Don't ever go to Dyatlov Pass

While I'm sure this is a classic case of Occam's Razor, it is still trippy/scary as hell.

In January of 1959, Igor Dyatlov began a ski trek across the Ural Mountains in northeast Russia with eight other graduates from the Ural Polytechnic University. They were never seen alive again.

When the group did not return by the scheduled return date of February 12th, a search party was sent out to investigate.

This is where the story gets weird. The search team reached the camp on February 26th;  the tent found empty, apparently torn open from the inside. The first two bodies were found a few hundred metres away in a group of pine trees, evidence of a campfire was beside them. They were dressed only in their underwear.

Three more bodies were also found closer to the tent, suggesting that they were trying to return to camp. They were merely half-dressed, wearing one shoe or an undershirt. The final four bodies were not even discovered until May when the several meters of snow covering the mountain had thawed. Stranger still, all of them seemed to have a fucked up brown-orange tan on their skin and allegedly had small levels of radiation in their bodies.

One of the skiers was found without a tongue. Another had a cracked skull. Two more still had broken ribs. Hypothermia was the obvious culprit, but the Russian government actually later released a statement claiming an 'unknown compelling force' was the ultimate cause of death. The files were then locked in a badass secret Soviet archive until 1991.

This is where the story gets out of hand. There are reports of strange metal fragments found scattered throughout the area, 'suggesting' that there were military tests in the vicinity. There are also reports of other skiers forty or fifty kilometres south of their location seeing strange orange spheres of light in the sky to the north, in the direction of the camp.

This story is a great platform for wild ideas and conspiracies; it is perfect for any junkie (nutcase?) of the paranormal. So folks like to irresponsibly attach UFOs, the friggin Yeti aka Sasquatch, crazy Russian military weapons tests, etc. to this bizarre incident.

Don't get me wrong, as the poster in Mulder's office says, "I want to believe". I do, I really do, but I value my skepticism too much for that.

Read more about the Dyatlov Pass incident at the St. Petersburg Times
and wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident





Wksc.