So Supernatural - THE UNKNOWN: Dyatlov Pass

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

On a hiking trip in Russia's Ural Mountains in 1959, nine young mountaineers tore their way out of their tent in the middle of the night and went running into the wilderness, half-clothed and without shoes. By morning, they were all dead—some from hypothermia, others from unexplained catastrophic injuries. To this day, no one knows what happened. 

Almost every country has one moment in their history that spawned a whole culture of conspiracy theories. In the U.S., we have the JFK assassination. In the U.K., it's speculation about Jack the Ripper. And Russia has the Dyatlov Pass incident. In 1959, a group of nine hikers died in the Siberian wilderness under incomprehensible circumstances. According to the Russian prosecutor general, there are at least 75 different theories, but not a single one of them can fully explain what happened. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, we're talking about the Dyatlov Pass incident.

On January 23, 1959, a group of students and recent graduates set out from their university in the Soviet Union for a hiking trip. They were all seasoned mountaineers, and since they had a month before the start of the next term, they were going to test their limits with a 16-day trip to Otorten Mountain in western Russia. In the language of the native Manzi people, Otorten reportedly means don't go there. It's dangerous, especially in the dead of winter when the average temperature hovers around zero degrees Fahrenheit. But the group's 23-year-old leader, Igor, isn't one to back down from a challenge. They spend the evening packing up

the dorm and he makes sure they don't forget anything. Tents, food, skis, two first aid kits, cameras. One of the students, Giorgi, even brings his mandolin. And of course, they bring journals to record everything that happens. Now, the mountain is over 300 miles away from town. So to get there, they have to take two trains, a bus, and a passenger truck. It's going to be a few days before they even get to pull out their skis. On the initial train out of town, the expedition picks up another member who goes by Sasha. He was supposed to be joining a different hiking group, but the plans fell through at the last minute, so he asked Igor if he can tag along with them. Now, initially, the rest of the group is a little apprehensive about Sasha. He's, I mean, after all, a complete stranger. He's 37 years old, while the rest of them are in their early 20s,

and he's covered in strange tattoos. One of them is just a long series of letters that don't mean anything in any known language. But he's also a hiking instructor, and he says he has experience with the mountain that Igor and his friends are heading to. So they let him join, and by the next day, he's been fully accepted as one of the gang. On January 28th, the nine hikers finally set out from the last settlement before the wilderness. The real journey has finally begun. According to their journals, for the first couple of days, everything is peachy. The weather is nice. There's even a path to follow. The local indigenous hunters, the Manzi, had painted symbols on the trees, but none of the

hikers are totally sure exactly what they mean. When the sun goes down in the evenings, they find a safe place to set up camp, and all nine of them are sleeping in the same tent, which is this like huge 13-foot long behemoth that Igor has customized himself. It's a triangular piece of canvas held up by ropes that run along the top, and there's this opening for a collapsible chimney so they can keep the camping stove running inside for warm. Once the tent is set up, they cook dinner, they talk, they pass around that mandolin and play some music. As far as we can tell from their journal entries and photos, it's totally idyllic. Until the third morning of the hike on January 30th,

when the weather suddenly takes a turn for the worse. The temperature drops, the wind is blowing in their faces, and worst of all, it starts to snow. Pretty soon, the Manzi Trail ends. The forest thins out. The few pine trees that are standing are half-grown and misshapen, sprouting out of snow at crooked angles. By late afternoon, everyone's too exhausted to keep pushing against the wind.

They call it a day and set up camp. One of the two girls in the group, Luda, is so tired, she just plops down by the fire and refuses to move. Now, the rule is that no one is allowed to sit by the fire until all of the chores are done. There's this big hole in the side of the tent that someone's got to sew up before they can all relax. But it's been a long day. Everyone's a little bit worked up. So one of the guys, Nick, kind of picks a fight about it.

But Luda still won't get up, and Nick refuses to just fix the tent himself. Eventually, one of the other guys picks up a needle and gets to work. But by that point, the whole group is already in a really sour mood. Luda shuts herself into the tent and refuses to come out until after dinner. By the next morning, the tension has cooled off, but the weather is even worse than the day before. The sky is clear, but somehow it's still snowing. The wind is so strong, Igor compares it to the jet blast from an airplane taking off. Between the snow and the wind, they're only moving at about a mile an hour throughout the whole day.

By 4 p.m., they give up and settle in for the night. And that's where their journals stop. We don't have any more written records from the expedition. The only way to piece together what happened next is by looking at the photos that they left behind. So the next morning, February 1st, they're all in a great mood, laughing and joking around at camp. They need to pack light for the final stretch up the mountain, so they build this like temporary shelter for storage. Most of their food, extra pairs of skis, and sadly the mandolin are all packed away and then they set off. The photos from the afternoon are a lot more serious than the ones we saw from the morning. In fact, they look downright apocalyptic. They're trekking through total whiteout conditions. Literally all you can see are these like dark figures marching into a murky gray expanse. And then there's this one final shot.

It's super out of focus and in black and white, so it's impossible to tell what the photo actually is. All you can see is a streak of white light that seems to be moving down the left side of the frame against the black background. Now, it's possible that this was just an accidental exposure that was made in the dark room when they were developing the photos, but if it was taken by the hikers, there were only two things that it could be. When this camera was found inside the

tent, it was attached to a small tripod, so we can assume that the camera itself was sitting still when the photo was taken. So to explain the motion blur, that means that the light had to have been moving. So either it's someone waving around a flashlight, or it's some glowing object moving through the night sky. That is the last record we have from the expedition. No more photos, no more journal entries. All we know is that night, February 1st, 1959, they set up camp on the northern slope of the mountain called Kolat Siakl. Based on the choice of location, it looks like they were planning to continue up the ridge in the morning

and reach their final destination on February 3rd. They were expected to come back into town on February 12th, but that day came, and it went, and they didn't show up. Now, before they got to the mountain, Igor had called a friend and said that they might spend an extra few days out there. So at first, no one was that alarmed, but days end up passing, and then a week, and there's still no word from anyone. By the 21st, it's been four weeks since anyone heard from the campers. The university finally put together a rescue team to go out and look for them. Everyone still expected to find them alive, after all.

I mean, they were experienced climbers, and they knew how to protect themselves. But when the campsite was finally found on February 26, it painted a more ominous picture. The tent was still pretty much standing. All of the poles and ropes were still in place, but the top had collapsed under a few inches of snow. When they took a closer look, they saw that the side of the tent had actually been slashed open from the inside with a knife. Leading out from that hole in the side, there were eight or nine sets of footprints in the snow, and most of them were barefoot. The hikers had obviously fled the tent in a hurry since they just cut through the canvas instead of bothering with the flap, and they didn't even stop to put their shoes on before

running out into the snow. But the footprints were not made by people in a panic. The pattern indicates that they were walking calmly at a normal pace. It even looks like one person was carefully stepping into the footprints left by someone ahead of them. Nearly a mile downhill from the tent, the rescuers saw a cedar tree with the remains of a campfire under it. Next to the fire pit, they found the first two victims, Gheorghe and Yuri. They were both barefoot, wearing nothing but shirts and underwear. Eventually, the investigators would realize that the other campers were wearing their clothes, which means Gheorghe and Yuri probably died first,

and their friends took their clothes for extra warmth. They also had burns on their legs and feet, and the skin on their hands was completely torn up. Now, the lowest branches on the tree, about 15 feet up, had been torn down, so it looks like they tried to climb up the tree and injured themselves in the process. More bodies were found a little further up the hill. Under a thin layer of snow, they found the group's leader, Igor, and Zina, one of the two girls in the group. From the positions they were in, it looked like they were trying to walk back to the tent,

but they died of hypothermia before they made it. Then, after digging a little deeper into the snow, they found a third body, Rustem. Like the others, he had died of hypothermia, but he also had a fractured skull and bruises on his knuckles, the kind of bruises that you'd get in a fist fight. No one thought much of it at first because so far there wasn't really any signs of foul play. No extra set of footprints, no unexplainable injuries. But only five of the missing hikers had been found. There were four that were still unaccounted for.

It took three months for those last bodies to be found. And when they were finally uncovered on May 4th, it changed everything. There was a ravine about 250 feet away from the cedar tree where the other bodies had been found. The remaining four hikers had apparently built a sort of mag-shift den below the bank to protect themselves from the cold. By the time they were found, they were buried under about 13 feet of snow. Strangely, these four didn't just die from hypothermia like the others. They died from massive injuries. Nick's skull was cracked open.

Alexander had a broken nose and injuries to his neck. Luda's ribs were broken. And strangest of all, she was missing her tongue and both eyeballs. They were just completely gone. Testing revealed that some of their clothes were actually contaminated with radioactive substances. Now, it's hard to gauge exactly how much they were exposed to because the melting snow would have washed away most of the particles. But the contamination was still way above any level that could be considered normal. If all that wasn't strange enough, even more questions circled around the final victim,

Sasha, the interloper who'd just joined the group on the train. He had five broken ribs, both of his eyes were missing, and he was holding a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other, but he hadn't managed to write anything down. And finally, he had this camera around his neck. Now, unfortunately, the film was damaged by the melting snow, so there's only one frame that's even slightly decipherable. There's this big, bright light filling most of the frame and three dark shapes at the bottom that almost look like the tops of people's heads. Now this could totally be a technical malfunction or some kind of damage to the film, but it does call to mind the last

photo from the other camera that was found at the tent, the bright streak of light against the dark background. Sasha was one of only two people who were wearing any kind of shoes, so we can assume that he left the tent before everyone else on the night of February 1st, apparently to take a picture of this light. And then something went terribly wrong. The rest of the group cut their way through the tent, walked a mile downhill barefoot in an orderly fashion. Four of them then suffered extreme unexplainable injuries.

Radioactivity was somehow involved. And by morning, they were all dead. Putting all these pieces together in a coherent picture was a tall order. It all hinged on one question. Why did they leave the tent in the first place? This was an experienced group of climbers. They knew the danger of leaving their tent in sub-zero temperatures,

especially without even getting dressed first. Whatever forced them out must have been even more terrifying than the thought of freezing to death. Coming up, we'll look at some theories about how and why the campers died. And now back to the story. When the last four missing hikers were found on May 4, 1959,

it raised serious questions about what really happened at Dyatlov Pass. From the injuries on the bodies, there was speculation that they'd been murdered. The campsite was pretty close to a hut built by the local indigenous tribe, the Manzi. One theory among the investigators was that the Manzi hunters had attacked the group for trespassing on their hunting grounds. However, the Manzi are peaceful and there's no indication that they ever attacked hikers on this mountain or anywhere else.

Besides, Manzi hunters had been helping with the search. They were actually responsible for finding two of the bodies. Pinning the deaths on them was totally out of line. There was also no unaccounted for footprints or ski tracks on the mountain, so it didn't look like anyone else had been there except for the nine hikers. There weren't any animal tracks either, so they weren't attacked by a wild animal, which leaves the possibility that they'd killed each other. Two of the most badly injured victims, Luda and Nick, had gotten into a bad argument just a couple of nights before. Rustem had bruised knuckles and Alexander had a broken nose, so the two of them might have gotten into a fistfight. And of course, there was Sasha, who was more or less a stranger to the rest

of the group. From what we can tell from the photos and journals, he seemed to get along with everyone pretty well. But I mean, something could have happened to drive a wedge between him and the others. Now, it's kind of hard to believe that these young students would just kill their friends out of the blue, but when hypothermia sets in, it causes confusion and panic. It's fair to say they wouldn't be thinking clearly. The biggest problem, though, is that they had these internal injuries that seemed way too severe to be caused by another human being. According to the investigators, this was a level of damage you'd usually see in a car crash. It seemed more likely that they'd been killed by some natural force. But none of those possibilities really added up either.

I mean, more than anything, let's just look at the fact that someone's tongue and eyes were missing. No natural force does that. One theory that's often tossed around is an avalanche. The last four bodies were buried under four meters of snow when they were found. If it had fallen all at once in an avalanche, I mean, that would explain the internal injuries. However, this wasn't even considered as a possibility by the investigators at the scene. There's no record of an avalanche occurring in the area, not just in February of 59, but ever in the past 60 years. It just doesn't happen there.

Besides, if there was an avalanche, it would have caused way more damage to the tent uphill, and they probably would have been running out of the way instead of just walking calmly. Another option is a strong wind or sudden snowfall that partially collapsed the tent, forcing the hikers out. The thinking is maybe they tried to build a new camp a mile downhill, but by that point, hypothermia was already setting in. And so the last four survivors built a shelter in the ravine, which eventually collapsed on them, burying them under feet of snow and causing them severe injuries. But again, I don't think any of that explains how your tongue and eyes go missing. Now, this apparently, though,

was reasonable enough for the police because just a few weeks after the last bodies were found in May, the case was suddenly closed. The deaths were ruled the result of a natural force and all of the files were classified. Needless to say, a lot of people, me included, found this suspicious. Again, nothing about this theory explains what happened to Luda's missing tongue and eyes, or the bright light that was captured on the two cameras? Or the radiation found on their clothes? Why would they close the investigation with so many loose threads still hanging? But this was the Soviet Union, after all,

and when people mysteriously died or disappeared, a lot of people would believe that the government was usually behind it. I mean, this whole thing reeked of a cover-up. The conspiracy theories around this case really started on the day after Gheorghe's funeral. His family was holding a private gathering at their apartment, and they were visited by two hikers who'd been camping out on the same mountain range in early February. They told Gheorghe's father that on the night his son died, they'd actually seen a strange, bright light in the sky over the mountain.

They couldn't be sure, but they thought it was a rocket. Over the next few weeks, several other hikers came forward to police with similar accounts. They'd all seen some kind of lights or orbs in the sky. This could have just been a natural phenomenon like lightning, and that's what the lead investigator Lev initially thought. But then the red flags started popping up. As soon as he started connecting the dots between the orb sightings and the deaths, he was called to Moscow and told by his higher-ups to stop looking into it. They suggested that the investigation might be a danger to state

security. As it happens, the area around the mountain was full of military test sites. Records indicate that secret missile tests and rocket launches were happening nearby all throughout February and March. If those were the mysterious lights in the sky, it opened up a whole new possibility for what happened to the nine campers. According to the book Mountain of the Dead by Keith McCloskey, on February 1st, two bomber planes were testing air mines at a test field nearby. These air mines were dropped by parachute and they're meant to explode before they hit the ground, so most of the damage is caused by the shockwave instead of

actual debris. There were unusually strong winds on the night of February 1st, so it's not hard to imagine that one of the parachutes was blown off course and detonated over the campsite. The power of the blast could account for the severe injuries, the radiation, and the sudden panic that sent them fleeing into the darkness. There's one question that this theory doesn't answer, though. Why was Sasha already outside, poking around with the camera in the middle of the night? Getting into Sasha's head is a challenge. Even today, this guy's backstory is hard to pin down. He went by Sasha, but some documents also refer to him as Alexander,

and his actual legal name was Simeon. He served in the Red Army for four years during World War II and then kind of just drops off the map. There's no real evidence of this, but with his military experience and sketchy background, a lot of people speculate that he was a KGB agent. Remember how he was so determined to go to this particular mountain range on this particular day? I mean, to the point where he's joining a group of total strangers when his other plans fell through. Well, the theory is he was supposed to be going there on a secret mission. There are a few possibilities for what he was actually supposed to be doing. An author named Alexei Rakitin thought that he was meeting with foreign agents, possibly the CIA.

Another theory by Alexander Gulikov is that he was spying on one group of Soviet officials under the orders from a different group of officials. Despite the differences, most of these theories agree on one thing. Whatever Sasha was looking for, he snuck out of the tent to photograph it. Someone saw him, and then they had to intervene. Here's a play-by-play of how it might have gone down. So soldiers approached the tent, most likely by helicopter, which would have scared everyone out. They probably followed orders and marched down the hill for a while before things got out of hand. Rustem tried to fight the soldiers off, bruising his knuckles in the process.

Yuri and Georgi tried to climb up the tree to hide. Nick was thrown into the ravine, busting his skull on a rock. The rest of them were pretty much ignored. They would die of hypothermia soon enough. So the soldiers would have been more focused on Sasha, who had taken cover in the ravine with Luda and Alexander. I said earlier that the internal wounds didn't appear to be caused by a human attacker, but the Soviet special forces were trained in unique ways of killing and torturing people. For example, snapping their necks,

like what happened to Alexander, or pressing down on their chests until they were crushed to death, which is what happened to Luda. Luda also had her tongue cut out and her eyes removed, possibly a message to the others to stay silent about what they saw. And Sasha's eyes were removed as well, and the film in his camera was damaged beyond recognition. Of course, the military men would have quickly found out that Sasha wasn't a foreign enemy after all.

And if word got out that the Soviet special forces had accidentally killed a KGB agent, whoever led the attack would be in for some serious trouble. So by the time they realized the mistake, the rest of the campers would have already died from hypothermia. All they had to do was cover their tracks, literally, by smoothing out the extra footprints in the snow. The four bodies that were the most obviously injured were buried in the ravine under several feet of snow to make it look like there had been an avalanche that killed them. By the time the rescuers arrived nearly a month later, it looked convincingly enough like a freak accident. Now, that theory is probably one of my favorite theories, just for the storytelling

alone. There's zero actual evidence that it's true, but there's also no solid evidence that it's not true. And to me, it's one of the only things that explains why someone's tongue and eyes are missing. Again, I cannot let that go. And compared to the other conspiracy theories that surround this case, this one actually seems pretty plausible. So another theory was actually brought up by that lead investigator, Lev, who eventually claimed that the mysterious flying lights weren't missiles or rockets after all. He thought that maybe they were alien spacecrafts. That's right. The hikers had been killed by a UFO. There were some

unexplained burn marks on a few of the trees in the surrounding forest, which to him suggested that the camp had been attacked by a hyper-advanced heat ray. Now, this doesn't quite fit with the rest of the evidence, namely that they didn't burn to death. I mean, they all froze to death in several feet of snow. And if the lights in the sky were connected to this incident, it's more likely that they were from a military test, as we discussed, not an alien spaceship. Another theory was put forth in 2014 by the Discovery Channel, who released a documentary called Russian Yeti, The Killer Lives. And I'm going to spoil it right now.

The idea that a yeti did this is ludicrous. We've already disproven the possibility of an animal attack. And the only piece of evidence in the documentary is a photo that the hikers took of this like blurry figure in the forest, which is very obviously a person. But amid all of this wild speculation, it seemed like we were only getting further and further from the truth about what happened. Unless new evidence was found, there was just no way to make the pieces fit together. But after six decades, that was unlikely to happen. But then, on February 1st, 2019, 60 years to the day after the Dyatlov Pass incident, the Russian government made a shocking announcement.

They were going to reopen the investigation. We'll take a look at the new developments right after this. Now let's get back to the story. On February 1st, 2019, the Russian prosecutor general announced a new investigation into the Dyatlov Pass incident. They didn't give any rationale for why they were doing this. No new evidence had been found in 60 years. Now, presumably, they wanted to shut down the conspiracy theories, but this announcement had the opposite effect. The government had compiled a list of 75 theories about what happened, but they would only be investigating three possibilities. An avalanche, a snow slab, or a hurricane. According to a spokesman, the idea that the Russian government

had anything to do with the incident is, quote, absolutely out of the question. If you think this sounds suspicious, you're not alone. We've already discussed the avalanche theory, and it's one of the least likely of the bunch. There is zero indication that there has ever been an avalanche in this area. A snow slab is a little bit different, but not much. I mean, it's basically when an entire layer of snow breaks loose and slides down the mountain in one piece. It's self-evident that the snow slab did not roll over the tent or it would have been more badly damaged. I guess there could have been one nearby, which might have spooked them into leaving the tent, but it still doesn't explain the injuries. I mean, maybe there was a second snow slab that only hit four people near the ravine and then completely avoided everyone

else by the tree who was just 250 feet away. But that sounds about as likely as the Yeti attack. And I don't even know what to make of the hurricane theory either, since this mountain is a good 500 miles away from the nearest body of water. That would be like a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico killing hikers in Kansas. I mean, it just does not make sense. However, in the past few years, there have been a few other natural theories that are more likely than these three. In the book Dead Mountain, Donnie Icar proposes that the hikers might have been driven to hysteria by infrasound. When a wind vortex blows around an object that's shaped in just the right way, in this case, a mountain,

it can cause sound waves at frequencies so low that we can't consciously hear it. Those waves, known as infrasound, can supposedly cause a whole host of symptoms like headaches, nausea, and even internal organ damage. If the hikers were affected by infrasound, which is a big if, Icar thinks that it might have caused a panic, which sent them fleeing from the tent.

The sound itself could be responsible for their internal injuries, or the hysteria might have led them to beat each other to death. But here's the thing, though. The research on infrasound is pretty murky, and there's no evidence that naturally occurring wind can cause symptoms that severe. I mean, some scientists doubt infrasound can cause any physical symptoms at all. We can't definitely disprove this theory, but it's stuck with all the others in the realm of speculation. Another recent theory,

which came from a Swedish and Russian expedition in 2019, is that the incident was caused by katabatic wind. In basic terms, that's a wind that blows downslope with an extremely violent force. Some katabatic winds can blow as fast as hurricanes. Based on what we know about the weather from the hikers' photos and journals, it's pretty likely that one of these winds formed on the night of February 1st.

If the tent was in the middle of the wind blast, the sides would have started to collapse, forcing everyone out. With such powerful winds blowing, they wouldn't have had much of a choice but to walk downhill until they found a safe place to wait it out. They built a fire, dug a shelter into the ravine to protect themselves.

Yuri and Georgi were the first to die of hypothermia, at which point the others took their clothes for extra warmth. At some point, Igor, Zina, and Rustem decided to head back up the hill to the tent, but they didn't make it far before the cold got to them too. Sasha, Luda, Nick, and Alexander kept holding on in the ravine, but eventually the shelter collapsed, crushing them underneath. What really makes this theory stick out is that a similar event happened in Sweden in 1978, where a group of skiers were killed by a katabatic wind. The weather conditions and

topography at the Dyatlov Pass were really similar to the incident in Sweden. As it stands right now, this looks like the most logical explanation for what happened. But I mean, there's still a few pieces of the puzzle that don't fit, like the radiation on the group's clothing and the missing eyes and tongue. The problem with every one of these theories is that while they're all technically possible, none of them are a perfect fit. You can't explain every piece of evidence without jumping through bizarre logical hoops. Occam's razor says the simplest solution is usually the correct one, but there is no simple solution here, only varying degrees of insanity.

Thanks for listening. I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all other Audiochuck originals.