a lot of disbelief in order to think that that is really the thing that happened yeah

One of the other explanations is infrasound or catabatic wind, where basically they set up their tent in just the worst possible place for the wind patterns to go all around the hills and weaving in and around the ridges. And it creates this really low frequency sound that can't actually be heard by the human ear, but the mind still perceives it. And because of how it vibrates the eardrum and all this stuff, it makes some people feel an overwhelming sense of anxiety and dread of fear. And so the idea is like, well, the wind was so strong that night.

Maybe they suffered this infrasound phenomenon and enough of them panicked that the rest of them then panicked. And they all just ran away. Yeah. The issue with that is that, like I said, it's localized. So once you get that far away from the tent, the effects would have worn off. And you'd have been like, let's go back to the test. You would have quickly realized like, oh, I just got to deal with it. We're going to die.

Let's walk 100 meters to, or half a mile of the tent. They could have made a half a mile walk. Yes, they could. Especially after sitting around a fire. Yeah. So, and the catabatic wind is a little different. Catabatic winds are winds that form down slopes. So it's like, and it's a rare phenomenon.

But it's basically that when you have certain conditions with a mountain slope or it happens in glacial cliffs, where the wind will form a very high density, fast, like extremely fast moving wind down the slope. There are documented cases where people have been killed by catabatic winds, and it's like car injury, car crash injury stuff. Because you're getting thrown like a hurricane. But the problem is the tent was still there. Yeah. And not everybody had...

And the tent wasn't covered in snow. It wasn't covered it. So it wasn't a catabatic injury. And a catabatic wound, it would have covered it in snow. We just know that it wasn't because they all would have been blown away and had the same injuries and died that way. and the tent would have been blown away. Brian, studies done throughout the U.S. show that almost one in five churchgoers,

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You actually start to look at the piece of evidence that the initial chief investigator thought was the most compelling. And I'm paraphrasing, but the investigator essentially said, all that's left are the lights in the sky. Because there were reports from other people in nearby areas. And then there are those two strange pictures that I'm about to talk about that seemed to indicate something more was going on. And then you get a whole other slew of theories after this. So I'm going to just talk a little bit about what these strange pictures actually are. The local Mancy tribes people had legends and drawings of fiery balls of light that hung in the sky, full of wrath and power. They referred to them as, quote, flying lights, golden orbs, gods and shining garments, powerful searchlights that release lanterns.

Apparently the Mancy people saw this phenomenon enough to regard it with fearful reverence. This culminated at some point in their long history with the crowning of the goddess Sorni Nye, which translates to the golden sun. This goddess, according to legend, would often go on deadly hunts through the air with her bright and obedient servants. She would be a mother ship to their delegations further down.

She floats over the cedar forests, leaving no footprints, but a death bang would accompany her and her merciless light would blind her victims. The legend says that Sorni Nye is not interested in harvesting bodies, only taking the vital life force from her victims, the souls of the victims. On the very same night as the Diatlov tragedy, another student hiking group, led by Anatoly Shumkov, was about 50 kilometers south, climbing the remote Mount Chista. They had summited in the middle of the night, and they were able to see, in the far distance, the silhouette of the snowy domed peak of Mount Othorton, which was actually a, the Diatlov Party final objective.

It was contrasted against the night sky. As they prepared for the descent, the clouds to the north of them, in the direction of the Deatlov party, suddenly flashed silver. Shumkov reported a massive and bright white spark shooting upwards from the Ortorten Valley, floating silently and brightly around the mountaintops,

illuminating the clouds around it. He thought that it was the Deatlov team firing off a flare to celebrate a completed mission, so he was happy for his friends. When examining all the evidence in this case, the autopsies leave one nothing but puzzled. There's no straight answer that comes from the findings. We can rest assured that some died of hypothermia and some died of trauma,

but what caused the trauma and what actually forced them from the tent in the first place and what caused the other weird side effects found on the hypothermic victims like burns and internal bleeding and skull fractures. Ultimately, we don't know. But if we examine that last piece of evidence left behind, we can venture what we think is the beginnings of a guess. The key to this guess lies in the photographs, specifically the last images on the cameras that display an incredibly bright light which seems to be perched up in the sky.

We mentioned these pictures already briefly. They're called frames Z7 and K-34. They're the key images that actually are available to the public and show some of the something that genuinely is unexplained. Frame K-34 displays a blurry image of a bright cluster of light on the left side of the frame with some lens flare in the center. When this picture is enhanced, three round artifacts are seen at the bottom right corner. Now, this could be fingers blocking the frame, it could be rocks, it could be the tops of

three people's heads who are also looking at whatever this is actually a picture of. The image is, like I said, blurry. but it was mounted on a tripod, and if we assume this was used to take that image, which isn't too great of an assumption, we can also assume that the blur is due to the motion of the bright object, not necessarily the motion of the camera. When analyzed in some other ways that I won't get into, it appears to be a bright orb leaving a trail of light behind it.

And I mean frankly that it looks like a classic UAP or orb type photo, even down to the blurriness. there's a chance it could be an image taken by an investigator to reset the shutter once it was taken back to the lab for investigation. That is a real possibility. So we could just be seeing a blurry image of a spotlight in a room.

The problem with that is that it seems like this image would be a strange thing to keep back from the public for so many years, even temporarily, because it was kept from the public for a long time. Also, the object in the image is so bright that it blacks out completely the rest of the frame. and a light in a room would probably not do this.

So maybe it's a flare, maybe a torch, or a crashing plane, or maybe it's some kind of orb. And moving on to what is perhaps an even more compelling photograph, it's frame Z7. The cameras found wrapped around Zolotoriev's neck in the ravine. This photo, among others, was also kept hidden from the public until about 2015. It seems to depict some kind of ice crystals forming on the lens,

maybe some snow had melted into a water drop while still in the tent and then froze when they moved outside. Right on top of this ice crystal is a very bright ball of light. This image is far more clear than K-34. Given the cameras they had, this is actually a pretty good picture. It's just a matter of figuring out what it's actually a picture of. It's worth interjecting here that nine frames of the party's cameras are still missing from the public, concealed by investigative authorities. and we don't know what these frames hold.

But anyways, the frame Z7 has been extensively analyzed by the author Henning Kirsten of a book called the Diatlov Pass Mystery, not a cold case, a book that I used a lot in the researching for this show. He removed some noise in the picture, he added some sharpness and contrast, and what he found was pretty alarming. The ball of light seems to be anything but just a flare, and it doesn't seem to match up at all

with other images of more ordinary light sources. It almost looks like a bright fireball or something, and it's leaving a trail of smoke or some other semi-luminescent trail behind it. There's also trace evidence on the film's surface itself that indicate it could have been exposed to high levels of electricity. So what rabbit trails might this lead us down into? Has anyone else encountered orbs in that area that have behaved in this bizarre and terror-inspiring kind of way? Well, Brian. actually there's a whole web of phenomena or theories

that range around what these lights were or what could have caused some of these problems. There's a lot. Now, one of the theories, the speculations, is that the Soviet military was conducting exercises in the area. We know that they did conduct exercises

in this area at other times and even around this time. So the idea was that they were conducting parachute mine exercises. Parachute mines, the way they work is that they are, it's like what it sounds like. It's a bomb. Which is really cool. With a parachute attached to it.

Let's all be honest. Sounds pretty cool. Who doesn't want a parachute like to be able to throw a couple parachute bombs out of a plane or whatever? So basically the idea is that Soviets didn't know their people there or, you know, civilians there because it's super remote Siberian wilderness. Yeah. They're throwing out parachute mines for the, for the tests. This would mean that you would see like bright, glowing orange fireballs in the sky.

Parachute mines don't explode when they hit the ground. They explode in the air. And the injuries that they cause, if you were to be killed by one, is very similar to some of the trauma. So you wouldn't have external injuries as much as shockwave that gives you. It's very fast-moving air, basically. It's displaced by the explosion. Travels through your body very quickly causes a lot of damage internally to your bones and your organs. and then you bleed and you die.

Yep. Or it injures you really badly and you freeze to death and die of injuries. So the idea is that they got really scared by hearing explosions. They cut the rate of their tent. They run because there's explosions right near them. Some of them are injured by these explosions. They make it to the tree. Two parties split out, one trying to get to the tents.

One tries to make another camp and maybe find that cash. They're killed by another explosion, fall into the ravine and die. Yeah. That's the idea. Yeah, that's the idea. I'm not super compelled by it, I'll be honest. Yeah, so why not? Because I have some reasons. Yeah, I'm not super compelled by it because, number one, it just seems super contrived.

It seems more likely that those people fell through a hole in the snow over in the ravine than, like, were thrown into it, you know, by fireballs of the parachute mines. I think that the Russian government cover up would have been different had they done it. I think we would have far less information. Yeah. Had that been the case. I think that it doesn't explain why they cut their way out of the tent to me or why they didn't put some more clothes on.

Because even if you're scared of like parachute mines or whatever blowing up, unless they're right there. Yeah, why would you not? Because there was no... So, I mean, I guess you could say that any debris that was there was collected by the government and it was taken away.

and whatever, but the tent was still partially collapsed. Like, something had to happen to force them out urgently. You could also say that it explains the charred branches on the tree, but then you'd have to assume that it was almost like targeted, like these parachute mines were following the kids. And I think if that were the case, you'd have some much bigger problems that you'd have to answer. But then you have to say, okay, well, if it's not that, then they were just peppering the whole area

with these parachute mines. But there's no other damage anywhere else. Right. So it was localized to the fire, and you're trying to tell me that the government just luckily threw one right over their tent and then collected all the debris and hit it away. And then also luckily threw one right over the fire they had just made.

It's the same thing with the radiological testing, where it's like, oh, they were doing radiological bombs or weapons. But then why is only some of, do only some of them have radiation. Yeah, only four victims have radiation. Yeah. And not these other people. That's the thing is so many of these explanations explain some of the victims.

But not all. But none of them really explain all. I even heard someone who did a lot of research on the, especially around the Schumko expedition, the one where they found, they saw the glowing orb. And they reported extreme cold. And so some of the meteorological data from this time that we do have in reconstructing it, does show that basically through this region because of a confluence of different meteorological phenomena,

they experience maybe even down to 50 below zero. Wow. Okay. So the thing is, we can sometimes think and go back and think like our equipment's like theirs. So they're not using down sleeping bags, mummy bags with sleeping pads and that kind of thing.

They're using tarps and blankets. They're using heavy fiber clothing, not synthetic materials, but clothing that holds. moisture and gets cold. Like Gene, they're using a canvas tent. Yeah. They didn't use their stove that night.

So they didn't set up their stove in the tent. So it seems like they might have camped on an exposed area. 50 below cold front comes through. They wake up almost dying because they're so cold. Wow. And then they say, we need to get to the tree line. We need to do whatever. So I've heard that as an explanation.

But then, why not get dressed? Why not just a stove will heat up a tent? Why not heat use the stove? Why not? I mean, there's so many other elements that every single explanation like this, I go, cool, that explains maybe part of it. Right.

Then what about all the injuries? So there's one idea. Okay. I want to hear your least hinged idea, Ben. This is Haunted Cosmos. Okay. Haunt de Atloff. Let's hear it.

Orbs. Orbs. ball lightning. Aliens. A ball of plasma lightning that descends, just like the Mancy people said, like the goddess, whatever the goddess's name was.

Sorni Nye. Sorni Nye, who descends in this ball of light and sends out her messengers to steal the souls of people. Yeah. Okay, what if we just suspend this belief from him and say,

what if orbs are involved in this? At this point, Ben, I'm willing this. Let's just go. Let's go. Just what if orbs are involved in this? There's a mountaineer really, really, prolific ski mountaineer named Henning Kirsten. He wrote that book that I just mentioned, the Diatlov Pass Ministry, not a cold case. And so he brings this really rich history of his own

personal experience in the mountains to the table when analyzing this whole thing. And he is, he's emphatic about the avalanche doesn't make any sense. The government testing thing like what you're saying doesn't make sense. They would have done it differently. And so you're left with like, what if it was the UAP kind of thing? And so I just want to give a couple of accounts from history, specifically of a mountaineering trip, by some Russians in the Caucasus Mountains in 1978. And they had something happened to them,

and I think you'll find that some of these things sound very similar. So this is taken from Mr. Kirsten's book, as he recounts the account given by one of those Russian climbers in 1978. I woke up with the strange feeling that a stranger had made his way into our tent. Thrusting my head out of the sleeping bag, I froze. A bright yellow blob was floating around one meter from the floor, and it disappeared into Coravin's sleeping bag. The man screamed in pain.

The ball jumped out and proceeded to circle over the other bags, now hiding in one, now and another. When it burned a hole in mine, I felt an unbearable pain, as if I were being burned by a welding machine, I blacked out. Regaining consciousness after a while, I saw the same yellow ball, which, methodically observing a pattern that was known to it alone, kept diving into the bags, evoking desperate, heart-rendering howls from the victims. This indescribable horror repeated itself several times.

When I came back to my senses for the fifth or sixth time, the ball was gone. I could not move my arms or legs and my body was burning, as if it had turned into a ball of fire itself. In the hospital, where we were flown by helicopter, seven wounds were discovered on my body. They were worse than burns. Pieces of muscle were found to be torn out to the bone. The same happened to Shigen, Kaprov, and Bashkarov.

Oleg Koravin had been killed by the ball, possibly because his bag had been on a rubber mattress, insulating it from the ground. The ball lightning did not touch a single metal object, injuring only people. So there were also reports from the same area and around the same time of this miner who's working close by and he's in charge of a mining crew. And he's over this one specific pit. You know, he's the foreman of a pit.

And he goes over there to start turning on the machinery, but also just checking to make sure everything was there because they had had some robberies in the past. Yeah. The point is he's all alone and it's completely dark when he arrives. And he says that he gets there and everything quiets down and he sees this massive ball of white light start to come towards. him through the forest. And then it sends out these little like swimming beacons of other light that seem to be coming straight towards him. And it's making this horrible buzzing sound and it's, it is making him really freaked out. He starts hiding behind this thing. And then he notices that it goes away. Well, then he turns around and looks back and it turns around and looks back towards

him. And he's like the only person there and he's getting completely freaked out. So he turns on all the lights that he can in the pit, but it doesn't go away. And so now he's getting even more afraid. And finally, some trucks start rolling up because they're seeing like, oh, this, this pits available now. And finally, the thing kind of like just dissipates into the air and starts to go away, which that makes it seem almost like this, this prescient thing. But then there was another, again, this is all really local to Mount O'Torten, like the whole Diatlov Pass area. There was a park ranger who was nearby. And this is, I think, one year after the Diatlav events. and he said that he was looking up from his tent.

He was alone at night. He had just lit the fire. And he started seeing what looked like swinging flashlights through the woods. And there were poachers in the area, so he started going after them with this rifle. And these flashlights, it turns out, were only coming out of this much bigger ball of light

that looked like almost solid or something. Like it was horrible. So he hides behind this log, and he looks up, he says, for 45 minutes, he's looking up at this thing. And every time he looks up, the trails of light come closer to him. And so he ducks down again and he looks up and they come again. Finally, he says like after, you know, 45 minutes to an hour,

this thing just kind of dissipates into the ether. And he makes his way back to his tent. And so the idea from this Hitting Kirsten guy is that what if the orb or what if there's a natural phenomenon called ball lightning that we just don't know that much about? Yeah. where this like confluence of temperatures and pressures and static electricity and ionized air all come together to create an environment where this semi-tangible and solid plasma ball descends and is hovering over the earth looking for some highly conductive thing to pass through and humans are quite conductive and so anytime there's a human close by it it almost like goes to attack them so that's weird that's the idea i mean i know that people have investigated this, like Dr. Tudorani here, has investigated this, or at least they've established

the group to try to figure it out. Right. The Hesdalen project, basically a group that's trying to figure ball lightning out. Because there's, to me, this phenomena has like a van diagram with orb and lightning where you go, okay, if this really exists, is it a natural phenomena, or is it some demon orb thing? Because they seem sentient. Is it one of those things that could be both? Yeah. Every once in a while, the spiritual thing

latches onto the natural and it, I don't know, it becomes more sentient, kind of. So they call this spherical, unidentified anomalous aerial phenomena or AAPs or Earthlights. Apps. Apps, like apps and zerts. Earthlights, nice. Earthlights.

A lot of people say that after earthquakes, they see these balls of light rising up from the cracks in the ground. So this is an event that's, you know, witnessed by a lot of people. It would kind of help to explain some of the stuff on Skinwalker Ranch. Like the crazy orbs that fly through the air and kill dogs. Like they turn dogs into goop. Yeah, in a puddles of dog butter. And one of the things that he said is that the scientists that are doing this research claim

that you could very, very easily have one of these things explode and create a shockwave. And so the guy, Henning Kirsten, however you pronounce his name, some Norwegian thing, he kind of gives his whole series of events. He thinks that he figured it out. So he tells the Dietlaff story through this. He tells the Diatlov story. Yeah, and I'll tell us the story. How does it go? So it was past midnight. Most of the hikers were sound asleep and the snowfall had stopped. And Zolotarov crawled out of the tent with his flashlight in hand in order to go to the bathroom. There was something in the air, like some kind of electrostatic energy. that made crackling noises and tiny sparks when he brushed over the neoprene jacket. Suddenly, through squinting eyes, he could make out flickering purple blue flames that seemed to be burning on tall rock formations of the southern pass, like a lonely and forgotten landlocked lighthouse that doesn't know it's no longer needed. And he turned back to the tent to wake his comrades,

and when he did, he noticed a similar strange glow on the ski poles that were holding up the canvas. He watched in awe for a few minutes. he'd never seen anything like this. And suddenly a bright sphere, larger than the moon, caught his attention in the near distance. Engulfed in a foggy halo like a ghost in a misty graveyard, it slowly and silently floated across the bare mountain slope from the south, oscillating in brightness and changing color from yellow to white,

like some mysterious firefly from dis. He yelled his friends awake and asked for a camera. Tebow threw on his felt boots and hurried outside to hand Zolotariov, the first camera. While Krivenoshenko was preparing a tripod with his own camera, the others crawled outside to witness and photograph this spectacular celestial phenomena. They watched for a few minutes and Kvinashenko managed to take a single and final picture that K-34 frame of an undulating bright orb before it disappeared in silence behind the peak. Baffled but not frightened, the group returned to the tent in their warmed blankets discussing the phenomena they'd just seen, Igor mentioned

that maybe these fireballs are unknown phenomena in this area because he'd actually been warned by an old man and farmer in one of the towns they'd pass through to watch out for crazy lightning. And just as Slobodan was about to take off his second boot. A white spinning torus appeared 30 meters above the tent, sending a hot beam of blinding bright light towards the tent like a vindictive microwave. Seconds later, it multiplied into a pulsing cluster

like cells in our microscope. Zolotarov, the guy who first saw it, had remained outside this whole time, and he watched an anxious disbelief as the wobbling cluster suddenly spit out a turn-up-sized, bright blue ball, which descended with great speed. A few meters above the snowy slope, it made a sharp turn and headed against the wind to the uphill end of the tent, where the stove usually stands, and the smokestack exits. It slipped into the tent through the pipe opening, slowly hovered for a few terrifying seconds in mid-air, and then explode.

on the aft supporting ski pole with a tremendous bang, splintering the pole at its junctions and cracking the lens of Krivenoshenko's camera, which was lying attached to the tripod on the floor. Instantly, panic overcame the hikers inside the now partially collapsed tent. Blinded and deafened, they grabbed knives lying around them from dinner and cut themselves through the eastern canvas opposite the path of these light balls. A safe distance downhill, they regrouped, conned themselves, and decided that a return to the tent would be too dangerous. They couldn't recover. cover their boots and jackets, at least not yet. The next fireball was already visible on the southern sky, and they were still so full of adrenaline that they barely noticed the freezing cold.

They fled eastward towards the valley of the Lazva River. They knew exactly that they had ascended from the southern Osprey River Valley in the evening, and the ridge of the pass and the wind from the north were like natural compasses. Moreover, the passing orbs provided more light than a full moon. Zolotarov, the oldest and most experienced of the group, was calm enough to take about 20 pictures of these fireballs. Since he and Tebow were wearing boots and warm clothes, they were not in the same hurry to get to the sheltered tree line, but were eager to capture the spectacular event on camera. They were able to rejoin the group at the tree line. Little did Zolotariev know that two hours later, he and his camera would nevertheless end up at the bottom of a creek.

The pictures taken now just main leads in an investigation that would last six decades. Holding hands, the hikers stumbled in their socks down the mountain to the promising safety of the forest. When the other two caught up and rejoined, they headed for a large cedar tree, which stood like a tall signal tower in a stormy night, a prominent and somehow inviting meeting place that would be easy to find again if they got lost. Another good reason to choose the cedar was the circumstance. Beneath the branches only a few centimeters of snow would obstruct them in building a fire. However, in their bewildered state of mind, they forgot that tall trees were not the safest place to be during a thunder snow condition.

But then again, this was not a typical lightning storm. While his friends went on to collect dry branches from the cedar and surrounding bushes, Krivenoshenko managed to get a fire going. There was plenty of dry firewood available, but collecting it and tending the fire was an increasingly painful task, as frozen hands were burning with pain and sharp branches caused bleeding injuries. Dorishenko soon realized that thicker branches would allow for a warmer and longer fire. He climbed the cedar and began to work on the upper branches. Some were too green for fire, but they were perfect for insulation from the freezing.

ground. At this point in time, the group was well organized and had a good chance to survive and eventually returned to the tent. In that instant of hope, things took a catastrophic turn for the worse. A lightning bolt crashed down on the cedar, tearing off thick branches and leaving a large gap on the side of the tree facing the mountain. Doroshenko, who was unlucky to be in the tree at the time, was killed instantly by a current thousands of amps strong. The energy entered his body on his head and arms, boiled his lungs and exited his legs and feet, leaving them partially charred. He tumbled to the ground, hitting sharp protruding stumps and tearing his clothes on the way down. The search party would later find pieces of his clothing and skin on the bark.

As the bolt traveled along the trunk of the tree into the ground, it ejected a large and blindingly bright lightning ball. They got attracted to the conductive plasma of the fire and exploded next to Privenoshenko, kneeling beside it. The hot blast charred his hand. hands, burned a large area of his leg and foot and caused fatal injuries to his lungs. All this happened in a split second. While the two unlucky fire-tenders lay dead beside the blown-out fire, wood splinters and pine

needles came raining down from the sky. Some of the nearby spruces were glowing from the hot plasma, and scorched twigs and dead birds would be discovered by Chief Inspector Ivanov three weeks later. Zena and Sloblden, who were collecting twigs a few meters away from the fire, were thrown into shrubs, suffering cuts and contusions. Slobodan landed on his head resulting in hemorrhages, abrasions, and a skull fracture. They survived the blast, but the seriousness of their situation instantly dawned on them. Tebow was not so lucky.

He was catapulted into a rocky depression downhill from the cedar, where he suffered a more severe skull fracture and concussion. He may as well have been thrown off a busy road by a speeding and unfeeling car. Zolotariov, who was standing in a clearing close to the cedar and still trying to capture the phenomenon on film was hit by the full force of the blast wave, shattering his right rib cage and severely compressing his lungs and organs, causing internal bleeding. When the seven survivors recovered from the shock and regained their vision and hearing, they regrouped and realized that seeking shelter under the cedar had been a bad choice. They remembered the ravine they had crossed

shortly before reaching the cedar, and after bedding their two dead comrades onto branches beside the remains of the fire and salvaging some of their clothes, they dragged the fatally injured Tebow back to the natural depression of the snow-filled creek and agreed to split. Three would stay with Tebow and dig a shelter, while the stronger three would continue on and attempt to make it back to the campsite to retrieve clothes and blankets. Zena chose to stay with Ikor.

She admired him, while he felt equally attracted to her and wanted to see her safe. Meanwhile, the three at the creek didn't realize they were digging their own grave. Ludmila, Kolovatov, and the injured Zolotarov were in the process of moving snow and laying out branches for the shelter on the bank of the creek, when a final tragedy overcame the weakened and decimated group. Ludmila decided to return to the cedar to achieve more clothes from the dead and to carry over coals from the fire when she broke through the ice snow bridge covering the creek, which had been destabilized by their crossing and by the den of the bank.

She fell three meters down into an icy black tunnel, smashing her rib-cage in face on a large boulder protruding from the bedrock. She never regained consciousness. She would be discovered months later like a fallen climber with multiple broken ribs, hemorrhage in her punctured heart, and blood in her stomach from her smashed face. Kola Vatav and Zolotarov immediately hurried to her rescue, but their united weight caused the overhanging bank, including the fatally wounded Tebow, to completely collapse into the creek. With soaking wet clothes and frozen hands in the negative 30 degrees Celsius, they didn't have the slightest chance to climb out, let alone rescue the dying Ludmila from the freezing water. It was as hopeless as being trapped in a crevasse. Their dugout became their grave, and its location was indeed so sheltered that it would take over three months for their bodies

to be found, under tons of melting snow, grouped together in a final embrace. Zena, Slobodan, and Diotlov, who were attempting to return to the tent, didn't know that they were the last survivors. For close to an hour, they were too afraid to cross the exposed slope in the ongoing APP event, and were finally overcome by exhaustion and hypothermia. With fists clenched in pain and determination, they were found in locations that lent some minimal shelter from the wind. Several witnesses, dozens of kilometers away, including the Kistop hikers, would later testify to the exploding fireballs and hours-long duration.

of the event. To the Mancy, it was another fierce display of power by Sornini Nye, their goddess and shining garments. Now, of course, this is by no means a definitive solution. No, we think it is quite compelling. The existence of Earthlights and ball lightning is still heavily disputed. Orbs are heavily disputed. We don't know what they are, if they are. We don't know if they're always natural, sometimes natural, or ever actually natural. Perhaps the Mancy weren't too far from the truth of the matter. At any rate, this is just one among a vast number of unexplained mountaineering incidents that continue to grip the curiosity and imagination of people today. And we'll leave you with one last story. Not about the Atlaw and his team. In fact, it has

nothing to do with him, at least not on the surface. But it goes to show how strange of a place it is that we live and how there are things at work under the sun, whether natural or otherwise, that we certainly have yet to discover in name. On August 9, 1993, in a small river feeding the immense Lake Baikal in Siberia, a group of kayakers drifted through the water, enjoying the opportunity to breathe for a bit in between sections of heavier rapids. Little did the men know they floated towards a doom so dark and strange it remains unresolved today.

On one of the banks, half covered in some thicket and twig, one of the men noticed what he thought was the slight figure of a young woman, crouched as if halfway hiding, as if she was unsure how trustworthy of these men were. As the rest of the group registered her, she began a scream and begged for help with high-pitched shrieks. He took her in, and slowly now, made their way back to the town at the foot of the Kumar-Dabon pass that she had been traversing.

Safe again, but still crazed and silent for some unknown reason, she slept. On August 10th, she woke up, cleaned herself, and made her way to the local police station to share a story. The Camar-de-Ban range is not an uncharted alien land. It is in a hostile environment, sure, but it isn't shrouded in mystique. At least it wasn't.

For decades, it had been a popular proving ground for thousands of hikers each year. It was difficult. It would push you, but it wouldn't break you. It wasn't what you might describe as risky. So you can imagine the shock of the investigators when this petite young woman, Valentina, was her name, informed them that, were they to travel up to just beneath the highest point of the pass, they would find six corpses strewn across the gently sloping shoulder of the mountain. They were her friends.

Valentina appeared sober-minded enough, so the men went up. Sure enough, it was just as she had said, six people decomposing into the firm and unyielding mountainside. Autopsies were performed, reports were filed, and Valentina was cleared of any guilt. But she would not say what happened. Not until 25 years later, when she finally deemed her mind free enough from the pain to playback the events once again. According to Valentina, the only survivor, this is what happened. On August 2nd, 1993, she set out with six of her friends to spend a week in the Kamar-de-Bahn range,

hiking through the pass and enjoying a slow descent where they might practice some mountaineering skills. The trip leader, a woman named Ludmila, had done this same route dozens of times and was well-versed in the tricks necessary to give people a safe and joyful time on the mountain. By August 4th, the team had pushed through the high section of the pass and settled down for camp in an exposed but undeniably beautiful section of the hillside facing the gargantuan lake by call the mountainous ways began to show signs of a cold and heavy late summer storm brewing at its peak sure enough before long the team was enveloped in a brutal storm trees were bent down by the force of the winds at lower altitudes from them and at one point one of their tents was even lifted off of the ground

altogether. The team shared two tents and hunkered down for a night of rough sleep, unable to even light a fire. On August 5th, the storm had slowed and all but passed. They lit a fire, ate breakfast, grateful to be through what they were sure would be the worst monkey wrench thrown at their summer alpine trip. They packed and began to make their way to the next camp, a lighthearted mood of relief permeating the air. Then the real trouble began. A young man named Alexander, one of the members of their little band, started screaming in pain. The others turned around, soon regretting their pity for the sake of the horror that met their eyes. Alexander, healthy and jovial just moments before, was bleeding from his mouth and eyes, spitting foamy mucus from his mouth,

falling to the ground in agony, and began to convulse uncontrollably. Everyone screamed except Ludmila. She ran to the boy, searching for any way of helping him before she too succumbed the same fate. Eyes rolling back with blood taking their place, convulsing on the ground, she let out a scream before another woman ran to her. She didn't even get close to the pair before she too collapsed and began the same desperate and painful convulsions as the other. Valentina, subduing the temptation to panic, ran to this most recent victim and began to drag her away, wondering if there was something in the air that may be causing this. The woman bit her violently until she let go, and Valentina was then forced to watch as this woman, a shell of her

former self, crawled over to a boulder as if dragged by some unseen force. Once leaning on the stone, she lifted her head only to drive it back down onto the rock with inhuman force and recklessness. Valentina looked on. The woman slammed her face into the rock again and again until she slumped to the ground unmoving. Valentina was now stunned, shocked, scared, unable to move, unable to look away from even this vile scene. Two other hikers fled the scene, but it was a short flight. They too began bleeding from the face, before ripping at their clothes in desperation

and ultimately falling to convulsions and then stillness. The last member of the team, a young man named Dennis, grabbed Valentina and the two began their own sprint away from the carnage. Her heart sinking, Valentina continued on and crazed despair after Dennis fell behind with the familiar screams and shakes. the evil weapons of this mystery killer that had set upon the others.

She ran until she couldn't, and then she slumped down in the trees and set up her tent and slept. She slept thinking she would die, but she woke up again. For three more days, she wandered in a near catatonic dream through the woods on the wrong side of the ridge, following the power line to the river, following the river to an exposed bank and waiting there for someone. When she saw the kayakers, she screamed for help and was saved. She's never known what happened to her friends, and she's never been content with any ideas that anyone has given her. Want more Haunted Cosmos?

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