Warning: an earlier version of this article was published in 2016.
You like the dark stories of the Cold War and with supernatural overtones? Well, don’t go too far. What’s more: we recommend that you feel comfortable in the armchair with some fresh coffee for what comes next:
In February 1959, ten very young ski hikers plus an adult guide entered a glacial port in the Ural Mountains (average temperatures of -30ºC) to carry out a tough route that would take them a couple of weeks.
After two days one of them, Yuri yudin, decides to return due to illness, and lets his friends continue their planned route between the Komi Republic and Sverdlovsk Oblast. Their march continues, and on the 12th one of them should have sent a telegram informing them that they were all right. When they received no signs of life, the group’s relatives organized an expedition of volunteers on the 20th for the search and rescue mission of the group of hikers.
On the 26th they found the abandoned youth camp in Kholat Syakhl. The tent showed signs of tearing that had been worked from inside the tent to the outside. There are eight or nine pairs of tracks that lead to a nearby forest.
A few meters further on he found two of the young men barefoot and in underwear, next to some pine trees, with multiple internal wounds and scratches on his hands. The tree had traces of blood. Everything indicated that they had run out of their cabin to try to climb the trees. There are also remains of a bonfire. It was concluded that they must have died of hypothermia.
At 600 meters from this point, the investigators came across three other bodies. They also had a multitude of internal injuries, two of them with fractured skulls, the other with a strange orange tone in the skin and greyish in the hair, which did not seem to attract the attention of the investigators. The bodies showed signs of defense against something external. Their deaths were also attributed to a case of hypothermia.
The search for the other expedition members, including the group’s adult guide, lasted for more than two months. They were finally found the May 4th buried by four meters of snow, in the stream of a ravine in the interior of the forest. In this case it was clearer that his injuries had been inflicted by some external source. It seemed that they had been achieved by a high pressure level, and they were wearing the clothes of other companions that were not their own.
One of these members also had grayish hair, despite the fact that he was a young man at the time. According to one expert, the force required to cause such damage would have been extremely high (one expert compared it to the force of a car accident). In their clothes they found high radiation traces. No one knew what had happened. The guide was carrying a camera, but the film that should be inside was not found (the rest of the photos that you find in this article were found in another device thrown in the vicinity).
The official investigation concludes that all members of the group died from a “Mighty unknown force”, unclassified. The case was shelved and kept in the most absolute of summary secrets, until the 1990s, when it was available again. Then it is discovered that research pages missing.
It was the indigenous
Faced with facts so difficult to explain, the years have given them multiple interpretations of what must have happened to the different members of the team. The first conjecture, one of those launched from the same commission of inquiry, pointed to their deaths at the hands of the indigenous people of the Mansi people, who live in the area. As the forensics who treated the bodies of the first victims found said, their wounds were not so blunt. In addition, they did not show signs of close combat, and no footprints were found other than those of the members of the expedition themselves.
It was bad weather
Apparently, one of the infrequent deaths (but nonetheless existing) among hikers who enter routes with very low temperatures is that of a strange behavior known as paradoxical undressing, where subjects can remove their clothes in response to the burning sensations caused by extreme cold.
Death from hypothermia it is the most plausible medical hypothesis given the evidence found at the scene. The youths encountered some unfathomable danger for which they had to flee from their tent in haste. At the time when the companions died, the other young people took off the clothes from the corpses to better protect themselves from the cold (and that is why they were found half naked), but given the climatic situation those rags were not of much use.
It was the soviet government
And this is where we enter one of the theories most agreed by fans of the phenomenon and Internet theorists. This story has been gaining followers over the years. Writers, amateurs and documentary makers have tried to solve the mystery in different works.
Many collect the testimony of Yuri Yudin, the hiker who left in the first days of the expedition. When he went together with the rescue team to identify his friends, he found in the tent a belt and some military goggles that did not belong (according to him) to any of his companions. As he recounted in a 2012 interview for the Dead Mountain book research, the Russian suspected that the camp had been screened before the official rescue team arrived. He also recalled how the authorities seemed to be more interested in the reasons that his excursion took place in that area than the cause of the deaths itself.
They tell it in this documentary. Some research suggests that the remains found by Yudin correspond to elements forgotten by the soviet military services, which could have gone days before, until the February 6th, moments in which the protagonists were still alive and that would correspond to the missing information from the case report.
The camp and adjacent grounds where the bodies were found, which some say was investigated with somewhat irregular procedures, it could have been a montage of the KGB to divert attention from further investigation. The positions of the bodies on stage did not correspond to what they had at the time of death, according to one of the forensics. And it is not natural that footprints can be seen in the snow after several weeks of heavy snowfall. Among the belongings, Yudin said he did not find the diary of some of his colleagues, but he did find their money and wallets. Another group of hikers (about 50 kilometers south of the incident) reported that they had seen strange orange spheres in the night sky to the north.
We are in 1959 and it is possible that a remote village in the Russian steppe does not yet know what missiles are. As some researchers believe, Kholat Syakhl has all the ballots of having been a Soviet weapons testing ground. The strange red hue of the skin of corpses is precisely what is observed when the skin surface is exposed to the asymmetric dimethylhydrazine, one of the main combustible components of missiles. The radiation on the clothing points to the missile that would have spooked the hikers (causing them to rush out of their tent) was carrying a nuclear warhead. Finally, the last photo that remains of the excursion, of a shiny object, greatly encourages theorists of this option.
One last detail. Alexander Zolotarev, the adult guide who accompanied the young people on their journey (and who died with them) did not know them until a few days before, when they agreed to go together on such a difficult path. He was a veteran of World War II (very few of the military of his generation survived the war), and his real name was Semen Zolotarev, although he never told anyone.
According to the book Dyatlov pass keep it’s secret, at that time the mode used by American spies In order to identify nuclear weapons factories, it was by bribing local people who could give them (at points far from any settlement) proof of the location of said factories. These tests consisted of the delivery by the bribed person of any radioactively contaminated clothing in addition to the location. The method was eventually discovered by the KGB, and since then the deliveries were much more controlled.
The government resolution: it was an avalanche
In August 2020, sixty years after the incident, the Russian attorney general’s office shelved this iconic national enigma. Alexander Kurennoi, spokesman for the attorney general and in charge of the recent reopening of the case, already warned that only hypotheses concerning the weather would be investigated. His conclusion is that it was not due to a snow plate or a tornado, but to an avalanche. For the reasons that have been revealed so far, several journalists, as well as relatives, doubted that version. But thus the hopes of a governmental answer that satisfy all the parts are closed.