Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (32 page)

Bedard believes that some people are naturally more sensitive to the effects of these infrasonic waves, while others either appear immune or require more intense or prolonged exposure to experience damaging or unpleasant reactions. Over the years, Bedard has received desperate calls from around the world from
people reporting a variety of symptoms with no apparent medical or environmental cause. Sometimes these calls come from the same area or city, such as Taos, New Mexico—in what is known as the “Taos Hum.” Similarly, the “Windsor Hum” has for years plagued residents of one Canadian border town (on the border of Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario, across Lake Huron), making a mess of people’s sleep schedules, mental health and quality of life. Though the cause has not been determined with any certainty, many believe the machinery at an industrial factory on Jug Island, midway between both Midwest cities, to be the source of the infrasonic waves.

Not everyone affected by the “hum,” however, registers it as an aural sensation. “There are hearers and nonhearers,” Bedard explained. “To most people it’s a throbbing sensation with a constant feeling of anxiety and fear.” Although similar “hum” reports have also been noted in Bristol, England and Bondi, Australia, no one, including Bedard, has found the culprit source of what are believed to be “infrasonic waves.” Unfortunately, says Bedard, “Most people can’t afford to move away from infrasound.”

There are some governments that have attempted to harness the ill effects of infrasound for purposes that, on their face, appear to be Orwellian. “The Israelis have used it for crowd control,” he explains—the idea being that when exposed to these waves, people want nothing more than to leave the area. The
Toronto Sun
reported an incident from June 6, 2005, in which witnesses described a minute-long blast of sound emanating from a white Israeli military vehicle. Within seconds, protesters began falling to their knees, experiencing symptoms similar to seasickness. An Israeli military source said that such tactics are intended to “disperse crowds with sound pulses that create nausea and dizziness.” Infrasound had been used by Nazi Germany to stir up anger and strong emotions in crowds assembled to hear Hitler speak. Hitler had also ordered infrasound experiments to be conducted on prisoners, who were
tortured with an experimental weapon that used compressed air to generate high intensities of low-frequency sound waves.

When I suggested that infrasound seemed like the perfect weapon for war, Dr. Bedard responded, “I’m not a believer.” In response to a suggestion that Soviets had developed similar weapons during the Cold War, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Russians attempted it, but it would be very difficult to direct infrasound because the wavelengths are so long.” I was coming to understand that infrasound as a method of short-range crowd control was feasible, but the existence of long-range infrasound weapons was implausible at best.

Eager to get back to the fate of the Dyatlov hikers, I began to pull out my images of Boot Rock, as well as Russian contour maps of the area surrounding the rock. That’s when Bedard asked me if I’d heard of “Kármán vortex street.” I had. In fact, the Russian scientist that Borzenkov was in contact with had mentioned Kármán vortex street as a phenomenon that had likely occurred at Boot Rock the night of February 1—though, again, I hadn’t fully understood what that meant.

While Bedard and his colleagues pored over the maps and images of Boot Rock, I was given a quick primer on the phenomenon. Kármán vortex street, named after Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán, is an occurrence in fluid dynamics of both liquids and gases. In the aerodynamics of weather phenomena, air vortices—or small tornadoes—are created when wind of a certain speed hits a blunt object of a particular shape and size. Geographic masses around the world are known to cause this particular pattern of vortices. When these vortices are large or when revved up at a higher speed, they can reach the destruction threshold of a tornado. For instance, when strong winds hit the Rock of Gibraltar, the powerful vortices spinning off the rock are believed to be the cause of capsized ships in the Strait. These same destructive vortices are oftentimes accompanied by the twin danger of infrasonic frequencies.

Bedard showed me animated models of the pattern, including one of a water tunnel, in which Kármán vortices spun off both sides of an obstructing object. He then played me audio recordings of infrasound from a tornado, which, he explained, had been sped up and played back at 400 hertz to make the infrasound audible. The recording started off as a faint rumbling, then churned into an ominous groan that seemed to expand in decibels like the bellowing foghorn of a ship. In addition to the infrasound waves, these tornadic vortices are also capable of producing audible, ear-splitting groans, often compared to the sound of a freight train.

Bedard and his team continued to study the visuals I had laid out, showing particular interest in two images of Boot Rock. The rock, they pointed out, was irregularly shaped. To create the ideal conditions for Kármán vortex street, the object has to be of a certain symmetry and smoothness. In fact, when new buildings are constructed in windblown areas, they are often designed by architects to be complex in shape in order to dampen the effects of Kármán vortex.

Finally, Bedard looked up at me. He concluded, “Boot Rock would produce a slight roar with different frequencies, but . . .” he shook his head with certainty, “it wouldn’t create a Kármán vortex.” His colleagues in the room nodded in unified agreement. After fielding a few more questions about how Boot Rock might have generated some other type of infrasound phenomenon, Bedard shook his head again, saying, “Boot Rock is strange, and I’m sure you’d like to blame it, but it’s just a pussycat. And it’s not producing a harmful Kármán vortex or infrasound.”

He turned to the topographical maps again. “Essentially, Boot Rock created a little roar from the high winds but such experienced hikers would not be scared of it. Not to mention, the hikers were over a mile away from Boot Rock, so the sound would have been weak.”

I asked if he might be persuaded to look at more pictures of the rock, from different angles. He said he was happy to review whatever
I sent him, but he made it clear that the Boot Rock theory—proposed by myself, Borzenkov and the Russian scientists—was just not likely. And with that verdict, I was transported back to where I had been over a year ago on the mountaintop. With nothing.

Boot Rock. Photo taken by search party, 1959.

I said good-bye to Bedard’s Russian colleagues, who wished me well on my quest. Then, with nothing left to discuss, Dr. Bedard offered to show me around the facilities—a guided, personal tour. I followed him down the hall and into his office. Considering that he had managed to destroy all my hopes of potentially solving this case, he seemed lighthearted, even happy to be hosting a tour of his workplace. His office adhered to the controlled chaos that one might expect of a scientist’s personal space: There were stacks of drawers with cryptic labels, such as “Glass House” and “Kelly’s Eye.” On a desk covered in papers sat a can of fog fluid and a miniature elephant supporting a cheerful sign that read: “I love infrasound.” I had certainly come to the right place to have the theory of infrasound totally eliminated. Now what?

AT THE HOTEL THAT NIGHT, I REVIEWED THE IMAGES I
had shown Bedard and his colleagues that day. Not ready to completely discount weather phenomena and infrasound, I had asked Bedard if he could meet with me once more before I returned to Los Angeles. I could not shake the feeling that there was something substantial here. Borzenkov had felt it, too—he had, after all, been my oracle for this entire case—which only made me more reluctant to abandon the idea. I remembered how one of the search volunteers that winter in 1959 had described the hikers’ abandonment of their tent as the behavior of “lunatics.” Didn’t the effects of infrasound produce this same brand of lunacy?

Hoping that Bedard and his colleagues had perhaps misjudged Boot Rock’s complex shape and size, I sorted through the folders on my computer and e-mailed the physicist more images of the formation—and from every imaginable angle. I then sent Bedard a quote from the 1959 criminal case, in which an Ivdel local describes the weather of this region: “In winter in the northern Ural Mountains, and even in the summer, there can be strong winds and sometimes whirlwinds. . . . During whirlwinds, various sounds arise in the mountains, terrifying and foreign, like the howls of animals or human moans. . . . You get scared when you are there, and those who haven’t heard anything like that can become frightened.”

I also sent a few images of the site of the tent, including one particular image of Holatchahl mountain. It gave me chills every time I looked at it. Maybe it was because it reminded me of standing on that same slope, peering through the haze at that eerie, bald summit, devoid of life. Beyond the Holatchahl summit was the peak of Otorten Mountain, the hikers’ ultimate destination, which some said translated to: “Don’t go there.” This, however, is not true. The word Otorten is not a Russian or Mansi word at all, but simply an error on Russian maps resulting from the mispronunciation of a
different mountain a few miles to the north. The Mansi actually refer to Otorten by the name Lunt-Husap-Sjahyl, meaning “Mountain of Goose Nests.”

I sent Bedard everything I could think of, then closed my laptop and walked to the restaurant downstairs. After devouring a meal of atomic chicken wings, chased back with one too many beers, I returned to my room and promptly fell asleep, hoping the answer would hit me in the shower the following morning.

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER ANOTHER ROUND OF SECURITY
checks, I was back at NOAA. Bedard met me at 10:00
AM
in the lobby with a smile on his face, though I couldn’t imagine why. As we walked down the hall to his office, he told me he had gotten the photos that I’d sent him. One photo in particular had caught his attention, he said. It reminded him of a weather event in Boulder several years before, in which a nearby elevation, Flagstaff Mountain, had created the conditions for Kármán vortex street, and therefore infrasound. Bedard himself had been there to record a recurrence of the incident, which seemed all the more fantastic for its manifestation in such proximity to the NOAA offices and his place of work.

He then brought me into a conference room, a smaller one than the first. After we sat down, he pulled out a printed photograph of Holatchahl mountain, the one I had sent him the night before.

“It’s not because of Boot Rock,” he told me, “but because of this dome on the top of the mountain.” As he traced the top of the snowy mountain with his finger, he observed, “It’s a nice and symmetrical, dome-shaped object.”

Hardly believing what he’d just said, I had to ask him to repeat it. The symmetrical dome shape of the summit, he explained, combined with its proximity to the tent’s location, would have created the ideal conditions for Kármán vortex. With everything
I had told him about the weather in the area, the lack of anything growing on the top of the mountain, the topographical maps combined with the Ivdel quote from the criminal case, he determined that, “All these descriptions tell me that there are repetitive wind events that happen there.”