July 26, 2018 • 39 mins
The incident at Dyatlov Pass is one of the more enduring wilderness mysteries of all time. Russian hikers found in various states of undress, frozen. What happened to them? Why were there weird internal injuries and no outward signs of distress? We'll delve into all the questions in today's episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and this is Stuff you Should Know Unsolved Mysteries Edition.
(00:22):
How do you pronounced this? Diet love? Diet love. Yeah,
that's how I've always pronounced it. That's what we're going with, Okay.
For some reason, I always just always Oh, that's a
good one. I like that, a bit of a Russian
diet love playing just say get love anyway. Get Love
(00:48):
is the name of a famous pass in the Ural Mountains,
and it was named after it turns out a twenty
three year old mountaineer expert outdoors person uh named um
uh Igor do out love. I always want to call
him Uri because there was like five Yuris in his group,
(01:10):
but he was the only Igor. Yeah, And I did
not know that this pass was named for him. And
when I first started researching this, I was like, that's yeah, Uh,
shall we tell the story? Yeah, let's people might have
you you'd heard of this before, right? Yeah? And I
(01:30):
believe we may have touched on this in the top
ten once maybe, but or a video that we did.
But whatever it was, it was a little tiny, short thing.
I mean we mentioned the Gary Matthias disappearance was called
the American do at Love event Ye disappearance. Um, this
(01:50):
is this is totally different in a lot of ways,
in most ways, but you can find kind of find
some similarities here there. But yeah, let's tell the story man,
all right. So we're talking about a group of students
in nineteen fifty nine, early February from you're all u
r a l State Technical University. Go what go fighting
(02:18):
rook the hammers and sickles. That sounds good, the hammers
and sickles. Uh. They were all very um well acquainted
with camping, back country hiking, and skiing across country skiing.
So they weren't a bunch of rookies out there. No, no,
and that's really important, Like these people were very well
(02:40):
experienced with this kind of stuff. Yeah, they knew what
they were doing. And there was a group of how
many were there? Seven they're ten total? Oh tin total,
nine of whom actually went into the woods. The only
person to make it out of this trip alive was
the one person who stayed back because he wasn't feeling well,
stayed behind the village. That was another yury yury udine. Um. Yeah,
(03:07):
I got a little sick and was bummed, And little
did he know that would have been almost certainly a
life saving moment for him. Yeah, he had a rheumatism
and came down with about of rheumatism and actually stayed
back in this little tiny village where they they set
off from. And to say that they were like in
the middle of nowhere is an understatement. Like they were
in the middle of nowhere, not a lot going on there,
(03:30):
and I think like a two two plus week trip,
and they were trying to get to mount or to
ten right, yeah, or t o They were trying to
make it to this mountain, which is a part of
the Ural Mountains, um. And to get there they basically
cross country skied, they climbed this, They climbed mountains to
(03:54):
get to this mountain. They had to camp out and
this this like negative thirty degree weather. Um, just crazy nuts,
middle of nowhere, and they were having the time of
their lives. These students were. Yeah there, I mean there.
There is footage or footage by way of photographs because
they took a lot of pictures and if you go
(04:15):
through and look at the um the early parts of
this trip, they did look like they were having a
lot of fun. They were, they were good pals. They
did a very adorable thing on the way they they
started making their own little newspaper about the trip, the
Evening Ordered ten where they would just it was essentially
a little fun diary, like group diary they did, but
(04:36):
they put it in the form of a of a
daily newspaper of their journey, which is very very cute
and sad. Yeah, And one of the one of the
ways I saw their group described was that there were
there were two girls in this group and the rest
of the guys um, but that there wasn't any like
real sexual tension or rivalries going on. That there was
(04:56):
like kind of crushes here there and like like like
humorous flirtation that kind of thing, just keeping everything real light. Yeah,
but it wasn't like Uri betrayed me nothing with she
wasn't name Urie hooked up with Zena. What's one of
them Zena? Yeah, there was Zena and then uh lud
(05:19):
uh lud Mia just laughing. You try it. Jerry came
and talked, you know, she minored in Russian studies. I
had no idea. Did I ever tell you? By the
time you Me and I went to visit friends in
London and we were on our way to to go
(05:39):
to Moscow for these the guys that I met in London, Yes,
who now live in l A. Mikeldam, Oh, they're wonderful.
They live in l A. Now, welcome to America, dudes. Um.
But we went to visit them in London and found
out that Um, because Adam I think majored in Russian
studies or Russian literature. I think he's like, you you
(06:00):
have your visa and we're like, what do you mean.
He's like, you have to have a visa to go
to Russia and we're like, I don't think so no
one said anything to us about that, and he's like, no,
you definitely do. We call the airline. They're like, yeah,
you don't have a visa and we're like, how did
you not You mean like a visa card, right, that's
what we thought you meant, and um, we didn't go
to Russia. I think I remember we ended up going
(06:22):
to Majorca instead. Last minute, Oh well right, We're like
this could have been way worse than it turned out.
I think I remember you having plans to go to
Russia and I never heard anything. That's why we didn't think.
I remember at some point in my life being like,
that's weird, Josh never talked about Russia, but you heard
me talk about Mayorca. Yeah, it all adds up. Now,
(06:43):
that's that was all that trip. Interesting. Yeah, so that's
my Russia story. That's as close as I've come. That's
funny because you guys are pretty buttoned up. I know,
we're really surprised at ourselves, you guys. Yeah, all right,
thanks for that, Chuck. I appreciate that about you being
buttoned up. Yeah. Yeah, that's sounds like something I would do.
(07:05):
I don't know, that's pretty basic level stuff. I think
these people would catch that. All right. So where are they?
They're on the Mountain of the Dead, which I don't
believe we mentioned was the was the translation that the
local indigenous tribe, the Monsey tribe, called this mountain collots
Yakle the Mountain of the Dead, and the Monsey tribe, um,
(07:25):
we'll we'll pop up later in theories. So just we're
putting pins and things. Do you remember in our magic
mushroom episode where we talked about like um reindeer herder
who would feed their reindeer mushrooms and then drink the
pea to trip themselves. I think I do remember that
that's the man. They're like Siberian um nomad's I believe,
(07:50):
and who know how to party. Yeah, and like the
magic mushrooms that they're shame their shamans eat and probably
their regular people eat too. They're very toxic um and
one way to get rid of the toxins is to
feed him to reindeer, and the the reindeers filter toxin.
You drink the reindeer p and the psychoactive stuff is
still present in their pa. Wow. Yeah, and they think
(08:13):
that possibly I'm saving this for the Christmas episode. Okay, okay,
so go ahead. I'm sorry that that's the monster people. Yeah,
that's the monster people. So um. What they end up
doing is they decide on the night of February twod
to camp and in a decidedly sort of odd place.
It wasn't so weird, but they were only about a
(08:34):
mile from the tree line, where they would have had
much better cover. Um, and it would have been slightly warmer,
and it's just it makes more sense to camp in
the in the forest than out on this open ridge.
But nevertheless, for some reason they decided to camp there.
They think possibly because they didn't want to backtrack, because
they would have had to backtrack something to get back
(08:55):
to the tree line. Yeah, they would have had to
go a mile back down the slope, which means that
they would have had to go cover that mile up again.
And that's what Urie. What's the guy who was his
last name uri Uton? Yeah, that's what he later said
in an interview that he he thought it was either
that that um the out love didn't want to backtrack
(09:17):
because he d love as a leader, remember um, or
he wanted to practice camping on an exposed mountain slope,
which from what I've heard about this guy, it sounds
like something he might do. He might be like, hey, gang,
I've got a great idea. We've never done this right,
let's try it. And they would have been able to
quite easily. Um. They pitched. They pitched the camp. But
(09:37):
in between pitching camp, and this is February second, ninety nine,
in between pitching camp and making dinner, something happened. They
never got to make dinner and whatever happened to them
happened in between that time. On February second. We'll be
(09:58):
back right after this. All right, that was quite a teaser,
(10:27):
my friend, Thank you. You can talk regular now. So, uh,
the search party didn't go out right away because yet
Loft had said before, um, hey, we're going to be
back around February twelve, or maybe a bit longer if
we are so inspired to stay out there a bit longer,
which is or yeah, if it's going slower than we thought, right,
(10:50):
which is not the I mean, nowadays people will be
a little more buttoned up like you guys and say
a little more specific maybe when you're hiking in a
place like this, but nevertheless, or have like a satellite
phone with you or something. But again, so these these
kids are in the middle of nowhere, totally cut off
from contact. It was we're going in in January. You'll
(11:13):
hear from us, probably around February twelve or so. Yeah,
But because he put a wishy washy timeline on it, um,
it didn't. It wasn't until they that anyone had any
suspicions that anything was wrong, and then not until the
twenty six that volunteer searchers finally found this camp. Yeah,
that was much much later. So they found the camp
(11:35):
and right out of the gate, they're like, this is
a little weird. The tents seem to have been cut
from the inside out. That's a very weird thing. Not
only that their boots are here, Um, their clothes are here,
their gears here, their skis, like everything they would need
(11:55):
it was all just abandoned at this camp. Yeah, it
looked like a left in a hurry. Um. And then
even even stranger from what from the official report, and
we'll see that that was like this has gone on
for so long and been open to so much interpretation that, um,
(12:16):
there's a lot of taint to this legend um that
the but the official ports said that there were maybe
eight or nine tracks, the tracks of eight or nine
people around these tents, So that would account for everybody
in the party without the addition of other people being
on scenes. Yeah, and the way they left, like you said,
(12:36):
like it was almost as if they they went and
got in their tents, zipped them up and found um
a dozen pit vipers and each one because they cut
out of the tent and ran away in their underwear. Basically,
not all of them and their underwear, but you know,
barefoot and with very little clothing, like as if something
(12:58):
inside the tent had you know, was about to kill them. Okay,
that's a big, big thing. It's a weird way to
leave your camp. So these these guys are missing. Um
and they the search party that found the tent in
pretty short order. I'm not exactly sure how long it took,
but from what I understand, it was the same search
they found the first two bodies, and they found these
(13:21):
first two bodies. It was the two uries Uri Kravoniashenko
and Uri Doroshenko. Um the third year that stayed back, no,
because they were literally three euries right, three out of
tin right, Um, that's of them were Uri so um,
(13:42):
Uri Kravanishenko, I decided again because I wanted to do
better than the first time. And then Uri Doroshenko. They
were found, both of them wearing their underwear. I think
they were both barefoot. Um at the tree line. At
the tree line they call it the big tree. It
was a large cypress tree. Um. So they were in
their underwear, barefoot, dead a mile down the mountain from
(14:08):
the camp, which is where they said that they probably
should have camped for more cover, so very interestingly, supposedly
both of their hands were burned. I saw, yeah, I
saw that they were just beaten up, and that there
was human flesh found in the bark of the tree.
I didn't see that at all, Okay, So as that
(14:28):
they had tried to climb it in desperation, Okay. I
did see that that they were like broken branches that
indicated climbing. I didn't see there was flesh in the bark,
flesh in the bark okay. Um, So maybe burned hands
means like they were raw from climbing the tree. Um.
But there was signs of a fire. Yeah, there was
like a campfire that they had built and there were
(14:49):
unburnt branches kind of collected by it too, right, But
they were both dead and they were the first two discovered.
The two juris very weird, but nothing that couldn't be
a kound of or by hypothermia. Yeah, it was being
out there in your underwear to begin with. It was
the weird part again and like negative thirty degree weather,
negative thirty with howling wins, so foreshadowing. Okay, Three more bodies,
(15:16):
including our leader Mr dietlov Uh, They were found between
those two points between the original camp and that tree,
and it looked as if they were headed back toward camp. Yeah,
the way they were laid out, like imagine somebody like
kind of dying as they're crawling up a slope back
toward camp, right makes sense to me. So let's say
(15:39):
that they all kind of went to this tree and
then they started to head out back to camp to
maybe get their gear because they realized, we're in a
bad spot. We're all our gears up there and we're
down here in our underwear and barefoot, and why are we?
Yeah again, who knows? So they found um Igor, diatlov Um, Zaneda,
(16:07):
Colma Gorva. Why am I the only one saying their
I'll say the last one rustam sloban In. Well, even
Jerry could have said that one. So Rustum had a
about a two and a half inch gash in his
head and a fractured skull that was very weird. It
is weird, but the doctor said that's not what this
(16:28):
person died from. Again, all five of these people died
from hypothermia. Even though this guy has been smashed in
the head somehow. So Um, the investigators are like, okay,
so far, it's weird, but something happened and then all
these people died of hypothermia. Okay, yeah, that didn't hold
(16:50):
up when they finally found the other three bodies two
months later, four bodies. Yeah, in May, I think after
some of the snow melt they found they found four
more these in a gully down um, down slope from
the tree. So there's the tree where the first two
bodies were found. Up slope there were the next three bodies,
(17:10):
like they were crawling towards back toward camp. And then
on the other side, down slope of the tree, the
last four bodies were found. Yeah. These This is where
it gets very strange, very strange. These bodies they were
they didn't die from hypothermia. They died of some very
weird uh internal injuries. Some of them, um, had their
(17:33):
skulls crushed. Two of them had a massive chest fractures
and broken ribs. UM. One of them was missing her
uh which one was Ludma do Nina. She was missing
her tongue and part of her mouth and face. Yeah,
they were. She was also missing her eyes, as was
(17:55):
one of the other people. UM. And you know this
could have been a played away. Is maybe an animal
ate this stuff, but there was no outside trauma. No,
when you looked at these people, it wasn't like you
have been clearly hit very hard on the head was
a stick or a baseball bat, or you have had
(18:15):
your eyeballs pecked out by a vulture. Uh, no outward signs.
They didn't find out until later on that all these
internal injuries had occurred. Yeah, one of the really strange.
It was very strange. One of the doctors who examined
the bodies in the official reports said that this was like, um,
there was totally out of the capability of any human
(18:36):
to inflict these injuries. It was more like the injuries
you would see from a car crash, and so they
would have like crushed bones, crushed skulls, but they they
would not. They didn't have any like soft tissue damage, right,
Like it wasn't like somebody like kid him with an axe.
But you know, they had the injuries sustained like they
(18:57):
were hit by an x, but not the outward out
external injuries like they were crushed by an axe or something. Yeah,
although a lot of them were missing soft tissue, which
but no outward signs of that. That's I just can't
figure that one out. So we'll we'll, we'll, we'll put
a pin in that missing soft tissue stuff. Okay, Okay,
(19:18):
So there was something else that was really peculiar that
has never been explained. But at least two of the
bodies were found um to be like the clothing they
were wearing was radioactive. Yeah, And we should point out
to that some of this clothing they were wearing came
off of the other people. I believe, some shoes and
(19:38):
one of the women had parts of a wolf pants
wrapped around her, so they had scavenged some of the
clothes from there dead I guess, or dyeing compatriots, uh
is the only thing people can figure out. And it
contained radiation. Yeah, but that was the only thing that
contained radiation the right. The fact they were like taking
(20:00):
clothes from one another, that makes sense. And you can
even say that the people who weren't wearing clothes, you
can chalk that up to um something called paradoxical undressing,
which is like found and I think something like a
quarter of all hypothermia cases that you'll find the person
like like stripped because something in your hypothalamus goes hey
(20:23):
wire and you feel like your body temperature is actually
rising like you're getting hot when actually it's going down.
It's a weird quirk of hypothermia sometimes, so you can
even say, like maybe these people actually shed their clothes purposefully,
And then of course people who weren't undergoing paradoxical and dressing,
we're taking the clothes and putting it on themselves. Totally
(20:45):
makes sense. Where did the radiation come from? Why just
the clothing? That is beyond bizarre and it's never been
explained to any anyone's satisfaction. Yeah. And one more strange
ish thing, um, not completely off the charts, but like
I said, they found the camera film. That's why we
(21:06):
have all these pictures. Uh. And the infamous thirty third
frame was the last shot on this roll, which showed uh,
sort of a series of white lights or a big
white light against black. Could have been nothing with some
weird exposure, who knows. But they had the camera set
up on like a homemade tripod with the lens cap off,
(21:28):
like facing out, as if it were like, hey, let's
have this camera ready to take a picture of something
that we're seeing out there. Uh. And then uh, I
believe in the weeks previous to this other hikers had
reported seeing um like glowing orbs and glowing lights and
things like this. It was the week's previous or the
(21:48):
weeks after. I thought it was previous. I think it
was after or that there was another group that, well,
this has similar sightings at that time, So who know,
there was another group that was between thirty and fifty
miles away basically doing the same thing UM, that reported
seeing lights around the same time. So who knows. But
the fact and like you said, it's not off the charts,
(22:11):
but the fact that UM, I think it was Rustum
who had the camera but didn't have any of his
gear or outer outerwear, but he grabbed his camera. That
is pretty bizarre. Yeah. There was an investigative named lev Ivanov.
He was a lead guy, and um, he was really
into this case obviously for a while. He brought a
(22:32):
Geiger counter along that apparently just kind of spiked when
he was ever around. He was the one who discovered
that there was radio activity at all. Um. But they
officially closed the case like a month later or something,
and they said it they listed the causes of death
as a compelling natural force that they could not overcome. Yeah,
(22:54):
that's a really vague, creepy statement. Yeah, so that was
that was Another thing that really raised everyone's suspicions was
the investigators came in within three weeks of i think,
finding the last bodies who again had not died from hypothermia,
but had died from really bizarre, massive internal trauma. They
(23:16):
closed the case on it, put it under lock and
key um filed it away as classified and kept anyone
from the area for the next three years, just closed
off the area for three years. And it wasn't until
like the early nineties that these files were opened again.
And so the fact that that they had been you know,
classified actually in Soviet Russia was not that bizarre. They
(23:41):
just classified everything, But it was strange that when they
declassified these things after the Soviet Union is all that
they were like big chunks of these files just totally missing.
So who knows, maybe they got misplaced over time. But
when you add up all this stuff, the official investigation
being hurry eat and then classified and then parts missing
(24:02):
later on um that that is a little weird. It
does suggest to a lot of people that the Soviet
government either knew something, found something, or had some sort
of role in this that they didn't want everyone to
know about. Do we take another break, Yeah, all right,
we're gonna come back and talk about some of the
leading theories and debunk some of them right after this,
(24:48):
All right, did we mention that two groups of people
reported flying objects were just the one I only knew
about one? Yeah, there were two groups of people. Uh,
one that we're camping nearby, about thirty miles away, and
then um other reports in that month had been reported
orange balls of fire. And here's one direct quote, goodness gracious,
(25:12):
this is in from the written testimony. One person said
he saw a shining circular body fly over the village
from southwest to northeast. Shining disk was practically the size
of a full moon, a blue white light surrounded by
blue halo halo brightly flash like the flashes distant lightning.
And when the body disappeared behind the rise and the
sky lit up in that place for a few more minutes.
(25:35):
So that that's actually, I mean, not out of the
realm of possibility that that person really did see that,
because people have put um have suggested that these were
missile tests that were they were seeing. Yeah, So should
we go with that as theory Number one? Yeah, the
thing is as though. UM. The guy, the lead investigator,
lev levin Off, is that his name, yeah, Levi ivan Off.
(26:00):
He said, I suspect that this is in a UM
interview he gave UM. I suspected at the time, and
I am almost sure now these bright flying spheres had
a direct connection to the group's death. He didn't go
into any more detail about that, and he he himself
has died of old age. Now I believe UM. But
there are a lot of people who say these weird
(26:23):
sightings in the sky had something to do with it.
Either they irradiated the group. UM. One of the things
there was a twelve year old boy from their town
of kanarina Berg, which was known at the time as
um uh sveed lost UM that that he reported that
some of them were kind of orange tanned, like weirdly tanned, UM,
(26:45):
and that their hair was gray. So a lot of
people said irradiated. They were I radiated by UFOs or
missile tests or something like that. UM, you can actually
kind of explain the weird tanning. And I've seen a
picture of one of him at the morgue UM as
they were mummified. It was probably one of the members
of the group who wasn't found until May, and they
(27:06):
were partially mummified by the by the exposure to the
snow for you know, weeks or months. That was probably
explained that. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, they were on
the pathway apparently for what's called our seven intercontinental ballistic
missile launches. But um, it just didn't hold water with
(27:29):
the radiation only being in their clothes. Yeah, that's very weird.
That's like the one thing that doesn't quite add up. Yeah.
Another explanation for them becoming irradiated is that, yes, they
were near a nuclear missing missile testing site and that
they drank um melted snow. But again, why would just
their clothes, why wouldn't they become irradiated? I don't know,
(27:49):
or anither gear or the tent or anything what else.
We got another one, and this is the most people
who claim to be sensible say, this is the explanation
that it was sure that it was an avalanche, That
an avalanche came down the slope because they were, you know,
camping out on a mountain ridge face of a mountain,
(28:11):
um and that an avalanche came and they knew it
was coming, so they cut open their tent and fled
into the night and then got caught by hypothermia and died.
Makes sense. I mean that would get most people, especially
an experienced group of mountaineers, out of their tents pretty
quick by cutting through it. Cutting through it. Maybe the
(28:31):
thing is is it doesn't explain why some of them
but not all of them, had massive trauma. And again
it certainly doesn't explain the radiation at all or the
missing tongue. Yes, that was another one which was never found,
by the way. No, so the missing tongue I've seen.
I saw that it was removed while the girl was alive.
(28:57):
I'm sorry. Her name was lud mia um so when
I saw that. But then I also saw that she
had been found near a creek, and that it's possible
that it had just like like basically melted away from
the water the action of the water. Here's the problem,
(29:19):
this is the official report was kept under seals for decades,
and conjecture was added. You don't know at this point,
who who to believe. There's so many sites out there
dedicated and there's a twelve year old reporting from the
funeral like that's that's the only like documentation we have
of what they looked like. His name actually is um
(29:42):
Uri Kuntsevich, another another Yuri, and he was he was
that that twelve year old child. He became kind of
obsessed with it, and he set up the diet lave
Um Museum in the Diet Law Foundation and basically just
keeps the whole thing alive and is trying to get
the government to kids in the case that kid. Yeah,
well so you really really stuck to it. He's really
(30:04):
taken advantage. What else you got for theories? Well, you
know that tribe, the Monsy tribesmen, there is a theory
that they attacked them, um, but nothing about that holds water.
They didn't have any footsteps in the snow. There were
our footprints. There were peaceful people by all accounts, had
never done anything like that. There was no reason to
(30:24):
do anything like that. So just go ahead and discount
that one. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Animals attack
kind of the same thing. Same. Yeah. The other thing
that that the other reason the avalanche theory doesn't necessarily
hold up is there wasn't necessarily any evidence of an
avalanche having covered up the thing well in the tent. Yeah,
it would have swept that tent away and all the
(30:46):
gear probably right or covered it up. Yeah, what else
high winds. There's one theory that maybe one of the members,
maybe one of the euries, went out to pp and
a win swept him away, and everyone else like ran
out to look for him. But um, this article you
found where they're kind of debunking some of the stuff said,
(31:08):
you know that it doesn't make much sense that all
these experienced people would have behaved this way and just
ran out in their underwear. You know, it would have
been a little more of a organized, sensible effort if
that had happened. Yeah, you really can't. Can't um overstate
that the level of experience and the combined um like
(31:29):
the group that they formed was like greater than the
sum of its parts. So yeah, they wouldn't have it
wouldn't have been amateur like that. The one that and
this is the kind of the new fringe e semi
scientific explanation and I find just fascinating is the infrasound one. Yeah,
I mean we talked about infrasound and one of our episodes,
(31:53):
I don't remember which one. I can't remember which one,
but um, this is uh, it's a phenomenon where, when,
and in this area. They said that this definitely could
have happened where wind collides with the mountain and the
trees and everything and produces this low frequency range sound
that has been known to inspire panic and dread, confusion, beer,
(32:18):
all the things that would kind of add up in
this case. Right, So there's like this really weird. Um,
it's very tough to figure out whether that's actually real.
Like if you look at the science, the scientific literature
behind it, there's some but more often than not, it's
just some somebody claiming on their website that this is real.
(32:39):
This the literature is not necessarily there, but that's not
to say that it's just totally made up. It's like,
the the studies of this stuff hasn't caught up to
the some of the claims on the internet. But supposedly
there is from wind vortices. They could have produced it
on this on this mountain, right, these little your tornadoes
(33:00):
that would have spun up could have um produced these
sounds that is below human hearing, the level of human
hearing like a full octave below, but can supposedly produce
these weird behaviors that make people freak out. That would
explain everything. It would accept the tongue right, and I
guess the injuries sure so illustrating. I've seen other ones
(33:24):
to like, Um, there was a guy and we we
need to mention him a little more. Um. His name
was Simon Zelodov Zlotaryov. Man. This has been tough. His
name was Simon Zelotaryov. He was thirty eight. He wasn't
a member of the group. He was as he was
(33:46):
a add on towards the end who was out there
with another group that he couldn't get coordinated. So he
ended up saying like, hey, can I come with you guys?
And at first apparently the group was not all that
happy about him being there, but from what I understand,
he really kind of earned his place in there. Um.
For a while, people were like, who was this guy?
(34:07):
This is a mystery dude. Maybe the KGB was involved,
Maybe he was KGB. He was definitely ex military. Um.
But they and they actually exhumed him to find out
if the person who was buried in his grave as
him was him, and they did a they did, like
a skull. They took a picture of his skull and
superimposed it under a known picture of him. Supposedly it
(34:30):
was a perfect match, but then they took the extra
step of um comparing the DNA of the corpse in
the grave with the DNA of a known relative, and
it does not match. Okay, I saw that. I didn't
know that's who that. I didn't know. He was a
non Uh. He wasn't an original member of the good.
He wasn't in the in the club. So that so
(34:52):
some people are like, there's KGB was in on this
or he had something weird to do with it. It
was a little weird for sure. And he was one
of the ones who suffered um internal broken or broken ribs,
obviously internal. And he also became the editor in chief
of their daily paper. It's very strange. He's like, if
it bleeds, it leads, print it. Uh, you got anything else?
(35:17):
Oh man, we could do this for hours, but now
and if you have, if you're obsessed with the diet
love incident, Um, we want to know what we got
right and what we got wrong. Anything you want to specify,
We're happy to hear. Yeah, And I think um we
just officially became the three podcast to cover this topic.
(35:37):
Hopefully we did it some justice. If you want to
know more about the diet love past incident. You can
type those words into while the Internet and it will
give you all sorts of crazy stuff. And say, I
said that it's time for listener mail. Alright, So this
one is a bit long, but this is a Josh request. Oh,
(35:57):
this one's good. It's a mystery. It is a mystery.
And this is from Corey and Enjoysy City. Hey, guys,
at the open of your recent episode on Tsunamis, you
both expressed disbelief that the topic had never been covered.
In fact, you guys both said you could have sworn
you'd already covered it, and you each went back multiple
times to check. Even after checking three times, you both
admitted to being quote paranoid end quote that it had
(36:19):
somehow been done before. And just like you guys, I
was surprised to find out it had never been covered
and began to wonder why I had fuzzy memories. So
I did a little digging re listening to old episodes
on similar topics. That turns out the three of us
are not the only ones convinced of this existent episode.
The existence of this episode Apparently the two thousand fourteen
episode of stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck also
(36:44):
believed in the existence in the Rogue Waves episode, right correct. Uh, Yes,
and the September show about Rogue Waves. At about twenty
minutes in, Chuck says, and I'll do this as Chuck.
One of the last things we should cover, USh is
the difference between rogue Waves and tsunamis. But we've already
done an episode on tsunamis. And Josh, that was a
(37:06):
great appreciate that I've been worring on it. H And
at this point Josh chimes in to confirm the existence.
You want to confirm it, as Josh. Uh, my name
is Josh, and I'm confirming the existence of that episode.
I think it's what I said roughly, I think so.
And you guys go on to cover the topic quickly,
seemingly in agreement that an in depth explanation isn't necessary
(37:27):
since it already existed. Man, this opens the door to
many questions. Guys, did any listeners right in after Rogue
Waves to ask where the tsunami episode was Corey, I
don't remember. Surely. With so many listeners who take pride
in having listened to every episode of the show, someone
should have noticed. I agree. Why were you guys so
convinced of the existence of the tsunami episode and Son fourteen?
(37:50):
I don't know, Corey, wouldn't Jerry notice? Well that's a no. Uh.
Is it possible that the lost episode on Tsunamis was
the tipping point for a sequence of events leading to
a doomsday scenario and humans from the future were forced
to travel back in time in order to try and
expunge it from the historical record. It's possible, Corey. That's
(38:11):
where my money is. Yeah, but why what did we
say in there that was so ghastly that it could
have brought about the end of humanity? I don't know.
There's no way to find out either because it's been
expunged by the future people. So again, Corey from Jersey City,
one of my favorite places. Thanks Corey. Our our buddy
(38:31):
John lives there. Oh no, he lives in Hollboken. Where's
the Jersey City? Who shout out to John Bendell? Either way? Oh? John,
Hey John? He looks at Manhattan out of his window.
I know that that could be anywhere. That's true. Um, yeah,
you might be thinking of Brooklyn. No, thanks a lot, Corey.
(38:53):
That was a fantastic email, so much so I just
kept pressuring Chuck to read it, and he did, and
I think worked out well as we can all agree, right, Yes,
thank you for reading it, Chuck, certainly. Um, if you
want to get in touch with this, you can go
to stuff you Should Know dot com and find us
on all of our social media's there, and then you
(39:13):
can also send us an email to Stuff podcast at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Doff
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there,
and this is Stuff you Should Know Unsolved Mysteries Edition.
(00:22):
How do you pronounced this? Diet love? Diet love. Yeah,
that's how I've always pronounced it. That's what we're going with, Okay.
For some reason, I always just always Oh, that's a
good one. I like that, a bit of a Russian
diet love playing just say get love anyway. Get Love
(00:48):
is the name of a famous pass in the Ural Mountains,
and it was named after it turns out a twenty
three year old mountaineer expert outdoors person uh named um
uh Igor do out love. I always want to call
him Uri because there was like five Yuris in his group,
(01:10):
but he was the only Igor. Yeah, And I did
not know that this pass was named for him. And
when I first started researching this, I was like, that's yeah, Uh,
shall we tell the story? Yeah, let's people might have
you you'd heard of this before, right? Yeah? And I
(01:30):
believe we may have touched on this in the top
ten once maybe, but or a video that we did.
But whatever it was, it was a little tiny, short thing.
I mean we mentioned the Gary Matthias disappearance was called
the American do at Love event Ye disappearance. Um, this
(01:50):
is this is totally different in a lot of ways,
in most ways, but you can find kind of find
some similarities here there. But yeah, let's tell the story man,
all right. So we're talking about a group of students
in nineteen fifty nine, early February from you're all u
r a l State Technical University. Go what go fighting
(02:18):
rook the hammers and sickles. That sounds good, the hammers
and sickles. Uh. They were all very um well acquainted
with camping, back country hiking, and skiing across country skiing.
So they weren't a bunch of rookies out there. No, no,
and that's really important, Like these people were very well
(02:40):
experienced with this kind of stuff. Yeah, they knew what
they were doing. And there was a group of how
many were there? Seven they're ten total? Oh tin total,
nine of whom actually went into the woods. The only
person to make it out of this trip alive was
the one person who stayed back because he wasn't feeling well,
stayed behind the village. That was another yury yury udine. Um. Yeah,
(03:07):
I got a little sick and was bummed, And little
did he know that would have been almost certainly a
life saving moment for him. Yeah, he had a rheumatism
and came down with about of rheumatism and actually stayed
back in this little tiny village where they they set
off from. And to say that they were like in
the middle of nowhere is an understatement. Like they were
in the middle of nowhere, not a lot going on there,
(03:30):
and I think like a two two plus week trip,
and they were trying to get to mount or to
ten right, yeah, or t o They were trying to
make it to this mountain, which is a part of
the Ural Mountains, um. And to get there they basically
cross country skied, they climbed this, They climbed mountains to
(03:54):
get to this mountain. They had to camp out and
this this like negative thirty degree weather. Um, just crazy nuts,
middle of nowhere, and they were having the time of
their lives. These students were. Yeah there, I mean there.
There is footage or footage by way of photographs because
they took a lot of pictures and if you go
(04:15):
through and look at the um the early parts of
this trip, they did look like they were having a
lot of fun. They were, they were good pals. They
did a very adorable thing on the way they they
started making their own little newspaper about the trip, the
Evening Ordered ten where they would just it was essentially
a little fun diary, like group diary they did, but
(04:36):
they put it in the form of a of a
daily newspaper of their journey, which is very very cute
and sad. Yeah, And one of the one of the
ways I saw their group described was that there were
there were two girls in this group and the rest
of the guys um, but that there wasn't any like
real sexual tension or rivalries going on. That there was
(04:56):
like kind of crushes here there and like like like
humorous flirtation that kind of thing, just keeping everything real light. Yeah,
but it wasn't like Uri betrayed me nothing with she
wasn't name Urie hooked up with Zena. What's one of
them Zena? Yeah, there was Zena and then uh lud
(05:19):
uh lud Mia just laughing. You try it. Jerry came
and talked, you know, she minored in Russian studies. I
had no idea. Did I ever tell you? By the
time you Me and I went to visit friends in
London and we were on our way to to go
(05:39):
to Moscow for these the guys that I met in London, Yes,
who now live in l A. Mikeldam, Oh, they're wonderful.
They live in l A. Now, welcome to America, dudes. Um.
But we went to visit them in London and found
out that Um, because Adam I think majored in Russian
studies or Russian literature. I think he's like, you you
(06:00):
have your visa and we're like, what do you mean.
He's like, you have to have a visa to go
to Russia and we're like, I don't think so no
one said anything to us about that, and he's like, no,
you definitely do. We call the airline. They're like, yeah,
you don't have a visa and we're like, how did
you not You mean like a visa card, right, that's
what we thought you meant, and um, we didn't go
to Russia. I think I remember we ended up going
(06:22):
to Majorca instead. Last minute, Oh well right, We're like
this could have been way worse than it turned out.
I think I remember you having plans to go to
Russia and I never heard anything. That's why we didn't think.
I remember at some point in my life being like,
that's weird, Josh never talked about Russia, but you heard
me talk about Mayorca. Yeah, it all adds up. Now,
(06:43):
that's that was all that trip. Interesting. Yeah, so that's
my Russia story. That's as close as I've come. That's
funny because you guys are pretty buttoned up. I know,
we're really surprised at ourselves, you guys. Yeah, all right,
thanks for that, Chuck. I appreciate that about you being
buttoned up. Yeah. Yeah, that's sounds like something I would do.
(07:05):
I don't know, that's pretty basic level stuff. I think
these people would catch that. All right. So where are they?
They're on the Mountain of the Dead, which I don't
believe we mentioned was the was the translation that the
local indigenous tribe, the Monsey tribe, called this mountain collots
Yakle the Mountain of the Dead, and the Monsey tribe, um,
(07:25):
we'll we'll pop up later in theories. So just we're
putting pins and things. Do you remember in our magic
mushroom episode where we talked about like um reindeer herder
who would feed their reindeer mushrooms and then drink the
pea to trip themselves. I think I do remember that
that's the man. They're like Siberian um nomad's I believe,
(07:50):
and who know how to party. Yeah, and like the
magic mushrooms that they're shame their shamans eat and probably
their regular people eat too. They're very toxic um and
one way to get rid of the toxins is to
feed him to reindeer, and the the reindeers filter toxin.
You drink the reindeer p and the psychoactive stuff is
still present in their pa. Wow. Yeah, and they think
(08:13):
that possibly I'm saving this for the Christmas episode. Okay, okay,
so go ahead. I'm sorry that that's the monster people. Yeah,
that's the monster people. So um. What they end up
doing is they decide on the night of February twod
to camp and in a decidedly sort of odd place.
It wasn't so weird, but they were only about a
(08:34):
mile from the tree line, where they would have had
much better cover. Um, and it would have been slightly warmer,
and it's just it makes more sense to camp in
the in the forest than out on this open ridge.
But nevertheless, for some reason they decided to camp there.
They think possibly because they didn't want to backtrack, because
they would have had to backtrack something to get back
(08:55):
to the tree line. Yeah, they would have had to
go a mile back down the slope, which means that
they would have had to go cover that mile up again.
And that's what Urie. What's the guy who was his
last name uri Uton? Yeah, that's what he later said
in an interview that he he thought it was either
that that um the out love didn't want to backtrack
(09:17):
because he d love as a leader, remember um, or
he wanted to practice camping on an exposed mountain slope,
which from what I've heard about this guy, it sounds
like something he might do. He might be like, hey, gang,
I've got a great idea. We've never done this right,
let's try it. And they would have been able to
quite easily. Um. They pitched. They pitched the camp. But
(09:37):
in between pitching camp, and this is February second, ninety nine,
in between pitching camp and making dinner, something happened. They
never got to make dinner and whatever happened to them
happened in between that time. On February second. We'll be
(09:58):
back right after this. All right, that was quite a teaser,
(10:27):
my friend, Thank you. You can talk regular now. So, uh,
the search party didn't go out right away because yet
Loft had said before, um, hey, we're going to be
back around February twelve, or maybe a bit longer if
we are so inspired to stay out there a bit longer,
which is or yeah, if it's going slower than we thought, right,
(10:50):
which is not the I mean, nowadays people will be
a little more buttoned up like you guys and say
a little more specific maybe when you're hiking in a
place like this, but nevertheless, or have like a satellite
phone with you or something. But again, so these these
kids are in the middle of nowhere, totally cut off
from contact. It was we're going in in January. You'll
(11:13):
hear from us, probably around February twelve or so. Yeah,
But because he put a wishy washy timeline on it, um,
it didn't. It wasn't until they that anyone had any
suspicions that anything was wrong, and then not until the
twenty six that volunteer searchers finally found this camp. Yeah,
that was much much later. So they found the camp
(11:35):
and right out of the gate, they're like, this is
a little weird. The tents seem to have been cut
from the inside out. That's a very weird thing. Not
only that their boots are here, Um, their clothes are here,
their gears here, their skis, like everything they would need
(11:55):
it was all just abandoned at this camp. Yeah, it
looked like a left in a hurry. Um. And then
even even stranger from what from the official report, and
we'll see that that was like this has gone on
for so long and been open to so much interpretation that, um,
(12:16):
there's a lot of taint to this legend um that
the but the official ports said that there were maybe
eight or nine tracks, the tracks of eight or nine
people around these tents, So that would account for everybody
in the party without the addition of other people being
on scenes. Yeah, and the way they left, like you said,
(12:36):
like it was almost as if they they went and
got in their tents, zipped them up and found um
a dozen pit vipers and each one because they cut
out of the tent and ran away in their underwear. Basically,
not all of them and their underwear, but you know,
barefoot and with very little clothing, like as if something
(12:58):
inside the tent had you know, was about to kill them. Okay,
that's a big, big thing. It's a weird way to
leave your camp. So these these guys are missing. Um
and they the search party that found the tent in
pretty short order. I'm not exactly sure how long it took,
but from what I understand, it was the same search
they found the first two bodies, and they found these
(13:21):
first two bodies. It was the two uries Uri Kravoniashenko
and Uri Doroshenko. Um the third year that stayed back, no,
because they were literally three euries right, three out of
tin right, Um, that's of them were Uri so um,
(13:42):
Uri Kravanishenko, I decided again because I wanted to do
better than the first time. And then Uri Doroshenko. They
were found, both of them wearing their underwear. I think
they were both barefoot. Um at the tree line. At
the tree line they call it the big tree. It
was a large cypress tree. Um. So they were in
their underwear, barefoot, dead a mile down the mountain from
(14:08):
the camp, which is where they said that they probably
should have camped for more cover, so very interestingly, supposedly
both of their hands were burned. I saw, yeah, I
saw that they were just beaten up, and that there
was human flesh found in the bark of the tree.
I didn't see that at all, Okay, So as that
(14:28):
they had tried to climb it in desperation, Okay. I
did see that that they were like broken branches that
indicated climbing. I didn't see there was flesh in the bark,
flesh in the bark okay. Um, So maybe burned hands
means like they were raw from climbing the tree. Um.
But there was signs of a fire. Yeah, there was
like a campfire that they had built and there were
(14:49):
unburnt branches kind of collected by it too, right, But
they were both dead and they were the first two discovered.
The two juris very weird, but nothing that couldn't be
a kound of or by hypothermia. Yeah, it was being
out there in your underwear to begin with. It was
the weird part again and like negative thirty degree weather,
negative thirty with howling wins, so foreshadowing. Okay, Three more bodies,
(15:16):
including our leader Mr dietlov Uh, They were found between
those two points between the original camp and that tree,
and it looked as if they were headed back toward camp. Yeah,
the way they were laid out, like imagine somebody like
kind of dying as they're crawling up a slope back
toward camp, right makes sense to me. So let's say
(15:39):
that they all kind of went to this tree and
then they started to head out back to camp to
maybe get their gear because they realized, we're in a
bad spot. We're all our gears up there and we're
down here in our underwear and barefoot, and why are we?
Yeah again, who knows? So they found um Igor, diatlov Um, Zaneda,
(16:07):
Colma Gorva. Why am I the only one saying their
I'll say the last one rustam sloban In. Well, even
Jerry could have said that one. So Rustum had a
about a two and a half inch gash in his
head and a fractured skull that was very weird. It
is weird, but the doctor said that's not what this
(16:28):
person died from. Again, all five of these people died
from hypothermia. Even though this guy has been smashed in
the head somehow. So Um, the investigators are like, okay,
so far, it's weird, but something happened and then all
these people died of hypothermia. Okay, yeah, that didn't hold
(16:50):
up when they finally found the other three bodies two
months later, four bodies. Yeah, in May, I think after
some of the snow melt they found they found four
more these in a gully down um, down slope from
the tree. So there's the tree where the first two
bodies were found. Up slope there were the next three bodies,
(17:10):
like they were crawling towards back toward camp. And then
on the other side, down slope of the tree, the
last four bodies were found. Yeah. These This is where
it gets very strange, very strange. These bodies they were
they didn't die from hypothermia. They died of some very
weird uh internal injuries. Some of them, um, had their
(17:33):
skulls crushed. Two of them had a massive chest fractures
and broken ribs. UM. One of them was missing her
uh which one was Ludma do Nina. She was missing
her tongue and part of her mouth and face. Yeah,
they were. She was also missing her eyes, as was
(17:55):
one of the other people. UM. And you know this
could have been a played away. Is maybe an animal
ate this stuff, but there was no outside trauma. No,
when you looked at these people, it wasn't like you
have been clearly hit very hard on the head was
a stick or a baseball bat, or you have had
(18:15):
your eyeballs pecked out by a vulture. Uh, no outward signs.
They didn't find out until later on that all these
internal injuries had occurred. Yeah, one of the really strange.
It was very strange. One of the doctors who examined
the bodies in the official reports said that this was like, um,
there was totally out of the capability of any human
(18:36):
to inflict these injuries. It was more like the injuries
you would see from a car crash, and so they
would have like crushed bones, crushed skulls, but they they
would not. They didn't have any like soft tissue damage, right,
Like it wasn't like somebody like kid him with an axe.
But you know, they had the injuries sustained like they
(18:57):
were hit by an x, but not the outward out
external injuries like they were crushed by an axe or something. Yeah,
although a lot of them were missing soft tissue, which
but no outward signs of that. That's I just can't
figure that one out. So we'll we'll, we'll, we'll put
a pin in that missing soft tissue stuff. Okay, Okay,
(19:18):
So there was something else that was really peculiar that
has never been explained. But at least two of the
bodies were found um to be like the clothing they
were wearing was radioactive. Yeah, And we should point out
to that some of this clothing they were wearing came
off of the other people. I believe, some shoes and
(19:38):
one of the women had parts of a wolf pants
wrapped around her, so they had scavenged some of the
clothes from there dead I guess, or dyeing compatriots, uh
is the only thing people can figure out. And it
contained radiation. Yeah, but that was the only thing that
contained radiation the right. The fact they were like taking
(20:00):
clothes from one another, that makes sense. And you can
even say that the people who weren't wearing clothes, you
can chalk that up to um something called paradoxical undressing,
which is like found and I think something like a
quarter of all hypothermia cases that you'll find the person
like like stripped because something in your hypothalamus goes hey
(20:23):
wire and you feel like your body temperature is actually
rising like you're getting hot when actually it's going down.
It's a weird quirk of hypothermia sometimes, so you can
even say, like maybe these people actually shed their clothes purposefully,
And then of course people who weren't undergoing paradoxical and dressing,
we're taking the clothes and putting it on themselves. Totally
(20:45):
makes sense. Where did the radiation come from? Why just
the clothing? That is beyond bizarre and it's never been
explained to any anyone's satisfaction. Yeah. And one more strange
ish thing, um, not completely off the charts, but like
I said, they found the camera film. That's why we
(21:06):
have all these pictures. Uh. And the infamous thirty third
frame was the last shot on this roll, which showed uh,
sort of a series of white lights or a big
white light against black. Could have been nothing with some
weird exposure, who knows. But they had the camera set
up on like a homemade tripod with the lens cap off,
(21:28):
like facing out, as if it were like, hey, let's
have this camera ready to take a picture of something
that we're seeing out there. Uh. And then uh, I
believe in the weeks previous to this other hikers had
reported seeing um like glowing orbs and glowing lights and
things like this. It was the week's previous or the
(21:48):
weeks after. I thought it was previous. I think it
was after or that there was another group that, well,
this has similar sightings at that time, So who know,
there was another group that was between thirty and fifty
miles away basically doing the same thing UM, that reported
seeing lights around the same time. So who knows. But
the fact and like you said, it's not off the charts,
(22:11):
but the fact that UM, I think it was Rustum
who had the camera but didn't have any of his
gear or outer outerwear, but he grabbed his camera. That
is pretty bizarre. Yeah. There was an investigative named lev Ivanov.
He was a lead guy, and um, he was really
into this case obviously for a while. He brought a
(22:32):
Geiger counter along that apparently just kind of spiked when
he was ever around. He was the one who discovered
that there was radio activity at all. Um. But they
officially closed the case like a month later or something,
and they said it they listed the causes of death
as a compelling natural force that they could not overcome. Yeah,
(22:54):
that's a really vague, creepy statement. Yeah, so that was
that was Another thing that really raised everyone's suspicions was
the investigators came in within three weeks of i think,
finding the last bodies who again had not died from hypothermia,
but had died from really bizarre, massive internal trauma. They
(23:16):
closed the case on it, put it under lock and
key um filed it away as classified and kept anyone
from the area for the next three years, just closed
off the area for three years. And it wasn't until
like the early nineties that these files were opened again.
And so the fact that that they had been you know,
classified actually in Soviet Russia was not that bizarre. They
(23:41):
just classified everything, But it was strange that when they
declassified these things after the Soviet Union is all that
they were like big chunks of these files just totally missing.
So who knows, maybe they got misplaced over time. But
when you add up all this stuff, the official investigation
being hurry eat and then classified and then parts missing
(24:02):
later on um that that is a little weird. It
does suggest to a lot of people that the Soviet
government either knew something, found something, or had some sort
of role in this that they didn't want everyone to
know about. Do we take another break, Yeah, all right,
we're gonna come back and talk about some of the
leading theories and debunk some of them right after this,
(24:48):
All right, did we mention that two groups of people
reported flying objects were just the one I only knew
about one? Yeah, there were two groups of people. Uh,
one that we're camping nearby, about thirty miles away, and
then um other reports in that month had been reported
orange balls of fire. And here's one direct quote, goodness gracious,
(25:12):
this is in from the written testimony. One person said
he saw a shining circular body fly over the village
from southwest to northeast. Shining disk was practically the size
of a full moon, a blue white light surrounded by
blue halo halo brightly flash like the flashes distant lightning.
And when the body disappeared behind the rise and the
sky lit up in that place for a few more minutes.
(25:35):
So that that's actually, I mean, not out of the
realm of possibility that that person really did see that,
because people have put um have suggested that these were
missile tests that were they were seeing. Yeah, So should
we go with that as theory Number one? Yeah, the
thing is as though. UM. The guy, the lead investigator,
lev levin Off, is that his name, yeah, Levi ivan Off.
(26:00):
He said, I suspect that this is in a UM
interview he gave UM. I suspected at the time, and
I am almost sure now these bright flying spheres had
a direct connection to the group's death. He didn't go
into any more detail about that, and he he himself
has died of old age. Now I believe UM. But
there are a lot of people who say these weird
(26:23):
sightings in the sky had something to do with it.
Either they irradiated the group. UM. One of the things
there was a twelve year old boy from their town
of kanarina Berg, which was known at the time as
um uh sveed lost UM that that he reported that
some of them were kind of orange tanned, like weirdly tanned, UM,
(26:45):
and that their hair was gray. So a lot of
people said irradiated. They were I radiated by UFOs or
missile tests or something like that. UM, you can actually
kind of explain the weird tanning. And I've seen a
picture of one of him at the morgue UM as
they were mummified. It was probably one of the members
of the group who wasn't found until May, and they
(27:06):
were partially mummified by the by the exposure to the
snow for you know, weeks or months. That was probably
explained that. Yeah, that makes sense. Um, they were on
the pathway apparently for what's called our seven intercontinental ballistic
missile launches. But um, it just didn't hold water with
(27:29):
the radiation only being in their clothes. Yeah, that's very weird.
That's like the one thing that doesn't quite add up. Yeah.
Another explanation for them becoming irradiated is that, yes, they
were near a nuclear missing missile testing site and that
they drank um melted snow. But again, why would just
their clothes, why wouldn't they become irradiated? I don't know,
(27:49):
or anither gear or the tent or anything what else.
We got another one, and this is the most people
who claim to be sensible say, this is the explanation
that it was sure that it was an avalanche, That
an avalanche came down the slope because they were, you know,
camping out on a mountain ridge face of a mountain,
(28:11):
um and that an avalanche came and they knew it
was coming, so they cut open their tent and fled
into the night and then got caught by hypothermia and died.
Makes sense. I mean that would get most people, especially
an experienced group of mountaineers, out of their tents pretty
quick by cutting through it. Cutting through it. Maybe the
(28:31):
thing is is it doesn't explain why some of them
but not all of them, had massive trauma. And again
it certainly doesn't explain the radiation at all or the
missing tongue. Yes, that was another one which was never found,
by the way. No, so the missing tongue I've seen.
I saw that it was removed while the girl was alive.
(28:57):
I'm sorry. Her name was lud mia um so when
I saw that. But then I also saw that she
had been found near a creek, and that it's possible
that it had just like like basically melted away from
the water the action of the water. Here's the problem,
(29:19):
this is the official report was kept under seals for decades,
and conjecture was added. You don't know at this point,
who who to believe. There's so many sites out there
dedicated and there's a twelve year old reporting from the
funeral like that's that's the only like documentation we have
of what they looked like. His name actually is um
(29:42):
Uri Kuntsevich, another another Yuri, and he was he was
that that twelve year old child. He became kind of
obsessed with it, and he set up the diet lave
Um Museum in the Diet Law Foundation and basically just
keeps the whole thing alive and is trying to get
the government to kids in the case that kid. Yeah,
well so you really really stuck to it. He's really
(30:04):
taken advantage. What else you got for theories? Well, you
know that tribe, the Monsy tribesmen, there is a theory
that they attacked them, um, but nothing about that holds water.
They didn't have any footsteps in the snow. There were
our footprints. There were peaceful people by all accounts, had
never done anything like that. There was no reason to
(30:24):
do anything like that. So just go ahead and discount
that one. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Animals attack
kind of the same thing. Same. Yeah. The other thing
that that the other reason the avalanche theory doesn't necessarily
hold up is there wasn't necessarily any evidence of an
avalanche having covered up the thing well in the tent. Yeah,
it would have swept that tent away and all the
(30:46):
gear probably right or covered it up. Yeah, what else
high winds. There's one theory that maybe one of the members,
maybe one of the euries, went out to pp and
a win swept him away, and everyone else like ran
out to look for him. But um, this article you
found where they're kind of debunking some of the stuff said,
(31:08):
you know that it doesn't make much sense that all
these experienced people would have behaved this way and just
ran out in their underwear. You know, it would have
been a little more of a organized, sensible effort if
that had happened. Yeah, you really can't. Can't um overstate
that the level of experience and the combined um like
(31:29):
the group that they formed was like greater than the
sum of its parts. So yeah, they wouldn't have it
wouldn't have been amateur like that. The one that and
this is the kind of the new fringe e semi
scientific explanation and I find just fascinating is the infrasound one. Yeah,
I mean we talked about infrasound and one of our episodes,
(31:53):
I don't remember which one. I can't remember which one,
but um, this is uh, it's a phenomenon where, when,
and in this area. They said that this definitely could
have happened where wind collides with the mountain and the
trees and everything and produces this low frequency range sound
that has been known to inspire panic and dread, confusion, beer,
(32:18):
all the things that would kind of add up in
this case. Right, So there's like this really weird. Um,
it's very tough to figure out whether that's actually real.
Like if you look at the science, the scientific literature
behind it, there's some but more often than not, it's
just some somebody claiming on their website that this is real.
(32:39):
This the literature is not necessarily there, but that's not
to say that it's just totally made up. It's like,
the the studies of this stuff hasn't caught up to
the some of the claims on the internet. But supposedly
there is from wind vortices. They could have produced it
on this on this mountain, right, these little your tornadoes
(33:00):
that would have spun up could have um produced these
sounds that is below human hearing, the level of human
hearing like a full octave below, but can supposedly produce
these weird behaviors that make people freak out. That would
explain everything. It would accept the tongue right, and I
guess the injuries sure so illustrating. I've seen other ones
(33:24):
to like, Um, there was a guy and we we
need to mention him a little more. Um. His name
was Simon Zelodov Zlotaryov. Man. This has been tough. His
name was Simon Zelotaryov. He was thirty eight. He wasn't
a member of the group. He was as he was
(33:46):
a add on towards the end who was out there
with another group that he couldn't get coordinated. So he
ended up saying like, hey, can I come with you guys?
And at first apparently the group was not all that
happy about him being there, but from what I understand,
he really kind of earned his place in there. Um.
For a while, people were like, who was this guy?
(34:07):
This is a mystery dude. Maybe the KGB was involved,
Maybe he was KGB. He was definitely ex military. Um.
But they and they actually exhumed him to find out
if the person who was buried in his grave as
him was him, and they did a they did, like
a skull. They took a picture of his skull and
superimposed it under a known picture of him. Supposedly it
(34:30):
was a perfect match, but then they took the extra
step of um comparing the DNA of the corpse in
the grave with the DNA of a known relative, and
it does not match. Okay, I saw that. I didn't
know that's who that. I didn't know. He was a
non Uh. He wasn't an original member of the good.
He wasn't in the in the club. So that so
(34:52):
some people are like, there's KGB was in on this
or he had something weird to do with it. It
was a little weird for sure. And he was one
of the ones who suffered um internal broken or broken ribs,
obviously internal. And he also became the editor in chief
of their daily paper. It's very strange. He's like, if
it bleeds, it leads, print it. Uh, you got anything else?
(35:17):
Oh man, we could do this for hours, but now
and if you have, if you're obsessed with the diet
love incident, Um, we want to know what we got
right and what we got wrong. Anything you want to specify,
We're happy to hear. Yeah, And I think um we
just officially became the three podcast to cover this topic.
(35:37):
Hopefully we did it some justice. If you want to
know more about the diet love past incident. You can
type those words into while the Internet and it will
give you all sorts of crazy stuff. And say, I
said that it's time for listener mail. Alright, So this
one is a bit long, but this is a Josh request. Oh,
(35:57):
this one's good. It's a mystery. It is a mystery.
And this is from Corey and Enjoysy City. Hey, guys,
at the open of your recent episode on Tsunamis, you
both expressed disbelief that the topic had never been covered.
In fact, you guys both said you could have sworn
you'd already covered it, and you each went back multiple
times to check. Even after checking three times, you both
admitted to being quote paranoid end quote that it had
(36:19):
somehow been done before. And just like you guys, I
was surprised to find out it had never been covered
and began to wonder why I had fuzzy memories. So
I did a little digging re listening to old episodes
on similar topics. That turns out the three of us
are not the only ones convinced of this existent episode.
The existence of this episode Apparently the two thousand fourteen
episode of stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck also
(36:44):
believed in the existence in the Rogue Waves episode, right correct. Uh, Yes,
and the September show about Rogue Waves. At about twenty
minutes in, Chuck says, and I'll do this as Chuck.
One of the last things we should cover, USh is
the difference between rogue Waves and tsunamis. But we've already
done an episode on tsunamis. And Josh, that was a
(37:06):
great appreciate that I've been worring on it. H And
at this point Josh chimes in to confirm the existence.
You want to confirm it, as Josh. Uh, my name
is Josh, and I'm confirming the existence of that episode.
I think it's what I said roughly, I think so.
And you guys go on to cover the topic quickly,
seemingly in agreement that an in depth explanation isn't necessary
(37:27):
since it already existed. Man, this opens the door to
many questions. Guys, did any listeners right in after Rogue
Waves to ask where the tsunami episode was Corey, I
don't remember. Surely. With so many listeners who take pride
in having listened to every episode of the show, someone
should have noticed. I agree. Why were you guys so
convinced of the existence of the tsunami episode and Son fourteen?
(37:50):
I don't know, Corey, wouldn't Jerry notice? Well that's a no. Uh.
Is it possible that the lost episode on Tsunamis was
the tipping point for a sequence of events leading to
a doomsday scenario and humans from the future were forced
to travel back in time in order to try and
expunge it from the historical record. It's possible, Corey. That's
(38:11):
where my money is. Yeah, but why what did we
say in there that was so ghastly that it could
have brought about the end of humanity? I don't know.
There's no way to find out either because it's been
expunged by the future people. So again, Corey from Jersey City,
one of my favorite places. Thanks Corey. Our our buddy
(38:31):
John lives there. Oh no, he lives in Hollboken. Where's
the Jersey City? Who shout out to John Bendell? Either way? Oh? John,
Hey John? He looks at Manhattan out of his window.
I know that that could be anywhere. That's true. Um, yeah,
you might be thinking of Brooklyn. No, thanks a lot, Corey.
(38:53):
That was a fantastic email, so much so I just
kept pressuring Chuck to read it, and he did, and
I think worked out well as we can all agree, right, Yes,
thank you for reading it, Chuck, certainly. Um, if you
want to get in touch with this, you can go
to stuff you Should Know dot com and find us
on all of our social media's there, and then you
(39:13):
can also send us an email to Stuff podcast at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works? Doff
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Chuck Bryant
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