What Happened At the Dyatlov Pass? | Unveiled

What Happened at the Dyatlov Pass?

In the winter of 1959, a group of Russian students set out on an expedition into the Ural Mountains. They were good friends and highly experienced hikers but, for reasons unknown, they all perished on one fateful February night of their journey. To this day, the incident remains unexplained… but there are plenty of theories as to what really happened.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the mysterious question; what happened at the Dyatlov Pass?

So, here’s what we know for sure. The group set off on January 27th, 1959. At the beginning, there were ten of them… but one hiker, Yuri Yudin, was forced to leave the trip early, on January 28th, due to ill health. Yudin would ultimately go down in history as the group’s only survivor, because everybody else died on the night of February 1st into the morning of February 2nd. It took weeks for any alarm to be raised, though, because the team hadn’t been expected to return until at least February 12th. Search parties weren’t sent out until the 20th, and it wasn’t until February 26th, almost four weeks since the tour departed, that the tent and first bodies were found.

Not that this gruesome discovery did much to make an explanation for it any clearer. Those that came across the site found the hikers’ tent first of all, still full of their possessions, supplies, and most of their clothes, but otherwise deserted and ripped open from the inside. The first five bodies were found on nearby slopes, frozen in positions to suggest they had been trying to return to the tent. But they were all wearing only their underwear, and so had all died of hypothermia because of the extreme conditions on the mountain.

What happened to the rest of the group wasn’t confirmed until May 4th, when snow melted enough so that investigators could reach a nearby ravine; and the four remaining bodies were found inside it. These four were better dressed, suggesting they’d taken clothes from the others who had died first, but three of them had devastating internal injuries - to the point where coroners reported that the trauma they apparently went through was consistent with being hit by a car; something which definitely couldn’t have happened to them in the bleak, inaccessible wilderness of the mountains. These four also had unusual soft tissue damage, though, including a woman missing her tongue, and a man missing his eyes. Stranger still, some articles of their clothing were found to be radioactive.

The grisly “tongues and eyes” business was quickly given quite a straightforward explanation; because some of the bodies had been found face down in a stream of running water, those body parts had simply decomposed at a quicker rate. But as for everything else… It was ultimately ruled by the official investigation that the victims had left their tents and died due to, quote, “a compelling natural force they were unable to overcome”… But that explanation offers no real answers, does it!

One of the earliest alternative theories blamed local, indigenous, Mansi tribesmen, suggesting that they had murdered the hikers for trespassing on their land. However, the Mansi are and were a peaceful group, not known to commit violent attacks. There were also no footprints found at the site apart from those of the hikers. And, finally, most analysts argue that it would have been impossible for another human to cause the massive internal injuries found in three of the bodies. Over time, then, increasing numbers came to accept the Mansi’s innocence, making way for another popular theory blaming the military, instead.

The case was immediately classified at the time and wasn’t declassified until the 1970s. Though, in the Cold War era, it was routine for the Soviet Union to keep the details of incidents like this under wraps, it hasn’t stopped speculation that the army may have been involved - with the “compelling natural force” explanation never really being accepted as good enough… especially as there’s some evidence to suggest that parachute mines may have been tested in the area. One line of reasoning says that mine testing might have been what made the campers panic and flee, and might even have caused the physical injuries that some sustained. But there are still no official records of military incidents in the immediate area even today, decades after the collapse of the USSR.

After mass murder and military accident, though, the Dyatlov Pass theories take a significantly different, more outlandish direction. First off, there were UFO sightings reported in the area around the date the hikers died. Quickly, then, an alien encounter theory took hold. According to advocates, the arrival of an extraterrestrial UFO could well have scared the group enough to make them all leave their tents, plus an alien ship wouldn’t necessarily have left marks in the snow to giveaway its arrival - therefore explaining some of the unexplained aspects of the story. It could also potentially account for the presence of radiation. Nine hikers in the middle of nowhere stumble across aliens in hiding, and are all swiftly killed… For many, it wasn’t so hard to believe!

The alien narrative has plenty of its own pitfalls, though. The hikers with radioactive clothing, for example, also worked in close proximity to radioactive materials during their day jobs - one even made nuclear weapons - so it’s much more likely that they already carried the radiation with them. Most members of the team also kept meticulous records of their trip even up to the day they died, but we have zero record of a UFO sighting by anyone in the group. It’s hard to imagine that no one would’ve journaled such a strange event; and are we really supposed to believe that the aliens themselves would’ve gone through their victims’ diaries, to make sure that any mention of their presence was erased? Not likely! Finally, the extraterrestrial argument also never really dwelt on why aliens would want to brutally murder a group of hikers, in the first place. For a clearer motive, some theorists turned to another unconventional solution; an angry yeti!

A yeti attack was another common theory at the time, and it still holds some weight in the debate on what happened, today - with a 2014 Discovery Channel documentary leading with the dramatic title; “Russian Yeti: The Killer Lives”. Again, though, there weren’t any giant, yeti-like footprints on the scene, or in fact any signs of an animal attack of any type. And that’s not even to mention the obvious reality that yetis aren’t actually proven to exist at all, let alone specifically on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl where the bodies were found. That name, “Kholat Syakhl”, even translates as “Dead Mountain” in Mansi, owing to the fact that so few regularly dangerous animals - like bears or wolves - live there. Yes, a yeti attack would explain the trauma injuries, but the solid evidence for this particular solution is perhaps a little thin on the ground…

There is one other strange and unusual theory, though, which puts the blame on… infrasound. Infrasound is sound at such a low frequency that it’s below the range of human hearing, and it’s been shown to cause feelings of panic and even nausea in humans - sometimes even being used to explain away ghost sightings. Meanwhile, there are rare weather phenomena called Von Kármán Vortices - tornado-like winds - which are thought to produce infrasound. Therefore, the theory goes that this is what the hikers were subjected to midway through their trek, triggering some kind of hysteria in them, enough to make them flee their camp. Infrasound has never been conclusively proven to induce mass hysteria, but the suggestion that it’s to blame has still never been definitely thrown out.

For all the more fantastic and farfetched ideas, however, one of the most popular theories out there is a lot more grounded. Ever since the hikers were first found, there’s been the argument that what happened was something to do with an avalanche… the idea being that if there was an avalanche, or even if the team only thought there was an avalanche, it could have forced some of them to abandon their tent without pausing to get properly dressed. It might’ve also led to the group splitting into two, and the force of the snow could well have caused the internal injuries in some of the bodies. Even the avalanche theory is by no means watertight, though, as there was never any concrete proof that one actually occurred on the night in question, plus later investigations found that (if one were to have happened) then the snow should’ve fallen in the opposite direction to where the hikers were camped.

Ultimately, there still isn’t a catch-all explanation for what really happened on the mountain. It should’ve been a reasonably routine, manageable journey through a stretch of land that has since been renamed for the doomed group’s leader, Igor Dyatlov… but the mystery of what possessed the hikers to abandon their camp, only to die in the midst of a harsh, Russian winter, remains to this day. And that’s what happened at Dyatlov Pass.