The Deadly Case of 9 Fleeing Skiers (Soviet Mystery from 1959)

Moscow Times, Issue 3834. Page 1 ^ | February 4, 2008 | Svetlana Osadchuk

[struwwelpeter]

	For MT Yury Yudin hugging Lyudmila Dubinina as he prepares to leave the group due to illness in late January 1959. The ski expedition's leader, Igor Dyatlov, is watching.

Nine experienced cross-country skiers hurriedly left their tent on a Urals slope in the middle of the night, casting aside skis, food and their warm coats.
Clad in their sleepwear, the young people dashed headlong down a snowy slope toward a thick forest, where they stood no chance of surviving bitter temperatures of around minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Baffled investigators said the group died as a result of "a compelling unknown force" -- and then abruptly closed the case and filed it as top secret.
The deaths, which occurred 49 years ago on Saturday, remain one of the deepest mysteries in the Urals. Records related to the incident were unsealed in the early 1990s, but friends of those who died are still searching for answers.
"If I had a chance to ask God just one question, it would be, 'What really happened to my friends that night?'" said Yury Yudin, the only member of the skiing expedition who survived.
Yudin and nine other students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute embarked on the skiing expedition to Otorten Mountain in the northern Urals on Jan. 28, 1959. Yudin fell ill near Vizhai, the last settlement before the mountain, and was left behind.
What happened next has been reconstructed from the diaries of the rest of the group and the photographs they took. Copies of the diaries, photos and investigators' records were reviewed for this article.

The skiers, led by Igor Dyatlov, 23, set up camp for the night of Feb. 2 on the slope of Kholat-Syakhl, a mountain next to Otorten. They pitched their tents at around 5:00 p.m., investigators said, citing photos that they developed from rolls of film found among the abandoned belongings.
Why the nine skiers picked the spot is unclear. The group could have detoured just 1.5 kilometers down the mountain to a forest, where they would have found shelter from the harsh elements.

"Dyatlov probably did not want to lose the distance they had covered, or he decided to practice camping on the mountain slope," Yudin said by telephone from Solikamsk, a town near Yekaterinburg, where the institute, now named Ural State Technical University, is located.
When the group left the institute for the expedition, Dyatlov promised to send a telegram as soon as they returned to Vizhai from Otorten Mountain, which he said would be by Feb. 12.
But Yudin said Dyatlov told him when they parted ways that the group would probably return a few days later than planned.

As such, no one was worried when the group failed to reappear on Feb. 12.
Only on Feb. 20, after relatives raised the alarm, did the institute send out a search-and-rescue team of teachers and students. The police and army dispatched their airplanes and helicopters later.

Puzzling Evidence

The volunteer rescuers found the abandoned camp on Feb. 26.
"We discovered that the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind," Mikhail Sharavin, the student who found the tent, said by telephone from Yekaterinburg.
Investigators said the tent had been cut open from inside and counted traces of footprints from eight or nine people in meter-deep snow. The footprints had been left by people who were wearing socks, a single shoe or were barefoot.
Investigators matched the footprints to the members of the group, saying there was no evidence of a struggle or that other people had entered the camp.
The footsteps led down the slope toward the forest but disappeared after 500 meters.

Infodjatlov.narod.ru From left, Lyudmila Dubinina, Rustem Slobodin, Alexander Zolotaryov and Zina Kolmogorova posing in early 1959.

Sharavin found the first two bodies at the edge of the forest, under a towering pine tree. The two -- Georgy Krivonischenko, 24, and Yury Doroshenko, 21, were barefoot and dressed in their underclothes.

Charred remains of a fire lay nearby. The branches on the tree were broken up to five meters high, suggesting that a skier had climbed up to look for something, perhaps the camp, Sharavin said. Broken branches also were scattered on the snow.
The next three bodies -- Dyatlov, Zina Kolmogorova, 22, and Rustem Slobodin, 23 -- were found between the tree and the camp. The way the bodies were lying indicated that the three had been trying to return to the camp.
The authorities immediately opened a criminal investigation, but autopsies failed to find evidence of foul play. Doctors said the five had died of hypothermia. Slobodin's skull was fractured, but the injury was not considered fatal.
It took two months to locate the remaining skiers. Their bodies were found buried under four meters of snow in a forest ravine, 75 meters away from the pine tree. The four -- Nicolas Thibeaux-Brignollel, 24, Ludmila Dubinina, 21, Alexander Zolotaryov, 37, and Alexander Kolevatov, 25 -- appeared to have suffered traumatic deaths. Thibeaux-Brignollel's skull had been crushed, and Dubunina and Zolotarev had numerous broken ribs. Dubinina also had no tongue.
The bodies, however, showed no external wounds.
The four were better dressed than the rest, and those who had died first had apparently relinquished their clothes to the others. Zolotaryov was wearing Dubinina's faux fur coat and hat, while Dubinina's foot was wrapped in a piece of Krivonishenko's wool pants.
Deepening the mystery, a test of the clothes found they contained high levels of radiation.
The investigation, however, was closed after a few months, and investigators said they could not find anyone to accuse of wrongdoing. Case files were sent to a secret archive. Skiers and other adventurers were barred from the area for three years.
"I was 12 at that time, but I do remember the deep resonance that the accident had with the public, despite the authorities' efforts to keep relatives and investigators silent," said Yury Kuntsevich, head of the Yekaterinburg-based Dyatlov Foundation, which is trying to unravel the mystery.

Investigators first explored the theory that the local Mansi people had killed the skiers in revenge for trespassing on their land. No evidence, however, was found to back up the theory; Neither Otorten nor Kholat-Syakhl were considered sacred or taboo places by the Mansi, case documents said.
Further debunking the theory, a doctor who examined the bodies in 1959 said he believed that no man could have inflicted the injuries because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged,
"It was equal to the effect of a car crash," said the doctor, Boris Vozrozhdenny, according to case documents.

'Bright Flying Spheres'

In 1990, the chief investigator, Lev Ivanov, said in an interview that he had been ordered by senior regional officials to close the case and classify the findings as secret. He said the officials had been worried by reports from multiple eyewitnesses, including the weather service and the military, that "bright flying spheres" had been spotted in the area in February and March 1959.
"I suspected at the time and am almost sure now that these bright flying spheres had a direct connection to the group's death," Ivanov told Leninsky Put, a small Kazakh newspaper. He retired in Kazakhstan and has since died.

For MT A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on Feb. 26, 1959. The tent had been cut open from inside, and most of the skiers had fled in socks or barefoot.

The declassified files contain testimony from the leader of a group of adventurers who camped about 50 kilometers south of the skiers on the same night. He said his group saw strange orange spheres floating in the night sky in the direction of Kholat-Syakhl.
Ivanov speculated that one skier might have left the tent during the night, seen a sphere and woken up the others with his cries. Ivanov said the sphere might have exploded as they ran toward the forest, killing the four who had serious injuries and cracking Slobodin's skull.

Yudin said he also thought an explosion had killed his friends. He said the level of secrecy surrounding the incident suggests that the group might have inadvertently entered a secret military testing ground. He said the radiation on the clothes supported his theory.
Kuntsevich agreed, saying another clue to the deaths was the fact that the faces of the first five bodies had been inexplicably tan. "I attended the funerals of the first five victims and remember that their faces look liked they had a deep brown tan," he said.
Yudin also said the released documents contained no information about the condition of the skiers' internal organs. "I know for sure that there were special boxes with their organs sent for examination, " he said.
No traces of an explosion, however, have been found near Kholat-Syakhl.

No Records of Missiles

While a missile fired from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan could have reached the northern Urals, there are no records of any launches at the time, said Alexander Zeleznyakov, a historian on Soviet missiles and a senior official with the Korolyov Rocket and Space Corporation Energia. The Soviet Union's other main launch pad, Plesetsk, only opened in late 1959. Zeleznyakov also said the surface-to-air missiles that could have been launched from the pads had not yet been built.
The Defense Ministry and the Yekaterinburg regional prosecutor's office said they had no immediate information, citing the age of the case.
Kuntsevich said he had led a group to the area last year and found a "cemetery" of scrap metal that suggested the military had conducted experiments there at some time.
"We can't say what kind of military technology was tested, but the catastrophe of 1959 was man-made," he said.

Yudin said the military might have found the tent before the volunteer rescuers. He said he had been asked to identify the owner of every object found at the scene and had failed to find a match for a piece of cloth that looked like it had come from a soldier's coat, a pair of glasses, a pair of skis and a piece of a ski.
Yudin also said he had seen documents that led him to believe that the criminal investigation had been opened on Feb. 6, 14 days before the search team found the tent.
Dyatlov's friends have looked into whether the deaths might have been caused by an avalanche. Setting up the camp on the slope might have disturbed the snow above, causing it to tumble down a few hours later. This would explain the ripped tent, which the skiers would have had to cut open to exit.
Skeptics of this theory point out that the skiers left the camp by foot and traveled more than a kilometer in minus 30 C.
Thibeaux-Brignollel would have been unconscious due to his shattered skull, said Mikhail Kornev, a doctor with the S.M. Kirov Russian Medical Military Academy.
But his friends could have carried him. After all, investigators could not decide whether there were eight or nine pairs of footprints in the snow.
Also, Dubinina and Zolotarev could have walked with their broken ribs, Kornev said. "I can grant this possibility since the situation was extreme," he said.
Six former rescuers and 31 independent experts gathered Friday in Yekaterinburg to look for answers about the incident. They concluded that the military had been carrying out tests in the area and had inadvertantly caused the deaths.
But "we still lack documents and ask the Defense Ministry, the space agency and the FSB to provide us with them to obtain a full picture," the participants said in a statement.

The conference was organized by Ural State Technical University, the Dyatlov Foundation and several nongovernmental organizations.
What really happened on the night of Feb. 2, 1959, may never be known. But Dyatlov is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. The area where the group set up their last camp has been officially named Dyatlov's Pass.

[struwwelpeter]

Some links:
Site (in Russian): http://pereval1959.narod.ru/
Photo archives (from 1959):
http://infodjatlov.narod.ru/fg4/index.htm
http://www.e1.ru/fun/photo/view_album.php?id=32891

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

Bad link. Looking for page 2? Is there any more to this story or was it posted here in its entirety?

[BOBTHENAILER]

very interesting story

[warsaw44]

ping for later read.

[Joiseydude]

For reading later

[lilylangtree]

Fascinating. An X-file case.

[okie01]

Very interesting story.

There seems to be no conceivable natural explanation...

[wildbill]

And they haven’t discovered the secret Yeti?

[Calvin Locke]

Split the difference. Some secret test started the avalanche...forcing the group to cut the tent and flee to their deaths.

Or, the secret tests forced them to flee.

[Joe Boucher]

A Yeti wouldn’t not have caused high levels of radiation.
Nor would the Mansi.
The military or Space invaders could have though.
I tend to believe the soviet military story as being the more correct one.

[DUMBGRUNT]

The footprints had been left by people who were wearing socks, a single shoe or were barefoot.

Barefoot? I have done some winter camping and climbing and never known anyone to sleep barefoot? Most have a pair of dry socks, booties or both for sleeping. At minus 20F (-30c) you put most of your dry clothes on to sleep in.

Once when my wife was with we had paired bags that we zipped together, bad idea! She is a light sleeper and with each move the bags would expand a bit and pull in some very cold air!

[lilylangtree]

A military test may have started avalanche but why did the woman broken ribs not have a tongue, one with a cracked skull, one with a crushed skull, one with broken ribs, and the clothes containing radiation. Sounds pretty mysterious.

[A knight without armor]

That is strange. If she had somehow bitten off her tongue I would think the investigators would have figured that out. If she had been a handicapped person with an amputated tongue that would have been well known I also would think. I have never heard this story before. It is very intriguing. I wonder if they were forced at gun point to undress. But then if there were no other footprints... Surely in those conditions one would always be wearing just about every single piece of dry garment available.

[lilylangtree]

As a longshot if there had been some type of test and they were discovered on the mountatin, I was thinking maybe the military or the KGB may have questioned them rather harshly. Could explain the broken ribs and crushed and cracked skulls and perhaps the missing tongue.

[Calvin Locke]

Some sort of rodent, perhaps?

Or, maybe she bit and swallowed the tongue in the avalanche?

As for the other injuries, I'll chalk it up to unevenly scattered debris in the avalanche.

They all got hit differently.

Go back to "military test" for the radiation...

[martin_fierro]

Weird.

[struwwelpeter]

I was reading the Russian site, and saw some extremely strange stuff, but, unfortunately, I don't have much time these days for long translations.


This picture states that 9 Mansi (Ural natives) died near the site of a glowing ball, which is captioned "something appearing in the sky frightening the tourists (1.02.59)." The caption on the tent reads: "the tourists in a panic cut their way out of the tent, and... they run down the slope. Their footprints disappear (500 meters from the tent)." The five lines point to the locations of the bodies of the 9 dead tourists/skiers, and the three lines to the right point to sites of plane crashes with 9 fatalities.

The mountain on which they camped in the local Mansi dialect is the "Mountain of the Dead" (even before the accident/incident).

The case has a minor cult following in Russia, and there's a work of fiction based on what might have happened.

Google "Dyatlov Pass" and you'll get UFOs, monsters, secret weapons, the supernatural, and even numerology.

[zot]

Ping

[SunkenCiv]

By 1959 Soviet research into radiation had taken a back seat to biological weapons research. Perhaps they’d gone into a remote area to try LSD, and, uh, took a little too much.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD

[Quix]

Interesting.

The radiation aspect sounds UFO-y.

Thx.