Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (30 page)

3. HIGH WINDS. The hikers had been warned about dangerous winds on the pass, most notably by the Vizhay forester Ivan Rempel, who had told stories of locals being swept away. This was also an angle seriously considered by investigators at the time. The idea was that one or two persons outside the tent—those presumably wearing the cloth boot liners—had stepped outside, possibly to
urinate, when an overpowering wind took them by surprise. Their cries roused those inside the tent not only to jump outside to save them, but also to cut through the canvas in their haste. But this theory supposes that all the hikers would have flung themselves into the wind to save their friends, one by one, heedless of the dangers. This does not seem likely. One of the hikers would surely have put on a pair of shoes. The theory also requires the winds to have been powerful enough to blow all nine hikers off the face of the mountain, yet not strong enough to blow away the tent or Rustik’s knit hat (which was securely on his head when he was found). According to Borzenkov’s weather analysis, the winds had indeed been strong that night—up to 40 miles per hour—but they would not have reached destructive levels on the Beaufort wind scale, let alone anywhere near hurricane-force (74 mph and above). Of all the theories, this had initially struck me as the least improbable. But given the intelligence of Igor and his comrades, and the strength of the winds that night, I could now eliminate it with confidence.

4. ARMED MEN. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the theory that a group of armed men—either Soviet military or escaped prisoners—led the hikers to their deaths is a stubborn one that has continued to plague the Dyatlov case. Although this scenario had been briefly considered by Lev Ivanov and his investigators—most notably after knife slashes at the back of the tent were discovered—it was largely dismissed after the cuts were determined to have been made from the inside of the tent. Additionally, only nine sets of footprints were found at the scene. There was no evidence, from tracks or otherwise, of visitors to the tent that night. And there were zero reports at the time of prisoners having escaped from any of the surrounding camps, the closest of which was over 50 miles away.

Claims that some of the hikers’ belongings had gone missing are overstated. After examining the criminal case file, I found that the toy hedgehog Yudin believed to be missing had, in fact, been found
among the hikers’ belongings, though mistakenly catalogued with Rustik’s things. The missing chocolate was most likely consumed by search volunteers upon discovery of the tent. In my interview with Boris Slobtsov, for instance, he confessed that he and Mikhail Sharavin, after locating the tent, had drunk the hikers’ flask of medicinal alcohol.

To explain the forensic examiner’s discovery of violent injuries on three of the hikers’ bodies—including hemorrhaging, multiple rib fractures and a fractured skull—one needn’t look farther than the ravine in which the bodies were found. The 24-foot-high precipice on one side of the ravine—at an incline between 50 and 60 degrees—would have given the four hikers who had happened upon it in the pitch darkness a nasty fall. Given that there were rocks at the bottom of the ravine, just a few inches beneath the snow, the resulting injuries would have been serious enough for Ivanov to compare the impact to “a large directional force, such as a car.” Ivanov, however, was not a doctor or an expert in such injuries. Additionally, the forensic examiner’s conclusion that three of the deaths had been “violent” is consistent with a lethal fall into the ravine.

Damage to Lyuda’s tongue can be blamed on the natural decomposition process. One theory suggests that small animals got to her tongue, but because her body had been lying in melted snow, it is more likely that over several weeks, the microfauna in the water decomposed the fleshiest parts of her body.

5. WEAPONS TESTING.

• •
  Rocket tests/“Orbs.”
  He hadn’t been able to say so publicly while he was investigating the case, but Lev Ivanov had believed the orb sightings of February 1959 to be connected to the hikers’ deaths. After his retirement, in his 1990 interview with journalist S. Bogomolov, he revealed, “I can’t tell for sure whether those orbs were weapons or not, but I’m certain that they were directly related to the death of the hikers.” That same year, in a lengthy letter to the
  Leninsky Put
  newspaper on November 22, he connected the orbs to the violent injuries of three of the hikers: “Someone wanted to intimidate people or show off power, and so they did so by killing three hikers. I know all details of this event and can say that only those who were inside the orbs know more than me. Whether there were ‘people’ inside that time or any time is yet unclear.” Ivanov was reluctant to say whether or not he thought the “orbs” were a kind of weapon, preferring instead to talk in vague terms of “energy bundles unexplained by modern science.” But elsewhere in the letter, he maintained that “the investigation showed that Dyatlov’s case was not related to the military.” With a Cold War going on, classified rocket launches would not have been unusual in 1959, and indeed there had been such tests in February and March of that year. But none would have affected the Dyatlov hikers on the night of February 1 and 2. In fact, there is no evidence of any unusual sightings on that night.
  

  The purported “light orb” sightings of early February were more accurately seen midmonth. Hiker Georgy Atmanaki had originally told investigators he had seen the orbs during the first week of February. But his companion on the same trip, Vladislav Karelin, later confirmed the date was much later, February 17. This coincides with Ivdel witnesses who reported seeing lights in the sky on the same day. For many, including relatives of the hikers, it had been tempting to connect the midmonth sightings with the tragedy of February 1. The “orb” sightings of February 17 and March 31, as described by numerous witnesses, happened within minutes of corroborated rocket tests from the Baikonur testing site—otherwise known as the Soviet Missile and Space Station. Any other rocket tests in the Soviet Union during that period came from Heiss Island, an island in the northern archipelago of Franz Josef Land, which was over 1,200 miles away from where the hikers had set up camp. With the maximum flight range of these M-100 rockets being no more than 100 miles, I could eliminate rocket-related scenarios with certainty.
  

  The final photo taken on Georgy’s camera—featuring an unknown light source—has fueled much speculation about the hikers having encountered weapons testing or UFOs. I myself had been tempted to connect this photo to something the hikers had been trying to photograph in their final hours. I determined that the octagonal shape at the center is a flare resulting from the eight blades on the camera’s aperture. Though the source of light is nearly impossible to determine, the lack of focus of the image, and the smear of the light source, is consistent with it having been taken accidentally—by the hikers or even possibly by the search party or the investigators.
  

• •
  Radiation-related tests.
  The radiation that had been detected on the hikers’ clothes is largely responsible for the idea that some weapon, potentially nuclear in nature, had exploded above or near the campsite and had forced the hikers from their tent—causing injury and affecting their vision. After the autopsies, two sets of the hikers’ clothes tested two to three times higher than normal for radiation. I submitted these test results to Dr. Christopher Straus, associate professor of radiology at the University of Chicago Medical Center to find out if the original verdict would hold up. Dr. Straus was able to determine, upon first glance, that by today’s scientific understanding of radiation levels, the beta particle decays cited in the criminal case for the hikers’ clothing were nowhere near an abnormal range. They would have had to be 50 to 100 times the level detected to reach dangerous or alarmingly abnormal levels of radiation. The slight positive result in the hikers’ clothing could easily be explained by environmental contaminants—for example, radiation from nuclear tests conducted that winter on the islands of Novaya Zemlya, 850 miles to the north of the hikers’ location, could have found its way to the northern Urals through the atmosphere and water cycle. Additionally, the dark or “orange” color of the hikers’ skin is more plausibly explained as a severe tan or sunburn, rather than exposure to radiation. Before becoming buried in snow, the bodies likely had lain out for many days. Even with no sun, UV rays would have penetrated the cloud cover. Dr. Reed Brozen, medical director of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s Advanced Response Team, and an expert in wilderness medicine and hypothermia, explained to me that “with the altitude, UV light, and zero percent humidity, the bodies could have become mummified over time.”
  

6. “IT’S CLASSIFIED.” Many Dyatlov case enthusiasts—the Dyatlov Foundation’s Yuri Kuntsevich among them—still believe the answer to the Dyatlov mystery lies in classified government documents that have yet to be released. However, the behavior of both Soviet and Russian officials hardly points to the existence of secret files. Per Soviet law, criminal case files were to be stored in the prosecutor’s office for twenty-five years. If no appeals were filed for the case during that time, the entire case could be legally destroyed. The Soviet government had its chance to completely destroy the Dyatlov case files, but it chose not to. Despite the fact that there were no appeals filed for twenty-five years after the close of the case, the Sverdlovsk prosecutor’s office chose to leave the case files intact in their archives. The files were later released in the late 1980s and early ’90s, during glasnost. Considering that much of the Stalin archive was released during that time, thereby
revealing many incidents deeply embarrassing to the country’s government—including the 1962 Novocherkassk massacre in which Soviet troops with machine guns mowed down a group of factory protesters—what would be so special about nine hikers dying in the northern Urals? Conspiracists will likely never give up on the theory of a government cover-up, but the idea that the Russian government is holding onto secret case files is implausible.

7. SPACE ALIENS, ETC. There were, of course, those who would put forth interstellar visitation as the answer to Sherlock Holmes’s “whatever remains, however improbable.” But I was holding out hope that I could find an explanation that didn’t involve extraterrestrials. I’m not saying I don’t entertain the idea of life existing out there somewhere in the vast universe, but if one is going to fall back on malevolent alien visitors without backing it up with evidence, one may as well throw ghosts, the hand of God, and devious subterranean gnomes into the mix. Aliens were off the table.

I DON
’
T REMEMBER SHERLOCK HOLMES EVER MENTIONING
what you are supposed to do when you’ve eliminated everything improbable, and nothing is left.

The
least improbable
answer still seemed to lie, if not in an avalanche, then in some sort of other natural occurrence. I’d been reading up on weather phenomena, in the hope I might discover something relevant to the case, something I’d managed to miss. I’d always enjoyed reading about bizarre weather events. When you grow up in Florida, a.k.a. “hurricane alley,” obsessing about weather phenomena is a rite of passage. I had also been somewhat of a weather wonk as a teen, not because meteorology itself had initially interested me—my interest in forecasting grew out of my love of surfing. As any surfer knows, where there was intense weather
off the coast, such as a hurricane or low-pressure system, there were also long-period ground swells that produced good waves.

Among the articles I had printed out related to weather was one particular piece I thought might be related to the topic of experimental weapons—infrasound weaponry in particular. It was a piece from a
Physics Today
issue from 2000. The piece in question—entitled “Atmospheric Infrasound”— was written by a Dr. Alfred J. Bedard, Jr. and Thomas M. Georges. I wasn’t entirely sure what the title meant, though it intrigued me. The Bedard-Georges study examined the occurrence of sound waves that travel through the air at frequencies below those on the audible spectrum, frequencies referred to as
infrasound
. Infrasound is the opposite of ultrasound; it occurs below the threshold of human hearing at 20 hertz, while ultrasound frequencies fall above hearing at a threshold at 20,000 hertz.

A pioneer in the biological effects of infrasound was the Russian-born, French scientist Vladimir Gavreau, who discovered its impact on the body entirely by accident. During the 1960s, Gavreau and his laboratory assistants started experiencing inexplicable nausea, pain in their eardrums and shaking lab equipment—all with no apparent cause. When all chemical and airborne sources were ruled out, Gavreau eventually concluded that inaudible, low-frequency sounds waves were being generated by the motor of a large fan-and-duct system in the building where his lab was located. What initially started out as a subconscious irritation, soon became a scientific pursuit for Gavreau—but it was a difficult one for him to pursue, as no traditional microphone could pick up the frequencies, and exposing himself and his assistants to the infrasound resulted in severe illness, sometimes lasting days.