The Dyatlov Pass Mystery
Wednesday March 12, 2008 8:33 AM
On February 2, 1959, a man named Igor Dyatlov and eight other people were skiing in the snowy Ural Mountains in Russia when they decided to stop for the night. They took photos as they set up camp and retired for the evening. Over two weeks later, volunteer rescue workers found them all dead, and after almost 50 years, no one has been able to figure out what happened to them.
Investigators first found that the skiers' tents had been ripped open from the inside. The footprints leading away from the tents showed that they had run out into the snow without putting on their shoes or socks. The bodies of the first three skiers were found near the edge of the forest, and the second two were found closer to the tents, positioned as if they had been trying to run back towards the campsite. The other four bodies weren't found until two months later; they were buried in the snow far away from the campsite. They were wearing clothes that had belonged to the first five bodies found, and all four of them had sustained terrible internal injuries — one man's skull had been crushed, and a woman was missing her tongue.
An already-frightening series of events grew more frightening when it was discovered that the clothing the skiers were wearing contained extremely high levels of radiation. Witnesses at the funerals of the first five people found said that all five of them appeared to be deeply tanned. The investigation into the Dyatlov accident was closed soon afterward, and skiers and hikers were barred from the area for three years.
When the investigation files were unsealed in the 1990s, it was discovered that during February and March of 1959, several people in the area had reported seeing bright flying spheres in the sky. This information has prompted some to theorize that the deaths of Dyatlov and his friends were related to the spheres somehow, that perhaps the radiation and burned skin were the results of the party coming in contact with one of these spheres. Yury Yudin, who had planned to go on the trip but fell ill and was left behind, says that he found several items at the campsite that did not belong to any of his friends, and that he found documents which indicated that a military investigation began days before the rescue workers found the campsite. Perhaps this would explain why the investigation was closed so early, and so inconclusively.
The area has been renamed Dyatlov Pass in honor of Igor Dyatlov and his friends.
