February 27, 2021 • 35 mins
This 2014 episode covers the incident in 1959, in which nine students ventured into the Ural mountains for a ski hiking trip, and never returned. While much speculation has swirled for more than half a century, no one knows for certain what caused them to abandon their camp to die in the cold.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Hey, if you have listened to this
week's episodes on is a Door duncan you have heard
us talk in a listener mail about recent research into
the cause of the love past incident. Uh? That includes
Monday's email from listener Kiki, who hinted that we might
run that episode, which originally came out on October as
(00:22):
a Saturday Classic. So when we read kikiS email, we
genuinely thought we had done that already, but there was
so much back and forth about it. If we have
already done this as a Saturday Classic, we sure cannot
find evidence of it anywhere. So here it is, by request,
our previous episode on the love Past incidents. Enjoy Welcome
(00:50):
to stuff you missed in History Class A production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and we're creeping up into Halloween territory,
my favorite time of year, so it's time for a
little brush with the mysterious, the unknown, and believed by
(01:14):
some to be paranormal. Uh. This story isn't exactly spooky,
depending on your definition of that word, but it is
quite unsettling in many ways. Uh. If you were to
just do a quick Google search on the Diatlov past incident,
you will instantly turn up dozens and dozens heading into
the hundreds of sites that focus on paranormal investigation, conspiracy theories,
(01:37):
and even cryptozoology in some cases. This is really a
tragic piece of Russian history. It happened during Soviet era
Russia in Siberia, and it's never really been fully explained,
and as a consequence, there is an entire culture of
theorization that has kind of grown up around it. So
today we're going to talk about what we actually know
(01:59):
about this do hiking expedition, and then some of the
theories about it, as well as some of the less
fantastical possibilities in terms of explanation of what happened that day. Uh.
And we need to give a little morning on this one.
Some of this information could be a little upsetting if
you are squeamish to corpse talk. Uh. There are some
injury related details that are Germaine to the story that
(02:21):
I know. When I was relaying them to my husband,
Brian kind of gave him what we call the hus
where you kind of go. Uh. So, if you are
a little bit squeamish about details of how dead bodies
have been found and things that had happened to them.
Just know that you might want to proceed with caution here,
or if you have kids that might be affected by that,
this might be a good one to listen to before
(02:42):
you share with them. Uh. So we're going to talk
about the DApp Love past incident today, and if you
are fans of our colleagues podcasts stuff they don't want
you to know, you may have gotten a very brief
glimpse at this already. Yeah, there's like, it's a couple
of minutes of video, and I feel like we should
(03:03):
mention at the outset Tracy. Neither Tracy nor and I
are Slavic language speakers, so our pronunciation on names might
be a little dicey. We looked online for pronunciations of
all of these words, and they're shockingly difficult to find
anybody like a native speaker recorded saying them. So I
kind of went by, uh things that I have heard
(03:25):
other you know, historical documentaries using their pronunciation, and hopefully
we will offend no one if we are terribly wrong
in pronunciation. It is not out of a desire to
be disrespectful. In January of ninety nine, a group of
young Russian hikers and ski enthusiasts was preparing for an
(03:46):
adventure in the Ural Mountains uh And. This group consisted
of Uri Union, Ludmilla Dubnina, Zenaida Komo Garova, Alexander Kolovadov,
Rustum's sloban In, Uri kriven Ashenko, Uri Doroshenko, Nikolai Tibou
Bryno uh Simon Zola, Zola Tyev and the group's leader,
(04:11):
Igor Dyatlov, who the past eventually became named after him
since he was widely recognized as the leader of this group.
Most of the members of the group were students at
euro Polytechnical Institute and they were all experienced hikers. The
route that they had mapped out was a challenging one,
but they were all pretty much up for it. It
would have been a daunting but doable plan, so they
(04:34):
were not, you know, running in a foolhardy manner into
something that was way beyond them no and Dyatlov had
been hiking this route before, so he was familiar with it.
Uh And to begin, they traveled by train to Ivdl
in the Sferdlovsk province, and from the here they took
a truck to the last sort of town that some
people will call it an outpost or a settlement before
(04:56):
their run at the mountain. And while they were there,
in that last set moment, You're a Union actually became
quite sick. He was going to be unable to handle
the rigors of the trip, so he stayed behind. Igordiatlov
told his sick friend that he would send a message
as soon as they were back from their expedition, and
the estimated return date was two weeks later, which was
(05:19):
February twelve, and so without your Union, the rest of
the party set out on January ninety nine, and that
was the last time anyone outside that group would see
any of them alive. According to their diaries, they set
off through the past, but they lost their way because
of bad weather and they wound up going farther west
(05:40):
than they meant to. When they realized their mistake, they
set up camp, and this was February second, so it
had only been a few days into their trip. They
were only about a kilometer away from an expanse of
forests that would have offered them some shelter. So it's
kind of unclear why they didn't head into the woods
he yea. Some have theorized that dat Lav did not
(06:04):
want to head towards the woods because it would have
involved backtracking, and they were kind of trying to get
their bearings on how far they had drifted off course
and where they were going to go next, and he
may not have wanted to backtrack, not knowing, but we
really don't know why they didn't. So dad Lav, it
turned out, did not contact Uri or he was gonna
send a message to their sports club, which would then
(06:26):
really messages out on February twelve, as he had said
he would, But at that point Uton was not really
concerned hiking trips through snowy mountain train could easily experience delays.
Uh dead Lav had even told him it could be
a couple of days after that. But eventually a week
had gone by after the expected return date and there
had been no news from the young hikers, and so
(06:48):
friends and families, for obvious reasons, became very concerned. Authorities
were alerted and an investigation was mounted. On February twenty,
the search team set out to for the missing hikers,
and for almost a week, the searchers found absolutely nothing.
And then and remember they were not in the same
place that they were expected to have been, so that
(07:09):
was part of the delay in finding them. Uh. And
then on the sixth day, the group's camp was discovered
on the eastern shoulder of Kolatako, which is a mountain uh.
And that name, in the language of the Manci people
who live in the area means dead mountain or mountain
of the dead, depending on which interpretation you see uh.
And no doubt this moniker has kind of helped contribute
to interest in the legend throughout the years. The tent
(07:33):
was torn open from the inside, which is creepy yes, yes,
and the hikers winter clothes, food, and skis were all
left behind. The footprints of eight or nine people were
found in the meter deep snow, and they were headed
down the mountain and towards the forest. Yeah. The footprints,
according to some descriptions, uh, initially looked like they scattered
(07:56):
in all directions, but then they kind of all headed
in the same direct and downward. Uh. And the day
after they found the camp, and it's sort of bizarre scenario,
the first of the bodies were found Uri Cravanashenko your
and Uri Dorishenko were found near the edge of the forest,
and they were only wearing their underclothes. It seemed like
(08:20):
they had set a fire, although it wouldn't have protected
them from the freezing cold for very long. Scrapings of
their skin was found in the bark of the trees nearby,
suggesting that maybe they had tried to climb up away
from something, or more likely to get a better view
of the surrounding area. Yeah, because remember there had been
a terrible storm that kind of caused them to lose
(08:42):
their bearings in the first place, so they may have
been just trying to figure out where they were. Uh.
Soon after the two juries were found, three other bodies,
so igor yatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustum Slubadin were found
between those first two bodies and the campsite, and their
body position sans let investigators to speculate that they were
(09:02):
actually attempting to return to camp because they were all
facing the camp direction. Slubadon had a skull fracture, but
it was not believed to have been fatal. Two months
went by before the last four bodies were found in
a ravine, and that discovery was made on May four.
Their deaths were caused by trauma rather than hypothermia. Nicholas
(09:23):
tobou Bernol's skull was crushed. Alexander Zelitaryov, who was the
oldest of the group by far at the age of
thirty seven, had a whole lot of broken ribs, blood,
Milandemanina had broken ribs, and her tongue was gone. Yeah,
the missing tongue is often the thing that people go
and her tongue was gone, Like that's kind of one
(09:44):
of the stingers. In the ghost story versions of this,
all of the hikers that they found were either in
their underwear or sleeping clothes for the most part. Uh,
we'll get to a little bit more on that in
a second. And they were all either barefoot or in
stalking feet. It's believed one of and was wearing just
one shoe, So when they abandoned their tent, they were
(10:04):
basically walking into sub zero temperatures. I've seen it listed
as thirty degrees below fahrenheit. And some of the hikers,
particularly the ones found later, appeared to be wearing clothes
of others. So it's possible that um Kravonashenko and Drushenko
had died first and then their friends, disoriented and not
certain that they were going to be able to find Camp,
(10:26):
had taken what clothes they had been wearing, because remember,
they were found in just their underwear in a desperate
attempt to kind of buy time by covering themselves just
a little bit more. Dr Boris Bazra's Denny was the
medical examiner in charge of the autopsies. It was determined
that the first five bodies which were found had all
died of hypothermia and the cases of skull and riped fractures.
(10:49):
He determined that the force that caused the injuries would
have been on par with that of an automobile crash.
Because of a large amount of blood found in Ladmiller's stomach,
it was believe that she was alive when her tongue
was severed and that she had swallowed the blood that
resulted from the injury. Yeah, that comes up as being
kind of a tricky part of the equation when people
(11:11):
are trying to theorize what happened. Um. There was a
very brief speculation early on in the investigation that the
Mancy people that were living in the area may have
attacked the hikers, considering them to be interlopers on their land,
but there was really no sign of struggle or combat,
so that theory kind of got put to bed very quickly.
(11:32):
You know, humans could not have caused the damage that
was detailed in those autopsy findings. In the end, the
medical examiner ruled that the students had been the victims
of quote A compelling unknown force, and with that, the
official Soviet investigation of the case was shut down in
May nine, just a few months after it was begun.
(11:53):
The cases files and the reports were closed and they
were archived. The area where the camp and the bodies
had been found was kept off limits to other explorers
for several years. Some people point to this as proof
that there was a cover up, but it's entirely likely
that the officials simply did not want to risk losing
anyone else to whatever killed the nine members of the party.
(12:17):
In the nine nineties, photo copies of the case files
that have been locked away for decades were released to
the public, but they were incomplete. There are some gaps,
they're missing pages. Uh. That's another thing, of course, that
people like to point out as a part of a
conspiracy theory. Later on, I think we should also point
out that at that point the U leadership of Russia
(12:40):
had changed, and it had been four decades. There's not
always when it comes to archival situations. Things are not
always handled with kid gloves or properly. Things get misfiled.
So those are also potential things everyone wants to jump
to cover up. And I'm not saying that there couldn't
have been one, but you also have to consider them
(13:00):
were mundane elements. UH. And as the story of the
Diatlov Pass incident has persisted through the years, there have
been additional details that have kind of been woven into
the fabric of the story. Some versions mentioned that the
hikers and their clothing were highly radioactive, and there are
also alleged eyewitness accounts from other hikers who were south
(13:22):
of the area that described glowing orange lights in the
sky above the mountains, but those details really are hotly debated. UH.
There's little to nothing in the officially released records about
these two points. So depending on which blog, message board,
or news article you venture into to read, UH, some
(13:42):
will play up these points and kind of sensationalize them,
and some will dismiss the radiation as a normal trace
level amount. UH. And the light as either being a
false recollection on the part of the witnesses, or a
natural phenomenon that the viewers simply misunderstood or didn't recognize
for what it was, or a crackpot theory. That's my addition.
(14:04):
Lev Ivanov, an investigator who had worked on the case,
claimed in an interview in that he took several eyewitness
accounts describing brightly flying spears, but he was told to
close the case. Yeah, and again we don't we know
that eyewitness accounts of any event are always uh a
(14:28):
little bit suspect. People's memories failed them, not through any nefarious,
you know, desire, They just they're not always correct. There is, Yeah,
there is an increasing body of scholarly work about how
hugely unreliable eyewitness accounts are. Yeah. Uh. And next up
we are going to talk about some of the theories
as to just what exactly might have happened to those
(14:50):
hikers in Siberia. There are many possibilities and innumerable theories.
We will not talk about all of them exhaustively, but
we want to cover some of the more kind of
popular and well known ones. But before we get to that, Tracy,
do you want to have a word from our sponsor. Yes,
I do. So. When you have an unsolved mystery that
(15:16):
stretches on for decades, especially an unsolved mystery that has
some really weird details that have been there since the beginning,
lots of theories crop up around it. And there are
several that have cropped up around this incident over the years. Uh. Yeah,
one that actually is kind of recent eat earlier this year,
Discovery are to show that blended fiction and documentary to
(15:40):
pitch the idea that a Russian yetti had claimed the
lives of the nine hikers. I will be super blunt
and say that this was not well received. Well, that
it's funny because when we get to the part about
the tent being ripped open from the inside, my first
self his thought is werewolf. I didn't even think about that. Yeah.
(16:00):
So one theory that also does not have much traction
is that escaped prisoners from a gulag attacked them. But
there was nothing taken from the camp and there was
no sign of that sort of struggle. I mean, people
clearly had some traumatic injuries, but there were no sign
that they resulted from a fight with someone. Yeah, they
really didn't have any external damage. There is another theory
(16:25):
that uh, the entire group had eaten contaminated food. One
of the early findings was that their last meal had
been roughly five or six hours before they died. So
some had theorized that they ate some sort of contaminated
food with some sort of bacteria that caused them to
have sort of a psychotic episode and that they all
(16:46):
became disoriented and confused. Uh, and they basically went mad
from eating bad food. There's even one theory that the
hikers were killed somewhere else and then the whole abandoned
camp and all the resting places were staged afterward. And
this one is supported by statements from your uton. Remember
he's the one that got sick and wind up not
(17:06):
going on the trip. He was asked allegedly to identify
every item in the camp and who it belonged to,
And there were several items that he couldn't recognize or identify,
and this included skis, a piece of cloth, and a
pair of glasses. I think it's kind of easy to
dismiss this idea, but how in the world would one
person have knowledge of every single thing every other person
(17:29):
with them owned and carried with them? Yeah, and I mean,
I uh not to you know, discredit him. But again,
we talked about eyewitness accounts having some reliability issues anyway,
and you're talking about a kid in his early twenties
who just found out that nine of his closest friends
(17:50):
died in a really gruesome and horrible and mysterious way.
So there's some shock in the mix that can really
mess with your memory in your thought processes. In addition
to it being sort of unrealistic to expect him to
know what every single person had packed. Uh So that
also factors in. And because of the nature of the
(18:13):
injuries of the four bodies found in the ravine, they
all had serious internal injuries but no evidence of exterior trauma.
It's been postulated that some sort of explosion may have
led to their deaths, and that like a shock wave
may have hit them, or that they were running and
kind of thrown into the ravine with great force. And
this has kind of fed a whole slew of ideas
(18:36):
that the Diyat law of hikers met with a bad
end due to some sort of military activity, such as
a test missile explosion. There is no record of such
a military test happening at this time while they were there,
but proponents of this theory argue that it might not
have been divulged even if it had happened. There are
two military facilities where rocket trials and nuclear testing took
(18:59):
place that are near the scene, but there is no
record of them having been doing that when this happened.
So you're Reuton's identifying of articles problem is also cited
in support of this theory, which you know what sort
of with the suggestion that members of the military got
to the camp before the investigators and covered up the
(19:19):
evidence but sloppily left things behind. And I do want
to say I was not trying to discredit him, but
more to say it's it's not it's to be expected
that someone would not necessarily be able to identify everything
at the camp. Yeah, it's unrealistic. Um, Like I said, again,
this is a person in shock. Young also, you know,
(19:41):
dragged out there by authorities and gone who owned this,
Who owned this? Who owned this? I would be a
train wreck. So uh. And he mentioned there's that piece
of cloth that he couldn't identify where it came from,
and he specifically said he thought it looked like it
came from a military uniform. Which is another thing that
kind of feeds this military involvement theory. UM. Another story
(20:01):
which kind of perpetuates theories about alien or even military
involvement is tied to the recollections of a man who
was a twelve year old in ninety nine when all
of this happened, Eurikonsevitch, who attended the funerals of several
of the deceased hikers. UM. His recollection is that the
bodies were a deep brown tan. He sometimes even described
(20:23):
them as Orangesian tone and uh. He went on to
found the Diatlov Foundation, which kind of searches for various
UH solutions to how this all could have happened. But
some have discounted his his commentary on this weird color
of the skin as being attributed to the fact that
they were out in the elements for so long, even
(20:46):
while Street Journal book reviewer Gregory Crouch throughout a theory
in his review of Dead Mountain by Donnie Iker and
we'll be talking more about Iker in just a bit.
He suggests that one of the nine quote suffered some
kind of psychotic rage and attacked his fellow hikers. And
I will say one more time, We're wolf it's all
(21:09):
clear now, Tracy, I know it's obviously we're closed. Why
are we doing this episode? Right? They should have just
called you to begin with. This would be done. We
could save a lot of people time and money. Uh
so Uh. There are obviously plenty of these very interesting
and engaging theories regarding what happened in the Ural Mountains,
but we really also have to consider the less sensational explanations. First,
(21:36):
the tongue. The most obvious explanation is that a scavenger
animal ate it. And you know, the tongue is pretty
easily accessible soft tissue, and it probably would have been
a thing that a meal seeking animal would go for.
This doesn't really explain the blood in her stomach, though,
it's possible that she fell and bit her own tongue off,
(21:59):
or because she was the last found uh, or because
she was found in the last group, that her tongue
had simply decomposed. Yeah, her mouth was open when they
found her, so it is possible that the tongue decomposed
with exposure to the elements. I have never seen like
a breakdown of the likelihood of uh, that being the
case sort of worked out with how cold it was
(22:22):
and what the preservation of the temperature would have been
versus frost bite deteriorating something. But that's just one possible explanation.
So an avalanche has also been mentioned to explain the
trashed camp uh, and it could explain some of the
injuries that have been caused by great force without external trauma,
(22:43):
But there isn't um a whole lot of evidence that
an avalanche actually happened. However, I did read several theories
that the sort of more likely scenario would actually be
that the fear of an avalanche may explain why the
hikers ran from their tent in such a poor state
of dress for the conditions. If they heard a sound
(23:04):
that convinced them that an avalanche was happening, it is
possible that they would have run for their lives, thinking
that they didn't have time to prep uh, and that
that is how they found themselves disoriented and lost, and
remember this was a stormy time of year. It's also
completely believable that hypothermia could have played a really significant part.
(23:25):
And all the strange things about how the deceased were dressed,
a behavior called paradoxical undressing, is not at all uncommon
in cases of extreme hypothermia, as your brain functions are
compromised in the cold. Often this manifests as taking off
your clothing because either you're not thinking clearly at all,
(23:46):
or you feel like you're hot even though you're freezing
to death. Yeah, we talked a little bit about hypothermia
and sort of how it affects your brain, as well
as some more altitude related stuff when we did our
Everest pod cast. But I thought about that a little bit. Um,
these weren't at the elevations that the altitude issues were
(24:07):
ever brought into play. But you know, extreme conditions can
really cause your brain to do some very bizarre and
seemingly nonsensical things. Uh. And this paradoxical undressing is well
documented in a lot of hypothermia cases that people will
try to burrow into the snow with no clothes on
because some part of their brain thinks that's how I'm
(24:28):
going to survive. We don't know now, since there's no
official confirmation on the radiation levels that we mentioned earlier
or the mysterious orange lights. Uh, theories of secret government
testing and aliens that are based around those facts kind
of struggle. It really gets into a lot of theoretical
this could be, but there's just not much to back
(24:48):
it up. But we don't want to ruin all the
fun for Ben and Matt and stuff. They don't want
you to know. So, for all we know, those were
all detailed out in the pages and reports that somehow
went missing from the publicly released records will give them
that bone, but those really don't have a lot of
substantiation to work with. Before we get to one more
kind of interesting theory about how this may have happened.
(25:11):
Do you want to have a word from a sponsor,
let's do that. A more recent theory that's come about
is that a Carmen vortex street caused the deaths. The
Carmen vortex street is this phenomenon consisting of a series
(25:32):
of vortices caused by the separation of wind or fluid
by a bluff body. So vortices sort of like tornadoes. Uh.
I didn't mean to make that sound like a question.
That's actually swirling wind is really what that is? Uh,
And bluff body. So that's the shape of the landscape,
(25:55):
right right, So when like it's it's kind of if
you think about in this case, we in hitting the
mountain it can't go through it, so it splits to
go around it. And because of the shape of the mountain,
it forms these whirling vortices and they kind of dove
tail on one another and you end up with a
chain of them. Yeah. And when you look at atmospheric
photos of these, they look really beautiful. However they are
(26:18):
incredibly dangerous. Yeah, there are stories of them completely leveling buildings. UH.
And now in the modern era that they have been
studied and understood a little bit better. Modern architecture, particularly
in cities and places where they're multiple structures close together,
they really try to factor in not creating an environment
(26:40):
that will welcome these sorts of phenomenon to happen or
cause them. So Donnie I Car who we talked about earlier,
he was a filmmaker. He also wrote a book about
the diet Past incident UH as part of his kind
of press junket. As he talked about what was in
his book, he mentioned these Carmen vortex streets and he
believes this movement of wind through the past could have
(27:02):
created such a vortex street. And moreover, he asserts that
this wind event could have resulted in an infrasound phenomenon.
And this is pertinent to the mystery because infrasound, which
is too low of a frequency to be consciously heard
or perceived, but does affect your ear drum and the
pressure around you, it's said to cause people to experience disorientation,
(27:25):
they can have shortness of breath, they can have irrational fear.
So it kind of messes with your head a little bit. Uh.
And if this were the case, and this had in
fact happened to the diet Lov party, it offers another
possible explanation for why they ran out of their tent
into the you know, certainly fatal coldhi Our asserts that
the surroundings of the past form the perfect environment for
(27:49):
the creation of a Carmen vortex street. The dome of
the so called dead Mountain is really symmetrical. It's dome shaped,
as that suggests, So it's the perfect blunt object act
to form eddies of splitting wind as the gusts come
up against it. Yeah, I don't know if they've ever
been able to. He as part of his book research
(28:09):
and his project, actually tried to recreate their hike, and
I don't know that they came came into I haven't
read the whole book. I don't know if they came
into a situation where they saw a duplication of that
happening or not, but food for thought. UH. In more
recent happenings, UH. In two thousand eight, there was a
meeting which was organized by Eural State Technical University or Polytechnic,
(28:33):
which is the university that the students had attended, and
the Diatlov Foundation, and they gathered independent researchers and former
rescuers UH to gather and discuss all of the possible evidence,
because remember the Diatlaw Foundation was set up to try
to figure out exactly what happened, and this group determined
that when taking all of the evidence into account, all
(28:54):
signs really pointed to a military test accidentally causing the deaths. However,
a group also issued a statement saying that the Defense
Ministry and other government agencies would have to provide them
with some additional documentation before they could say they had
definitive proof. So they kind of were making a super theory,
but they don't really have the evidence to back it up.
(29:17):
There are a whole lot of films, both documentary and
docufiction that have been inspired by the deat Love Past
Incident in TLVE, director Renny Harland made a movie that
was loosely premised on the recreation of the journey, but
it veered very wildly into fictional territory. Oh yes, super
(29:38):
not I think I was. I have not seen it.
It's called Devil's Pass and I haven't seen it. But
Christian from brain Stuff and I were talking about it.
He's seen it, and he was He was saying like, yeah,
they never found the bodies, and I'm like, that is
not accurate. So clearly that film has a lot of
like liberties taken with the story in order to further
the plot along. There is actually I'm really looking forward
(30:00):
to this. There is a PC MAC video game that's
coming out that is based on the events of the
diet Loft Past incident. It's entitled Lot and if you're interested,
it's coming out of a Polish games company and that
is going to be out in early and I'm really
curious to see what they do with it. You're a Uton,
the young man who left the group before the hike
(30:22):
because of his illness, lived to be seventy five and
he died in April. He's often quoted as saying, if
I had a chance to ask God just one question,
it would be what really happened to my friends that night?
And I think that's one of the things that's really
like there's such a focus on the whole unsolved mystery
conspiracy angle of all this um because I I've I've
(30:45):
looked around those websites. We've had a lot of people
that have requested this episode, and I've sort of been like,
I personally don't feel like researching that, so I'm really
glad the Holly did. But you know, I have poked
around at some website some people have asked, and like
they pretty universally forget about the fact that these were
a group of college students who died and that's tragic,
(31:07):
Like that's pretty much not talked about. Yeah, it really
it really becomes about the my theory versus your theory
mentality a lot of times, uh, which I understand the
appeal of that, and it's very fun and it is
fun to theorize on sort of what might have happened,
kind of play armchair sleuth. But as you said, you know,
(31:29):
these are nine except for the one man that was
in his thirties. They were all in their early twenties,
they were really young. Then those were people's friends and
family members. Yeah, and they were by all accounts, very bright.
Three of them were engineers. Uh that I think we're
doing graduate work. And then the others were younger students.
(31:49):
I think they were undergrads. But so they all had
really bright futures ahead of them. They were all very smart.
As we said, they were accomplished um hikers, like they
really you know, they were just setting out in their
lives and it and there is a small memorial monument
to them with their photos on it. Uh, but I
think you're you make a great point. Well, there was
(32:12):
there was a student who was supposed to be part
of my freshman class in college who fell from a
waterfall and died, uh right before, like on a school
sponsored trip immediately before the school year. And it really
rocked the campus. Like people who had never even met
her were just profoundly affected by it. So I can't
(32:33):
imagine having a group this size who were all students,
who all died unexpectedly on a trip like this. I
can't imagine what it must have been like for their
classmates and colleagues and family members afterward. Yeah, and the
the gentleman we mentioned earlier Yuri Kotsevich, who had been
twelve when this all happened. When he spoke the incident,
(32:55):
you know, as an adult, his recollections are really very
Um there are impressions of sort of the emotional state
of their community and how everyone was really devastated. I mean,
it was a huge loss, uh So something to think about,
and as enthusiasts are still looking for the real answer
to what happened in the the outlaw pass we may
(33:17):
never know it. But part of the problem is that
the clock is kind of running out for some people. Um,
the people that were actually involved in the investigation or
who knew the hikers. The hikers are all aging so
and many have already died, so in terms of eyewitness accounts,
even though they're unreliable in terms of talking to people
that were actually part of what happened there, there's not
(33:39):
really going to be anybody to ask any additional questions
of soon. Although there are still people, of course that
hold out hope that there is a fuller record that
the Russian government has that they will someday release I
personally kind of hold more to the they don't say
much because they don't know anything else and probably some
records got lost, but that's just my sort of pragmat
(34:00):
I presume they're kind of like Shrug, which could be
perceived as a cover up, if that's what you want
to see, but I really think it's more of a
I don't know. Uh so that is the yell Off
Pass incident, which is fascinating. I'm sure we will get
lots of theories in our email I actually kind of
hope so that will be some fun October reading. Thanks
(34:28):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old hell stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(34:49):
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
(35:11):
you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday, everybody. Hey, if you have listened to this
week's episodes on is a Door duncan you have heard
us talk in a listener mail about recent research into
the cause of the love past incident. Uh? That includes
Monday's email from listener Kiki, who hinted that we might
run that episode, which originally came out on October as
(00:22):
a Saturday Classic. So when we read kikiS email, we
genuinely thought we had done that already, but there was
so much back and forth about it. If we have
already done this as a Saturday Classic, we sure cannot
find evidence of it anywhere. So here it is, by request,
our previous episode on the love Past incidents. Enjoy Welcome
(00:50):
to stuff you missed in History Class A production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and we're creeping up into Halloween territory,
my favorite time of year, so it's time for a
little brush with the mysterious, the unknown, and believed by
(01:14):
some to be paranormal. Uh. This story isn't exactly spooky,
depending on your definition of that word, but it is
quite unsettling in many ways. Uh. If you were to
just do a quick Google search on the Diatlov past incident,
you will instantly turn up dozens and dozens heading into
the hundreds of sites that focus on paranormal investigation, conspiracy theories,
(01:37):
and even cryptozoology in some cases. This is really a
tragic piece of Russian history. It happened during Soviet era
Russia in Siberia, and it's never really been fully explained,
and as a consequence, there is an entire culture of
theorization that has kind of grown up around it. So
today we're going to talk about what we actually know
(01:59):
about this do hiking expedition, and then some of the
theories about it, as well as some of the less
fantastical possibilities in terms of explanation of what happened that day. Uh.
And we need to give a little morning on this one.
Some of this information could be a little upsetting if
you are squeamish to corpse talk. Uh. There are some
injury related details that are Germaine to the story that
(02:21):
I know. When I was relaying them to my husband,
Brian kind of gave him what we call the hus
where you kind of go. Uh. So, if you are
a little bit squeamish about details of how dead bodies
have been found and things that had happened to them.
Just know that you might want to proceed with caution here,
or if you have kids that might be affected by that,
this might be a good one to listen to before
(02:42):
you share with them. Uh. So we're going to talk
about the DApp Love past incident today, and if you
are fans of our colleagues podcasts stuff they don't want
you to know, you may have gotten a very brief
glimpse at this already. Yeah, there's like, it's a couple
of minutes of video, and I feel like we should
(03:03):
mention at the outset Tracy. Neither Tracy nor and I
are Slavic language speakers, so our pronunciation on names might
be a little dicey. We looked online for pronunciations of
all of these words, and they're shockingly difficult to find
anybody like a native speaker recorded saying them. So I
kind of went by, uh things that I have heard
(03:25):
other you know, historical documentaries using their pronunciation, and hopefully
we will offend no one if we are terribly wrong
in pronunciation. It is not out of a desire to
be disrespectful. In January of ninety nine, a group of
young Russian hikers and ski enthusiasts was preparing for an
(03:46):
adventure in the Ural Mountains uh And. This group consisted
of Uri Union, Ludmilla Dubnina, Zenaida Komo Garova, Alexander Kolovadov,
Rustum's sloban In, Uri kriven Ashenko, Uri Doroshenko, Nikolai Tibou
Bryno uh Simon Zola, Zola Tyev and the group's leader,
(04:11):
Igor Dyatlov, who the past eventually became named after him
since he was widely recognized as the leader of this group.
Most of the members of the group were students at
euro Polytechnical Institute and they were all experienced hikers. The
route that they had mapped out was a challenging one,
but they were all pretty much up for it. It
would have been a daunting but doable plan, so they
(04:34):
were not, you know, running in a foolhardy manner into
something that was way beyond them no and Dyatlov had
been hiking this route before, so he was familiar with it.
Uh And to begin, they traveled by train to Ivdl
in the Sferdlovsk province, and from the here they took
a truck to the last sort of town that some
people will call it an outpost or a settlement before
(04:56):
their run at the mountain. And while they were there,
in that last set moment, You're a Union actually became
quite sick. He was going to be unable to handle
the rigors of the trip, so he stayed behind. Igordiatlov
told his sick friend that he would send a message
as soon as they were back from their expedition, and
the estimated return date was two weeks later, which was
(05:19):
February twelve, and so without your Union, the rest of
the party set out on January ninety nine, and that
was the last time anyone outside that group would see
any of them alive. According to their diaries, they set
off through the past, but they lost their way because
of bad weather and they wound up going farther west
(05:40):
than they meant to. When they realized their mistake, they
set up camp, and this was February second, so it
had only been a few days into their trip. They
were only about a kilometer away from an expanse of
forests that would have offered them some shelter. So it's
kind of unclear why they didn't head into the woods
he yea. Some have theorized that dat Lav did not
(06:04):
want to head towards the woods because it would have
involved backtracking, and they were kind of trying to get
their bearings on how far they had drifted off course
and where they were going to go next, and he
may not have wanted to backtrack, not knowing, but we
really don't know why they didn't. So dad Lav, it
turned out, did not contact Uri or he was gonna
send a message to their sports club, which would then
(06:26):
really messages out on February twelve, as he had said
he would, But at that point Uton was not really
concerned hiking trips through snowy mountain train could easily experience delays.
Uh dead Lav had even told him it could be
a couple of days after that. But eventually a week
had gone by after the expected return date and there
had been no news from the young hikers, and so
(06:48):
friends and families, for obvious reasons, became very concerned. Authorities
were alerted and an investigation was mounted. On February twenty,
the search team set out to for the missing hikers,
and for almost a week, the searchers found absolutely nothing.
And then and remember they were not in the same
place that they were expected to have been, so that
(07:09):
was part of the delay in finding them. Uh. And
then on the sixth day, the group's camp was discovered
on the eastern shoulder of Kolatako, which is a mountain uh.
And that name, in the language of the Manci people
who live in the area means dead mountain or mountain
of the dead, depending on which interpretation you see uh.
And no doubt this moniker has kind of helped contribute
to interest in the legend throughout the years. The tent
(07:33):
was torn open from the inside, which is creepy yes, yes,
and the hikers winter clothes, food, and skis were all
left behind. The footprints of eight or nine people were
found in the meter deep snow, and they were headed
down the mountain and towards the forest. Yeah. The footprints,
according to some descriptions, uh, initially looked like they scattered
(07:56):
in all directions, but then they kind of all headed
in the same direct and downward. Uh. And the day
after they found the camp, and it's sort of bizarre scenario,
the first of the bodies were found Uri Cravanashenko your
and Uri Dorishenko were found near the edge of the forest,
and they were only wearing their underclothes. It seemed like
(08:20):
they had set a fire, although it wouldn't have protected
them from the freezing cold for very long. Scrapings of
their skin was found in the bark of the trees nearby,
suggesting that maybe they had tried to climb up away
from something, or more likely to get a better view
of the surrounding area. Yeah, because remember there had been
a terrible storm that kind of caused them to lose
(08:42):
their bearings in the first place, so they may have
been just trying to figure out where they were. Uh.
Soon after the two juries were found, three other bodies,
so igor yatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustum Slubadin were found
between those first two bodies and the campsite, and their
body position sans let investigators to speculate that they were
(09:02):
actually attempting to return to camp because they were all
facing the camp direction. Slubadon had a skull fracture, but
it was not believed to have been fatal. Two months
went by before the last four bodies were found in
a ravine, and that discovery was made on May four.
Their deaths were caused by trauma rather than hypothermia. Nicholas
(09:23):
tobou Bernol's skull was crushed. Alexander Zelitaryov, who was the
oldest of the group by far at the age of
thirty seven, had a whole lot of broken ribs, blood,
Milandemanina had broken ribs, and her tongue was gone. Yeah,
the missing tongue is often the thing that people go
and her tongue was gone, Like that's kind of one
(09:44):
of the stingers. In the ghost story versions of this,
all of the hikers that they found were either in
their underwear or sleeping clothes for the most part. Uh,
we'll get to a little bit more on that in
a second. And they were all either barefoot or in
stalking feet. It's believed one of and was wearing just
one shoe, So when they abandoned their tent, they were
(10:04):
basically walking into sub zero temperatures. I've seen it listed
as thirty degrees below fahrenheit. And some of the hikers,
particularly the ones found later, appeared to be wearing clothes
of others. So it's possible that um Kravonashenko and Drushenko
had died first and then their friends, disoriented and not
certain that they were going to be able to find Camp,
(10:26):
had taken what clothes they had been wearing, because remember,
they were found in just their underwear in a desperate
attempt to kind of buy time by covering themselves just
a little bit more. Dr Boris Bazra's Denny was the
medical examiner in charge of the autopsies. It was determined
that the first five bodies which were found had all
died of hypothermia and the cases of skull and riped fractures.
(10:49):
He determined that the force that caused the injuries would
have been on par with that of an automobile crash.
Because of a large amount of blood found in Ladmiller's stomach,
it was believe that she was alive when her tongue
was severed and that she had swallowed the blood that
resulted from the injury. Yeah, that comes up as being
kind of a tricky part of the equation when people
(11:11):
are trying to theorize what happened. Um. There was a
very brief speculation early on in the investigation that the
Mancy people that were living in the area may have
attacked the hikers, considering them to be interlopers on their land,
but there was really no sign of struggle or combat,
so that theory kind of got put to bed very quickly.
(11:32):
You know, humans could not have caused the damage that
was detailed in those autopsy findings. In the end, the
medical examiner ruled that the students had been the victims
of quote A compelling unknown force, and with that, the
official Soviet investigation of the case was shut down in
May nine, just a few months after it was begun.
(11:53):
The cases files and the reports were closed and they
were archived. The area where the camp and the bodies
had been found was kept off limits to other explorers
for several years. Some people point to this as proof
that there was a cover up, but it's entirely likely
that the officials simply did not want to risk losing
anyone else to whatever killed the nine members of the party.
(12:17):
In the nine nineties, photo copies of the case files
that have been locked away for decades were released to
the public, but they were incomplete. There are some gaps,
they're missing pages. Uh. That's another thing, of course, that
people like to point out as a part of a
conspiracy theory. Later on, I think we should also point
out that at that point the U leadership of Russia
(12:40):
had changed, and it had been four decades. There's not
always when it comes to archival situations. Things are not
always handled with kid gloves or properly. Things get misfiled.
So those are also potential things everyone wants to jump
to cover up. And I'm not saying that there couldn't
have been one, but you also have to consider them
(13:00):
were mundane elements. UH. And as the story of the
Diatlov Pass incident has persisted through the years, there have
been additional details that have kind of been woven into
the fabric of the story. Some versions mentioned that the
hikers and their clothing were highly radioactive, and there are
also alleged eyewitness accounts from other hikers who were south
(13:22):
of the area that described glowing orange lights in the
sky above the mountains, but those details really are hotly debated. UH.
There's little to nothing in the officially released records about
these two points. So depending on which blog, message board,
or news article you venture into to read, UH, some
(13:42):
will play up these points and kind of sensationalize them,
and some will dismiss the radiation as a normal trace
level amount. UH. And the light as either being a
false recollection on the part of the witnesses, or a
natural phenomenon that the viewers simply misunderstood or didn't recognize
for what it was, or a crackpot theory. That's my addition.
(14:04):
Lev Ivanov, an investigator who had worked on the case,
claimed in an interview in that he took several eyewitness
accounts describing brightly flying spears, but he was told to
close the case. Yeah, and again we don't we know
that eyewitness accounts of any event are always uh a
(14:28):
little bit suspect. People's memories failed them, not through any nefarious,
you know, desire, They just they're not always correct. There is, Yeah,
there is an increasing body of scholarly work about how
hugely unreliable eyewitness accounts are. Yeah. Uh. And next up
we are going to talk about some of the theories
as to just what exactly might have happened to those
(14:50):
hikers in Siberia. There are many possibilities and innumerable theories.
We will not talk about all of them exhaustively, but
we want to cover some of the more kind of
popular and well known ones. But before we get to that, Tracy,
do you want to have a word from our sponsor. Yes,
I do. So. When you have an unsolved mystery that
(15:16):
stretches on for decades, especially an unsolved mystery that has
some really weird details that have been there since the beginning,
lots of theories crop up around it. And there are
several that have cropped up around this incident over the years. Uh. Yeah,
one that actually is kind of recent eat earlier this year,
Discovery are to show that blended fiction and documentary to
(15:40):
pitch the idea that a Russian yetti had claimed the
lives of the nine hikers. I will be super blunt
and say that this was not well received. Well, that
it's funny because when we get to the part about
the tent being ripped open from the inside, my first
self his thought is werewolf. I didn't even think about that. Yeah.
(16:00):
So one theory that also does not have much traction
is that escaped prisoners from a gulag attacked them. But
there was nothing taken from the camp and there was
no sign of that sort of struggle. I mean, people
clearly had some traumatic injuries, but there were no sign
that they resulted from a fight with someone. Yeah, they
really didn't have any external damage. There is another theory
(16:25):
that uh, the entire group had eaten contaminated food. One
of the early findings was that their last meal had
been roughly five or six hours before they died. So
some had theorized that they ate some sort of contaminated
food with some sort of bacteria that caused them to
have sort of a psychotic episode and that they all
(16:46):
became disoriented and confused. Uh, and they basically went mad
from eating bad food. There's even one theory that the
hikers were killed somewhere else and then the whole abandoned
camp and all the resting places were staged afterward. And
this one is supported by statements from your uton. Remember
he's the one that got sick and wind up not
(17:06):
going on the trip. He was asked allegedly to identify
every item in the camp and who it belonged to,
And there were several items that he couldn't recognize or identify,
and this included skis, a piece of cloth, and a
pair of glasses. I think it's kind of easy to
dismiss this idea, but how in the world would one
person have knowledge of every single thing every other person
(17:29):
with them owned and carried with them? Yeah, and I mean,
I uh not to you know, discredit him. But again,
we talked about eyewitness accounts having some reliability issues anyway,
and you're talking about a kid in his early twenties
who just found out that nine of his closest friends
(17:50):
died in a really gruesome and horrible and mysterious way.
So there's some shock in the mix that can really
mess with your memory in your thought processes. In addition
to it being sort of unrealistic to expect him to
know what every single person had packed. Uh So that
also factors in. And because of the nature of the
(18:13):
injuries of the four bodies found in the ravine, they
all had serious internal injuries but no evidence of exterior trauma.
It's been postulated that some sort of explosion may have
led to their deaths, and that like a shock wave
may have hit them, or that they were running and
kind of thrown into the ravine with great force. And
this has kind of fed a whole slew of ideas
(18:36):
that the Diyat law of hikers met with a bad
end due to some sort of military activity, such as
a test missile explosion. There is no record of such
a military test happening at this time while they were there,
but proponents of this theory argue that it might not
have been divulged even if it had happened. There are
two military facilities where rocket trials and nuclear testing took
(18:59):
place that are near the scene, but there is no
record of them having been doing that when this happened.
So you're Reuton's identifying of articles problem is also cited
in support of this theory, which you know what sort
of with the suggestion that members of the military got
to the camp before the investigators and covered up the
(19:19):
evidence but sloppily left things behind. And I do want
to say I was not trying to discredit him, but
more to say it's it's not it's to be expected
that someone would not necessarily be able to identify everything
at the camp. Yeah, it's unrealistic. Um, Like I said, again,
this is a person in shock. Young also, you know,
(19:41):
dragged out there by authorities and gone who owned this,
Who owned this? Who owned this? I would be a
train wreck. So uh. And he mentioned there's that piece
of cloth that he couldn't identify where it came from,
and he specifically said he thought it looked like it
came from a military uniform. Which is another thing that
kind of feeds this military involvement theory. UM. Another story
(20:01):
which kind of perpetuates theories about alien or even military
involvement is tied to the recollections of a man who
was a twelve year old in ninety nine when all
of this happened, Eurikonsevitch, who attended the funerals of several
of the deceased hikers. UM. His recollection is that the
bodies were a deep brown tan. He sometimes even described
(20:23):
them as Orangesian tone and uh. He went on to
found the Diatlov Foundation, which kind of searches for various
UH solutions to how this all could have happened. But
some have discounted his his commentary on this weird color
of the skin as being attributed to the fact that
they were out in the elements for so long, even
(20:46):
while Street Journal book reviewer Gregory Crouch throughout a theory
in his review of Dead Mountain by Donnie Iker and
we'll be talking more about Iker in just a bit.
He suggests that one of the nine quote suffered some
kind of psychotic rage and attacked his fellow hikers. And
I will say one more time, We're wolf it's all
(21:09):
clear now, Tracy, I know it's obviously we're closed. Why
are we doing this episode? Right? They should have just
called you to begin with. This would be done. We
could save a lot of people time and money. Uh
so Uh. There are obviously plenty of these very interesting
and engaging theories regarding what happened in the Ural Mountains,
but we really also have to consider the less sensational explanations. First,
(21:36):
the tongue. The most obvious explanation is that a scavenger
animal ate it. And you know, the tongue is pretty
easily accessible soft tissue, and it probably would have been
a thing that a meal seeking animal would go for.
This doesn't really explain the blood in her stomach, though,
it's possible that she fell and bit her own tongue off,
(21:59):
or because she was the last found uh, or because
she was found in the last group, that her tongue
had simply decomposed. Yeah, her mouth was open when they
found her, so it is possible that the tongue decomposed
with exposure to the elements. I have never seen like
a breakdown of the likelihood of uh, that being the
case sort of worked out with how cold it was
(22:22):
and what the preservation of the temperature would have been
versus frost bite deteriorating something. But that's just one possible explanation.
So an avalanche has also been mentioned to explain the
trashed camp uh, and it could explain some of the
injuries that have been caused by great force without external trauma,
(22:43):
But there isn't um a whole lot of evidence that
an avalanche actually happened. However, I did read several theories
that the sort of more likely scenario would actually be
that the fear of an avalanche may explain why the
hikers ran from their tent in such a poor state
of dress for the conditions. If they heard a sound
(23:04):
that convinced them that an avalanche was happening, it is
possible that they would have run for their lives, thinking
that they didn't have time to prep uh, and that
that is how they found themselves disoriented and lost, and
remember this was a stormy time of year. It's also
completely believable that hypothermia could have played a really significant part.
(23:25):
And all the strange things about how the deceased were dressed,
a behavior called paradoxical undressing, is not at all uncommon
in cases of extreme hypothermia, as your brain functions are
compromised in the cold. Often this manifests as taking off
your clothing because either you're not thinking clearly at all,
(23:46):
or you feel like you're hot even though you're freezing
to death. Yeah, we talked a little bit about hypothermia
and sort of how it affects your brain, as well
as some more altitude related stuff when we did our
Everest pod cast. But I thought about that a little bit. Um,
these weren't at the elevations that the altitude issues were
(24:07):
ever brought into play. But you know, extreme conditions can
really cause your brain to do some very bizarre and
seemingly nonsensical things. Uh. And this paradoxical undressing is well
documented in a lot of hypothermia cases that people will
try to burrow into the snow with no clothes on
because some part of their brain thinks that's how I'm
(24:28):
going to survive. We don't know now, since there's no
official confirmation on the radiation levels that we mentioned earlier
or the mysterious orange lights. Uh, theories of secret government
testing and aliens that are based around those facts kind
of struggle. It really gets into a lot of theoretical
this could be, but there's just not much to back
(24:48):
it up. But we don't want to ruin all the
fun for Ben and Matt and stuff. They don't want
you to know. So, for all we know, those were
all detailed out in the pages and reports that somehow
went missing from the publicly released records will give them
that bone, but those really don't have a lot of
substantiation to work with. Before we get to one more
kind of interesting theory about how this may have happened.
(25:11):
Do you want to have a word from a sponsor,
let's do that. A more recent theory that's come about
is that a Carmen vortex street caused the deaths. The
Carmen vortex street is this phenomenon consisting of a series
(25:32):
of vortices caused by the separation of wind or fluid
by a bluff body. So vortices sort of like tornadoes. Uh.
I didn't mean to make that sound like a question.
That's actually swirling wind is really what that is? Uh,
And bluff body. So that's the shape of the landscape,
(25:55):
right right, So when like it's it's kind of if
you think about in this case, we in hitting the
mountain it can't go through it, so it splits to
go around it. And because of the shape of the mountain,
it forms these whirling vortices and they kind of dove
tail on one another and you end up with a
chain of them. Yeah. And when you look at atmospheric
photos of these, they look really beautiful. However they are
(26:18):
incredibly dangerous. Yeah, there are stories of them completely leveling buildings. UH.
And now in the modern era that they have been
studied and understood a little bit better. Modern architecture, particularly
in cities and places where they're multiple structures close together,
they really try to factor in not creating an environment
(26:40):
that will welcome these sorts of phenomenon to happen or
cause them. So Donnie I Car who we talked about earlier,
he was a filmmaker. He also wrote a book about
the diet Past incident UH as part of his kind
of press junket. As he talked about what was in
his book, he mentioned these Carmen vortex streets and he
believes this movement of wind through the past could have
(27:02):
created such a vortex street. And moreover, he asserts that
this wind event could have resulted in an infrasound phenomenon.
And this is pertinent to the mystery because infrasound, which
is too low of a frequency to be consciously heard
or perceived, but does affect your ear drum and the
pressure around you, it's said to cause people to experience disorientation,
(27:25):
they can have shortness of breath, they can have irrational fear.
So it kind of messes with your head a little bit. Uh.
And if this were the case, and this had in
fact happened to the diet Lov party, it offers another
possible explanation for why they ran out of their tent
into the you know, certainly fatal coldhi Our asserts that
the surroundings of the past form the perfect environment for
(27:49):
the creation of a Carmen vortex street. The dome of
the so called dead Mountain is really symmetrical. It's dome shaped,
as that suggests, So it's the perfect blunt object act
to form eddies of splitting wind as the gusts come
up against it. Yeah, I don't know if they've ever
been able to. He as part of his book research
(28:09):
and his project, actually tried to recreate their hike, and
I don't know that they came came into I haven't
read the whole book. I don't know if they came
into a situation where they saw a duplication of that
happening or not, but food for thought. UH. In more
recent happenings, UH. In two thousand eight, there was a
meeting which was organized by Eural State Technical University or Polytechnic,
(28:33):
which is the university that the students had attended, and
the Diatlov Foundation, and they gathered independent researchers and former
rescuers UH to gather and discuss all of the possible evidence,
because remember the Diatlaw Foundation was set up to try
to figure out exactly what happened, and this group determined
that when taking all of the evidence into account, all
(28:54):
signs really pointed to a military test accidentally causing the deaths. However,
a group also issued a statement saying that the Defense
Ministry and other government agencies would have to provide them
with some additional documentation before they could say they had
definitive proof. So they kind of were making a super theory,
but they don't really have the evidence to back it up.
(29:17):
There are a whole lot of films, both documentary and
docufiction that have been inspired by the deat Love Past
Incident in TLVE, director Renny Harland made a movie that
was loosely premised on the recreation of the journey, but
it veered very wildly into fictional territory. Oh yes, super
(29:38):
not I think I was. I have not seen it.
It's called Devil's Pass and I haven't seen it. But
Christian from brain Stuff and I were talking about it.
He's seen it, and he was He was saying like, yeah,
they never found the bodies, and I'm like, that is
not accurate. So clearly that film has a lot of
like liberties taken with the story in order to further
the plot along. There is actually I'm really looking forward
(30:00):
to this. There is a PC MAC video game that's
coming out that is based on the events of the
diet Loft Past incident. It's entitled Lot and if you're interested,
it's coming out of a Polish games company and that
is going to be out in early and I'm really
curious to see what they do with it. You're a Uton,
the young man who left the group before the hike
(30:22):
because of his illness, lived to be seventy five and
he died in April. He's often quoted as saying, if
I had a chance to ask God just one question,
it would be what really happened to my friends that night?
And I think that's one of the things that's really
like there's such a focus on the whole unsolved mystery
conspiracy angle of all this um because I I've I've
(30:45):
looked around those websites. We've had a lot of people
that have requested this episode, and I've sort of been like,
I personally don't feel like researching that, so I'm really
glad the Holly did. But you know, I have poked
around at some website some people have asked, and like
they pretty universally forget about the fact that these were
a group of college students who died and that's tragic,
(31:07):
Like that's pretty much not talked about. Yeah, it really
it really becomes about the my theory versus your theory
mentality a lot of times, uh, which I understand the
appeal of that, and it's very fun and it is
fun to theorize on sort of what might have happened,
kind of play armchair sleuth. But as you said, you know,
(31:29):
these are nine except for the one man that was
in his thirties. They were all in their early twenties,
they were really young. Then those were people's friends and
family members. Yeah, and they were by all accounts, very bright.
Three of them were engineers. Uh that I think we're
doing graduate work. And then the others were younger students.
(31:49):
I think they were undergrads. But so they all had
really bright futures ahead of them. They were all very smart.
As we said, they were accomplished um hikers, like they
really you know, they were just setting out in their
lives and it and there is a small memorial monument
to them with their photos on it. Uh, but I
think you're you make a great point. Well, there was
(32:12):
there was a student who was supposed to be part
of my freshman class in college who fell from a
waterfall and died, uh right before, like on a school
sponsored trip immediately before the school year. And it really
rocked the campus. Like people who had never even met
her were just profoundly affected by it. So I can't
(32:33):
imagine having a group this size who were all students,
who all died unexpectedly on a trip like this. I
can't imagine what it must have been like for their
classmates and colleagues and family members afterward. Yeah, and the
the gentleman we mentioned earlier Yuri Kotsevich, who had been
twelve when this all happened. When he spoke the incident,
(32:55):
you know, as an adult, his recollections are really very
Um there are impressions of sort of the emotional state
of their community and how everyone was really devastated. I mean,
it was a huge loss, uh So something to think about,
and as enthusiasts are still looking for the real answer
to what happened in the the outlaw pass we may
(33:17):
never know it. But part of the problem is that
the clock is kind of running out for some people. Um,
the people that were actually involved in the investigation or
who knew the hikers. The hikers are all aging so
and many have already died, so in terms of eyewitness accounts,
even though they're unreliable in terms of talking to people
that were actually part of what happened there, there's not
(33:39):
really going to be anybody to ask any additional questions
of soon. Although there are still people, of course that
hold out hope that there is a fuller record that
the Russian government has that they will someday release I
personally kind of hold more to the they don't say
much because they don't know anything else and probably some
records got lost, but that's just my sort of pragmat
(34:00):
I presume they're kind of like Shrug, which could be
perceived as a cover up, if that's what you want
to see, but I really think it's more of a
I don't know. Uh so that is the yell Off
Pass incident, which is fascinating. I'm sure we will get
lots of theories in our email I actually kind of
hope so that will be some fun October reading. Thanks
(34:28):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old hell stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over
(34:49):
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
(35:11):
you listen to your favorite shows. H
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