October 6, 2014 • 39 mins
In 1959, nine students ventured into the Ural mountains for a ski hiking trip, and never returned. While much speculation has swirled for more than half a century, no one knows for certain what caused them to abandon their camp to die in the cold.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Molly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we're
creeping up into Halloween territory, my favorite time of year,
So it's time for a little brush with the mysterious,
(00:23):
the unknown, and believed by some to be paranormal. Uh,
this story isn't exactly spooky, depending on your definition of
that word, but it is quite unsettling in many ways. Uh.
If you were to just do a quick Google search
on the diet lov past incidents, you will instantly turn
up dozens and dozens heading into the hundreds of sites
(00:45):
that focus on paranormal investigation, conspiracy theories, and even cryptozoology
in some cases. This is really a tragic piece of
Russian history. It happened during Soviet era Russia in Siberia,
and it's never really been fully explained, and as a consequence,
there is an entire culture of theorization that has kind
(01:05):
of grown up around it. So today we're going to
talk about what we actually know about this doomed hiking
expedition and then some of the theories about it as well.
As some of the less fantastical possibilities in terms of
explanation of what happened that day. Uh And we need
to give a little morning on this one. Some of
this information could be a little upsetting if you are
(01:26):
squeamish to corpse talk. Uh there are some injury related
details that are germained to the story that I know.
When I was relaying them to my husband, Brian kind
of gave him what we call the hufs where you
kind of go. Uh So, if you are a little
bit squeamish about details of how dead bodies have been
found and things that had happened to them, just know
(01:48):
that you might want to proceed with caution here, or
if you have kids that might be affected by that,
this might be a good one to listen to before
you share with them. Uh So, we're going to talk
about the DApp Love past incident today. Yeah. And if
you are fans of our colleagues podcasts stuff they don't
want you to know, you may have gotten a very
brief glimpse at this already. Yeah. There's like, it's a
(02:11):
couple of minutes of video and I feel like we
should mention at the outset Tracy. Neither Tracy nor and
I are Slavic language speakers, so our pronunciation on names
might be a little dicey. We looked online for pronunciations
of all of these words, and they're shockingly difficult to
find anybody like a native speaker recorded saying them. So
(02:32):
I kind of went by uh things that I have
heard other, you know, historical documentaries using their pronunciation, and
hopefully we will offend no one If we are terribly
wrong in pronunciation, it is not out of a desire
to be disrespectful. In January of nineteen fifty nine, a
(02:53):
group of young Russian hikers and ski enthusiasts was preparing
for an adventure in the Ural Mountains uh And. This
group consisted of Yuri Yuden, Ludmilla Dubnina, Zenaida Komo Garova,
Alexander Kolovadov, Rustum Slobain, Yuri Krivenshenko, Uri Doroshenko, Nikolai Tibo,
(03:17):
Bruno uh Semonzola Zola Tariev, and the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov,
who the past eventually became named after him since he
was widely recognized as the leader of this group. Most
of the members of the group were students at euro
Polytechnical Institute, and they were all experienced hikers. The route
that they had mapped out was a challenging one, but
(03:39):
they were all pretty much up for it. It would
have been a daunting but doable plan. So they were not,
you know, running in a foolhardy manner into something that
was way beyond them. No, and Diatlov had been hiking
this route before, so he was familiar with it. Uh
And to begin, they traveled by train to Ivedel in
this fared Vsk province, and from there they took a
(04:02):
truck to the last sort of town that some people
will call it an outpost or a settlement before their
run at the mountain. And while they were there in
that last settlement, You're a Union actually became quite sick.
He was going to be unable to handle the rigors
of the trip, so he stayed behind. Igor. Diatlov told
his sick friend that he would send a message as
(04:23):
soon as they were back from their expedition, and the
estimated return date was two weeks later, which was February twelve,
and so without your Union, the rest of the party
set out on January twenty, nineteen fifty nine, and that
was the last time anyone outside that group would see
any of them alive. According to their diaries, they set
(04:45):
off through the pass, but they lost their way because
of bad weather and they wound up going farther west
than they meant to. When they realized their mistake, they
set up camp. And this was February second, so it
had only been a few days into their it. They
were only about a kilometer away from an expanse of
forests that would have offered them some shelter. So it's
(05:07):
kind of unclear why they didn't head into the woods. Yeah,
some have theorized that dad lav did not want to
head towards the woods because it would have involved backtracking,
and they were kind of trying to get their bearings
on how far they had drifted off course and where
they were going to go next, and he may not
have wanted to backtrack, not knowing, but we really don't
(05:29):
know why they didn't. So dad Lava, it turned out,
did not contact Uri or he was gonna send a
message to their sports club, which would then really messages
out on February twelve, as he had said he would,
but at that point Uten was not really concerned hiking
trips through snowy mountain train could easily experience delays. Uh
(05:49):
dead Lav had even told him it could be a
couple of days after that. But eventually a week had
gone by after the expected return date and there had
been no news from the young hikers, and so friends
and families up for obvious reasons, became very concerned. Authorities
were alerted and an investigation was mounted. On February twenty,
(06:09):
the search team set out to look for the missing
hikers and for almost a week the searchers found absolutely nothing.
And then and remember, they were not in the same
place that they were expected to have been, so that
was part of the delay in finding them uh. And
then on the sixth day, the group's camp was discovered
on the eastern shoulder of Kolatako, which is a mountain
(06:30):
uh and that name, in the language of the Manci
people who live in the area means dead mountain or
mountain of the dead, depending on which interpretation you see uh.
And no doubt this moniker has kind of helped contribute
to interest in the legend throughout the years. The tent
was torn open from the inside, which is creepy, yes yes,
and the hikers, winter clothes, food, and skis were all
(06:54):
left behind. The footprints of eight or nine people were
found in the meter deep snow, and they were headed
down the mountain and towards the forest. Yeah. The footprints,
according to some descriptions, uh, initially looked like they scattered
in all directions, but then they kind of all headed
in the same direction downward. Uh. And the day after
they found the camp, and it's sort of bizarre scenario,
(07:19):
the first of the bodies were found. Uri Cravanashenko your
and Uri Dorishenko were found near the edge of the forest,
and they were only wearing their underclothes. It seemed like
they had set a fire, although it wouldn't have protected
them from the freezing cold for very long. Scrapings of
their skin was found in the bark of the trees nearby,
(07:40):
suggesting that maybe they had tried to climb up away
from something, or more likely to get a better view
of the surrounding area. Yeah, because remember there had been
a terrible storm that kind of caused them to lose
their bearings in the first place, so they may have
been just trying to figure out where they were. Uh.
Soon after, the two URIs were found three other bodies,
(08:01):
so Igor Yatlov, Zina Kolmogorova, and Rustum Slubadin were found
between those first two bodies and the campsite, and their
body positions let investigators to speculate that they were actually
attempting to return to camp because they were all facing
the camp direction. Slubadon had a skull fracture, but it
was not believed to have been fatal. Two months went
(08:24):
by before the last four bodies were found in a ravine,
and that discovery was made on May four. Their deaths
were caused by trauma rather than hypothermia. Nicholas tobaubernyol skull
was crushed. Alexander Zelitaryov, who was the oldest of the
group by far at the age of thirty seven, had
a whole lot of broken ribs, but Melandemnina had broken
(08:47):
ribs and her tongue was gone. Yeah, the missing tongue
is often the thing that people go and her tongue
was gone. Like that's kind of one of the stingers.
In the ghost story versions of this, all of the
hikers that they found were either in their underwear or
sleeping clothes for the most part. Uh, we'll get to
a little bit more on that in a second, and
(09:07):
they were all either barefoot or in stalking feet. It's
believed one of them was wearing just one shoe, so
when they abandoned their tent, they were basically walking into
sub zero temperatures. I've seen it listed as thirty degrees
below fahrenheit. And some of the hikers, particularly the ones
found later, appeared to be wearing clothes of others. So
it's possible that um Kravonashenko and Derushenko had died first
(09:32):
and then their friends, disoriented and not certain that they
were going to be able to find camp, had taken
what clothes they had been wearing, because remember they were
found in just their underwear in a desperate attempt to
kind of buy time by covering themselves just a little
bit more. Dr Boris Basra's DNNY was the medical examiner
in charge of the autopsies. It was determined that the
(09:53):
first five bodies which were found had all died of
hypothermia and the cases of skullet rip fractures. He determined
that the force that caused the injuries would have been
on par with that of an automobile crash because of
a large amount of blood found in Ludmilla's stomach. It
was believed that she was alive when her tongue was severed,
(10:14):
and that she had swallowed the blood that resulted from
the injury. Yeah, that comes up as being kind of
a tricky part of the equation when people are trying
to theorize what happened. Um, there was a very brief
speculation early on in the investigation that the Mancy people
that were living in the area may have attacked the hikers,
considering them to be interlopers on their land. But there
(10:36):
was really no sign of struggle or combat, so that
theory kind of got put to bed very quickly. You know,
humans could not have caused the damage that was detailed
in those autopsy findings. In the end, the medical examiner
ruled that the students had been the victims of quote
a compelling unknown force, and with that, the official Soviet
(10:58):
investigation of the case was shut down in May nine,
just a few months after it was begun. The cases
files and the reports were closed and they were archived.
The area where the camp and the bodies had been
found was kept off limits to other explorers for several years.
Some people point to this as proof that there was
a cover up, but it's entirely likely that the officials
(11:21):
simply did not want to risk losing anyone else to
whatever killed the nine members of the party. In the
nine nineties, photo copies of the case files that have
been locked away for decades were released to the public,
but they were incomplete. There are some gaps, they're missing pages. Uh.
That's another thing, of course, that people like to point
(11:41):
out as uh part of a conspiracy theory. Later on,
I think we should also point out that at that point,
the U leadership of Russia had changed, and it had
been four decades. There's not always when it comes to
archival situations. Things are not always hand bolds with kid
gloves or properly. Things get misfiled. So those are also
(12:05):
potential things everyone wants to jump to cover up. And
I'm not saying that there couldn't have been one, but
you also have to consider them more mundane elements u uh.
And as the story of the diat Love Pass incident
has persisted through the years, there have been additional details
that have kind of been woven into the fabric of
the story. Some versions mentioned that the hikers and their
(12:26):
clothing were highly radioactive. And they are also alleged eyewitness
accounts from other hikers who were south of the area
that described glowing orange lights in the sky above the mountains.
But those details really are hotly debated. Uh. There's little
to nothing in the officially released records about these two points.
(12:47):
So depending on which blog, message board, or news article
you venture into to read, uh, some will play up
these points and kind of sensationalize them, and some will
dismiss the radiation as a normal trace level amount uh,
and the light as either being a false recollection on
the part of the witnesses or a natural phenomenon that
the viewers simply misunderstood or didn't recognize for what it was,
(13:10):
or a crackpot theory. That's my addition. Lev Ivanov, an
investigator who had worked on the case, claimed in an
interview in nine nine that he took several eyewitness accounts
describing brightly flying spears, but he was told to close
the case. Yeah, and again we don't we know that
(13:34):
eyewitness accounts of any event are always uh a little
bit suspect people's memories failed them, not through any nefarious,
you know, desire, They just they're not always correct. There is, Yeah,
there is an increasing body of scholarly work about how
hugely unreliable eyewitness accounts are. Yeah. Uh. And next up
(13:55):
we are going to talk about some of the theories
as to just what actually might have happened to those
hikers in Siberia. There are many possibilities and innumerable theories.
We will not talk about all of them exhaustively, but
we want to cover some of the more kind of
popular and well known ones. But before we get to that,
h Tracy, do you want to have a word from
our sponsor, Yes, I do so. When you have an
(14:17):
unsolved mystery that stretches on for decades, especially an unsolved
mystery that has some really weird details that have been
there since the beginning, lots of theories crop up around it.
And there are several that have cropped up around this
incident over the years. Uh. Yeah, one that actually is
kind of recent eat earlier this year, Discovery are to
(14:40):
show that blended fiction and documentary to pitch the idea
that a Russian yetti had claimed the lives of the
nine hikers. I will be super blunt and say that
this was not well received. Well, it's funny because when
we get to the part about the tent being ripped
open from the inside, my first self is thought, is where, Well,
(15:01):
I didn't even think about that. So one theory that
also does not have much traction is that escaped prisoners
from a gulag attacked them. But there was nothing taken
from the camp and there was no sign of that
sort of struggle. I mean, people clearly had some traumatic injuries,
but there were no sign that they resulted from a
fight with someone. Yeah, they really didn't have any external damage.
(15:26):
There is another theory that, uh, the entire group had
eaten contaminated food. One of the early findings was that
their last meal had been roughly five or six hours
before they died. So some had theorized that they ate
some sort of contaminated food with some sort of bacteria
that caused them to have sort of a psychotic episode,
(15:48):
and that they all became disoriented and confused, uh, and
they basically went mad from eating bad food. There's even
one theory that the hikers were killed somewhere else and
then the whole abandoned camp and all the resting places
were staged afterward. And this one is supported by statements
from your uton. Remember he's the one that got sick
(16:08):
and wind up not going on the trip. He was
asked allegedly to identify every item in the camp and
who it belonged to, and there were several items that
he couldn't recognize or identify, and this included skis, a
piece of cloth, and a pair of glasses. I think
it's kind of easy to dismiss this idea, but how
in the world would one person have knowledge of every
(16:30):
single thing every other person with them owned and carried
with them. Yeah, and I mean I uh not to
you know, discredit him. But again, we talked about eyewitness
accounts having some reliability issues anyway, and you're talking about
a kid in his early twenties who just found out
(16:51):
that nine of his closest friends died in a really
gruesome and horrible and mysterious way. So there's some shock
in the mix that can really mess with your memory
in your thought processes. In addition to it being sort
of unrealistic to expect him to know what every single
person had packed. Uh So that also factors in. And
(17:14):
because of the nature of the injuries of the four
bodies found in the ravine, they all had serious internal injuries,
but no evidence of exterior trauma. It's been postulated that
some sort of explosion may have led to their deaths,
and that like a shock wave may have hit them,
or that they were running and kind of thrown into
the ravine with great force, and this has kind of
(17:36):
fed a whole slew of ideas that the Diyat law
of hikers met with a bad end due to some
sort of military activity, such as a test missile explosion.
There is no record of such a military test happening
at this time while they were there, but proponents of
this theory argue that it might not have been divulged
even if it had happened. There are two military facilities
(17:59):
where rocket trials in nuclear testing took place that are
near the scene, but there is no record of them
having been doing that when this happened, So you're a
Uton's identifying of articles problem is also cited in support
of this theory, which you know, was sort of with
the suggestion that members of the military got to the
(18:19):
camp before the investigators and covered up the evidence but
sloppily left things behind. And I do want to say
I was not trying to discredit him, but more to say,
it's it's not it's to be expected that someone would
not necessarily be able to identify everything at the camp. Yeah,
it's unrealistic. Um. Like I said, again, this is a
(18:40):
person in shock. Young also, you know, dragged out there
by authorities and going who owned this, who owned this?
Who owned this? I would be a train wreck. So uh.
And he mentioned there's that piece of cloth that he
couldn't identify where it came from, and he specifically said
he thought it looked like it came from a military uniform,
which is another thing that kind of feeds this military
(19:00):
involvement theory. UM. Another story which kind of perpetuates theories
about alien or even military involvement is tied to the
recollections of a man who was a twelve year old
in ninety nine when all of this happened, Uh, Eurikon Svitch,
who attended the funerals of several of the deceased hikers. UM.
(19:22):
His recollection is that the bodies were a deep brown tan.
He sometimes even described them as orangesian tone. And Uh.
He went on to found the Diatlov Foundation, which kind
of searches for various UH solutions to how this all
could have happened, but some have discounted his his commentary
(19:42):
on this weird color of the skin as being attributed
to the fact that they were out in the elements
for so long, even while Street Journal book reviewer Gregory
Crouch throughout a theory in his review of Dead Mountain
by Donnie Iker and we'll be talking more about Iker
in just a bit. He suggests that one of the
nine quote suffered some kind of psychotic rage and attacked
(20:05):
his fellow hikers. And I will say one more time,
we're wolf. It's all clear now, Tracy. I know it's
obviously we're closed. Why are we doing this episode? Right?
They should have just called you to begin with this.
Is he done? We could save a lot of people
time and money. Uh so Uh. There are obviously plenty
(20:27):
of these very interesting and engaging theories regarding what happened
in the Ural Mountains, but we really also have to
consider the less sensational explanations. First, the tongue. The most
obvious explanation is that a scavenger animal ate it. And
you know, the tongue is pretty easily accessible soft tissue,
(20:49):
and it probably would have been a thing that a
meal seeking animal would go for. This doesn't really explain
the blood in her stomach, though it's possible that she
fell and bet her own tongue off, or because she
was the last found UH, or because she was found
in the last group, that her tongue had simply decomposed. Yeah,
(21:10):
her mouth was open when they found her, so it
is possible that the tongue decomposed with exposure to the elements.
I have never seen like a breakdown of the likelihood
of UH that being the case sort of worked out
with how cold it was and what the preservation of
the temperature would have been versus frost bite deteriorating something.
(21:31):
But that's just one possible explanation. So an avalanche has
also been mentioned to explain the trashed camp UH, and
it could explain some of the injuries that have been
caused by great force without external trauma, but there isn't
um a whole lot of evidence that an avalanche actually happened. However,
(21:52):
I did read several theories that the sort of more
likely scenario would actually be that the fear of an
avalanche may explain why the hikers ran from their tent
in such a poor state of dress. For the conditions.
If they heard a sound that convinced them that an
avalanche was happening, it is possible that they would have
run for their lives, thinking that they didn't have time
(22:14):
to prep uh, and that that is how they found
themselves disoriented and lost. And remember this was a stormy
time of year. It's also completely believable that hypothermia could
have played a really significant part and all the strange
things about how the deceased were dressed, behavior called paradoxical undressing,
(22:35):
is not at all uncommon in cases of extreme hypothermia,
as your brain functions are compromised in the cold. Often
this manifests as taking off your clothing because either you're
not thinking clearly at all, or you feel like you're
hot even though you're freezing to death. Yeah, we talked
a little bit about hypothermia and sort of how it
(22:58):
affects your brain, as well as some more altitude related
stuff when we did our Everest podcast, But I thought
about that a little bit. Um these weren't at the
elevations that the altitude issues were ever brought into play.
But you know, extreme conditions can really cause your brain
to do some very bizarre and seemingly nonsensical things. Uh.
(23:20):
And this paradoxical undressing is well documented in a lot
of hypothermia cases that people will try to burrow into
the snow with no clothes on because some part of
their brain thinks that's how I'm going to survive. We
don't know now, since there's no official confirmation on the
radiation levels that we mentioned earlier or the mysterious orange lights. Uh,
(23:41):
theories of secret government testing and aliens that are based
around those facts kind of struggle. It really gets into
a lot of theoretical this could be, but there's just
not much to back it up. But we don't want
to ruin all the fun for Ben and Matt. It
stuff they don't want you to know. So, for all
we know, those were all detailed out in the pages
and reports that somehow went missing from the publicly released records,
(24:02):
So we'll give them that bone. But those really don't
have a lot of substantiation to work with. Before we
get to one more kind of interesting theory about how
this may have happened. Do you want to have a
word from a sponsor, let's do that. A more recent
theory that's come about is that a Carmen vortex Street
caused the deaths. The Carmen vortex Street is this phenomenon
(24:26):
consisting of a series of vortices caused by the separation
of wind or fluid by a bluff body. So vortices
sort of like tornadoes. Uh, I didn't mean to make
that sound like a question. That's actually swirling wind is
really what that is. Uh, And bluff body. So that's
(24:49):
the shape of the landscape right right. So when like
it's it's kind of you think about in this case
wind hitting the mountain. It can't go through it, so
it splits to go around it, and because of the
shape of the mountain, it forms these whirling vortices and
they kind of dove tail on one another and you
end up with a chain of them. Yeah. And when
(25:09):
you look at atmospheric photos of these, they look really beautiful.
However they are incredibly dangerous. Yeah, there are stories of
them completely leveling buildings. Uh. And now in the modern
era that they have been studied and understood a little
bit better. Modern architecture, particularly in cities and places where
they are multiple structures close together, they really try to
(25:32):
factor in not creating an environment that will welcome these
sorts of phenomenon to happen or cause them. Uh So
Donnie I Car who we talked about earlier, he was
a filmmaker. He also wrote a book about the diet
loaf past incident. Uh as part of his kind of
press junket. As he talked about what was in his book,
he mentioned these Carmen vortex streets and he believes that
(25:55):
this movement of winds through the past could have created
such a vortex street. And moreover, he asserts that this
wind event could have resulted in an infrasound phenomenon. And
this is pertinent to the mystery because infrasound, which is
too low of a frequency to be consciously heard or perceived,
but does affect your ear drum and the pressure around you.
(26:17):
It's said to cause people to experience disorientation, they can
have shortness of breath, they can have irrational fear. So
it kind of messes with your head a little bit. Uh.
And if this were the case, and this had in
fact happened to the diet lov party, it offers another
possible explanation for why they ran out of their tent
into the you know, certainly fatal cold Ikura asserts that
(26:41):
the surroundings of the past formed the perfect environment for
the creation of a Carmen vortex street. The dome of
the so called dead Mountain is really symmetrical. It's dome
shaped as that suggests, So it's the perfect blunt object
to form eddies of splitting wind as the gusts come
up against it. Yeah. I don't know if they've ever
(27:02):
been able to. He as part of his book research
and his projects, actually tried to recreate their hike. And
I don't know that they came came into I haven't
read the whole book. I don't know if they came
into a situation where they saw a duplication of that
happening or not. But food for thought. UH. In more
recent happenings, UH. In two thousand eight, there was a
(27:24):
meeting which was organized by Eural State Technical University or Polytechnic,
which is the university that the students had attended, and
the diet Law Foundation, and they gathered independent researchers and
former rescuers UH to gather and discuss all of the
possible evidence. Because remember the Diatlaw Foundation was set up
to try to figure out exactly what happened, and this
(27:46):
group determined that when taking all of the evidence into account,
all signs really pointed to a military test accidentally causing
the deaths. However, the group also issued a statement saying that, uh,
the defenseman is three and other government agencies would have
to provide them with some additional documentation before they could
say they had definitive proof. So they kind of were
(28:08):
making a super theory, but they don't really have the
evidence to back it up. There are a whole lot
of films, both documentary and docum fiction, that have been
inspired by the Deatlove Past incident. In twelve, director Renny
Harland made a movie that was loosely premised on the
recreation of the journey, but it veered very wildly into
(28:30):
fictional territory. Oh yes, super not I think I was.
I have not seen it. It's called Devil's Pass and
I haven't seen it. But Christian from brain Stuff and
I were talking about it. He's seen it, and he
was he was saying like, yeah, they never found the bodies,
and I'm like, that is not accurate. Uh. So, clearly
that film has a lot of like liberties taken with
(28:51):
the story in order to further the plot along. Uh,
there is actually I'm really looking forward to this. There
is a PC MAC video game that's coming out that
is based on the events of the Diet Loaf past incident.
It's entitled Lot and if you're interested, it's coming out
of a Polish games company and that is going to
be out in early and I'm really curious to see
(29:12):
what they do with it. You're a Uton, the young
man who left the group before the hike because of
his illness, lived to be seventy five and he died
in April. He's often quoted as saying, if I had
a chance to ask God just one question, it would
be what really happened to my friends that night? And
I think that's one of the things that's really like,
there's such a focus on the whole unsolved mystery conspiracy
(29:37):
angle of all this um because I I've I've looked
around those websites. We've had a lot of people that
have requested this episode, and I've sort of been like,
I personally don't feel like researching that, so I'm really
glad the Holly did. But you know, I have poked
around at some websites and people have asked and like
(29:57):
they pretty universally forget about the act that these were
a group of college students who died and that's tragic,
Like that's pretty much not talked about. Yeah, it really
it really becomes about the my theory versus your theory
mentality a lot of times, uh, which I understand the
appeal of that, and it's very fun and it is
fun to theorize on sort of what might have happened,
(30:20):
kind of play armchair sleuth. But as you said, you know,
these are nine except for the one man that was
in his thirties, they were all in their early twenties.
They were really young. Then those were people's friends and
family members. Yeah, and they were by all accounts, very bright.
Three of them were engineers, Uh that I think we're
doing graduate work. And then the others were younger students.
(30:45):
I think they were undergrads. But so they all had
really bright futures ahead of them. They were all very smart.
As we said, they were accomplished um hikers like they
really you know, they were just setting out in their
lives and it and there is a small memorial monument
to them with their photos on it. Uh. But I
think you're you make a great point. Well, there was
(31:08):
there was a student who was supposed to be part
of my freshman class in college who fell from a
waterfall and died, uh right before, like on a school
sponsoring trip immediately before the school year, and it really
rocked the campus. Like people who had never even met
her were just profoundly affected by it. So I can't
(31:29):
imagine having a group this side who were all students,
who all died unexpectedly on a trip like this. I
can't imagine what it must have been like for their
classmates and colleagues and family members afterward. Yeah, and the
the gentleman we mentioned earlier, Yuri Kotsevich, who had been
twelve when this all happened. When he spoke of the incident,
(31:51):
you know as an adult, his recollections are really very um.
Their impressions of sort of the emotional state of their
community and how everyone was really devastated. I mean, it
was a huge loss, uh So something to think about.
And as enthusiasts are still looking for the real answer
to what happened in the outlaw Pass, we may never
(32:14):
know it. But part of the problem is that the
clock is kind of running out for some people Um,
the people that were actually involved in the investigation or
who knew the hikers. The hikers are all aging so
and many have already died. So in terms of eyewitness accounts,
even though they're unreliable in terms of talking to people
that were actually part of what happened there, there's not
(32:34):
really going to be anybody to ask any additional questions
of soon, although there are still people, of course that
hold out hope that there is a fuller record that
the Russian government has that they will someday release. I
personally kind of hold more to the They don't say
much because they don't know anything else, and probably some
records got lost, but that's just my sort of pragmatic
(32:56):
I presume they're kind of like shrug, which could be
perceived is a cover up, if that's what you want
to see, but I really think it's more of a
I don't know. Uh. So that is the yeah off
Path incident, which is fascinating. I'm sure we will get
lots of theories in our email. I actually kind of
hope so that would be some fun October reading exactly.
(33:19):
That will be great, uh listener mail going forward, But
for today's listener Mail, this is the roundup of several
listener mails, and we're gonna do this for a couple
of episodes. We had a recent episode where someone asked
us how we got to where we are? Uh and
I talked about how we get a lot of questions
from people saying how do I get a job as
a history major, and Holly and I are both like,
(33:40):
I don't know, we're so helpful. Uh So, after hearing that,
my friend Hayden from college, the person who UM who
recommended the Angel of Bond's episode wrote, wrote us an
email and he told us about how he got to
where he is, which includes having a b A. And
(34:01):
m A in history as well as a library science degree.
Um And he says, in addition to talking specifically about
getting the library job and what led him to it,
he says, now I happened to move into the public
services side of libraries, and while I do help the
occasional scholar with history research, I don't have a lot
of official use for my history degree. However, I do
work in a library, so I have the best resource
(34:24):
in the world to satisfy my own personal interests in history.
It's what I read about almost exclusively and I love
to take history based vacations. I'm basically using my knowledge
of history to add to my profession, but not necessarily
as my profession. After getting this email from Hayden, I
sort of had this Eureka moment of Hey, I bet
we have a lot of history people in the audience
(34:45):
who would totally be willing to tell us some things
about their careers. So we asked people to do that,
and we have picked out some of them that we're
going to read for a couple of episodes. UM. As
of right this minute, we have several email ails and
a hundred and fifty one comments on the Facebook post
where we asked about it, along with the step that's
on Twitter and Tumblr. UM. So just a few things, um.
(35:09):
Rebecca says. The areas that you study and skills you
develop undertaking a college history degree not to be confused
with high school history's love of route memorization, our skills
that can be very much utilized in other fields. Searching, sorting,
and collecting data, subsequent analysis of the data, and application
of the findings to a specific question. A timely topic
(35:30):
would be is this the first time a drought has
done a B or C I've often worked with scientists
who have been unable to translate their work for the
general public. You'll sometimes hear someone talking about the amount
of a chemical one million parts for per kilogram per
microgram or and then she puts that out numerically, and
your general position is, Oh, what I help by explaining
(35:52):
that's one drop in Olympic sized swimming pool. Other areas
where my skills have come into play is research into
historical actions that contaminated sites. Who owned the property um
at the time that the contaminating incident occurred. What does
the law say about the owner versus who may have
been an operator slash p leaseholder. It can all get
very legalistic, but a person with a history degree who
(36:14):
did research and spent time in the stacks has an
edge in this type of work. Tracy says, not me, Tracy,
a different Tracy spelled with an E. A background in
history is important for understanding the context in which artworks
and objects were made. But in addition, learning history gives
you the tools to read documents critically, to question provided narratives,
(36:34):
and to draw connections between events, people, and objects. I
had always liked history as a subject, but came to
love it when I learned how to interpret history through objects.
Tracy is working in the field of art obviously. Jennifer says,
I have a Masters in history and ended up working
in publishing, first legal publishing and now medical publishing. Being
a history major gave me very useful writing, reading, and
(36:56):
proof reading skills which I use that work every day
and close out today's Aaron says, as an archivist, I
get to put my interest in history to work on
a daily basis in acquiring, describing, processing, providing access to
and telling folks all about the archival collections. I manage
as a university archivist through classroom instruction, presentations to staff
(37:17):
and alumni groups, and our various social media outlets. I
tell stories from the past every single day. So that
is just some of what folks have written to us
about in terms of what they do with their history degrees.
Who will talk about more uh in future episode at
least one future episode, because we've had a lot and
some of them are great. Yeah, if you would like
(37:40):
to write to us and share how your degree helped you,
or talk about the missing Russian Hikers, or anything else
you would like to communicate with us, you can do
so at history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com
slash missed in history uh, on Twitter at misston history,
mist in History dot tumbler dot com, and on pinterest
dot com slash missed in History. Well. You can also
(38:02):
visit our spreadshirt store and get shirts and bags and
mugs and almost any other thing that could have a
thing printed upon it with all kinds of missed in
History fun items and that is missed in History dot
spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn a
little bit more about what we talked about today, you
can go to our parents site, how stuff Work. Type
in the word avalanche in the search bar and you
(38:23):
will get an article talk called how avalanches work UH.
If you would like to visit us, you can go
to missed in History dot com and reach show notes.
You can get all the episodes occasionally Tracy particularly post
spree blogs. You can visit us there, as we said,
or you can research almost anything else your heart can
yearn for at our parents site. House stop works dot
(38:43):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
How stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Molly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we're
creeping up into Halloween territory, my favorite time of year,
So it's time for a little brush with the mysterious,
(00:23):
the unknown, and believed by some to be paranormal. Uh,
this story isn't exactly spooky, depending on your definition of
that word, but it is quite unsettling in many ways. Uh.
If you were to just do a quick Google search
on the diet lov past incidents, you will instantly turn
up dozens and dozens heading into the hundreds of sites
(00:45):
that focus on paranormal investigation, conspiracy theories, and even cryptozoology
in some cases. This is really a tragic piece of
Russian history. It happened during Soviet era Russia in Siberia,
and it's never really been fully explained, and as a consequence,
there is an entire culture of theorization that has kind
(01:05):
of grown up around it. So today we're going to
talk about what we actually know about this doomed hiking
expedition and then some of the theories about it as well.
As some of the less fantastical possibilities in terms of
explanation of what happened that day. Uh And we need
to give a little morning on this one. Some of
this information could be a little upsetting if you are
(01:26):
squeamish to corpse talk. Uh there are some injury related
details that are germained to the story that I know.
When I was relaying them to my husband, Brian kind
of gave him what we call the hufs where you
kind of go. Uh So, if you are a little
bit squeamish about details of how dead bodies have been
found and things that had happened to them, just know
(01:48):
that you might want to proceed with caution here, or
if you have kids that might be affected by that,
this might be a good one to listen to before
you share with them. Uh So, we're going to talk
about the DApp Love past incident today. Yeah. And if
you are fans of our colleagues podcasts stuff they don't
want you to know, you may have gotten a very
brief glimpse at this already. Yeah. There's like, it's a
(02:11):
couple of minutes of video and I feel like we
should mention at the outset Tracy. Neither Tracy nor and
I are Slavic language speakers, so our pronunciation on names
might be a little dicey. We looked online for pronunciations
of all of these words, and they're shockingly difficult to
find anybody like a native speaker recorded saying them. So
(02:32):
I kind of went by uh things that I have
heard other, you know, historical documentaries using their pronunciation, and
hopefully we will offend no one If we are terribly
wrong in pronunciation, it is not out of a desire
to be disrespectful. In January of nineteen fifty nine, a
(02:53):
group of young Russian hikers and ski enthusiasts was preparing
for an adventure in the Ural Mountains uh And. This
group consisted of Yuri Yuden, Ludmilla Dubnina, Zenaida Komo Garova,
Alexander Kolovadov, Rustum Slobain, Yuri Krivenshenko, Uri Doroshenko, Nikolai Tibo,
(03:17):
Bruno uh Semonzola Zola Tariev, and the group's leader, Igor Dyatlov,
who the past eventually became named after him since he
was widely recognized as the leader of this group. Most
of the members of the group were students at euro
Polytechnical Institute, and they were all experienced hikers. The route
that they had mapped out was a challenging one, but
(03:39):
they were all pretty much up for it. It would
have been a daunting but doable plan. So they were not,
you know, running in a foolhardy manner into something that
was way beyond them. No, and Diatlov had been hiking
this route before, so he was familiar with it. Uh
And to begin, they traveled by train to Ivedel in
this fared Vsk province, and from there they took a
(04:02):
truck to the last sort of town that some people
will call it an outpost or a settlement before their
run at the mountain. And while they were there in
that last settlement, You're a Union actually became quite sick.
He was going to be unable to handle the rigors
of the trip, so he stayed behind. Igor. Diatlov told
his sick friend that he would send a message as
(04:23):
soon as they were back from their expedition, and the
estimated return date was two weeks later, which was February twelve,
and so without your Union, the rest of the party
set out on January twenty, nineteen fifty nine, and that
was the last time anyone outside that group would see
any of them alive. According to their diaries, they set
(04:45):
off through the pass, but they lost their way because
of bad weather and they wound up going farther west
than they meant to. When they realized their mistake, they
set up camp. And this was February second, so it
had only been a few days into their it. They
were only about a kilometer away from an expanse of
forests that would have offered them some shelter. So it's
(05:07):
kind of unclear why they didn't head into the woods. Yeah,
some have theorized that dad lav did not want to
head towards the woods because it would have involved backtracking,
and they were kind of trying to get their bearings
on how far they had drifted off course and where
they were going to go next, and he may not
have wanted to backtrack, not knowing, but we really don't
(05:29):
know why they didn't. So dad Lava, it turned out,
did not contact Uri or he was gonna send a
message to their sports club, which would then really messages
out on February twelve, as he had said he would,
but at that point Uten was not really concerned hiking
trips through snowy mountain train could easily experience delays. Uh
(05:49):
dead Lav had even told him it could be a
couple of days after that. But eventually a week had
gone by after the expected return date and there had
been no news from the young hikers, and so friends
and families up for obvious reasons, became very concerned. Authorities
were alerted and an investigation was mounted. On February twenty,
(06:09):
the search team set out to look for the missing
hikers and for almost a week the searchers found absolutely nothing.
And then and remember, they were not in the same
place that they were expected to have been, so that
was part of the delay in finding them uh. And
then on the sixth day, the group's camp was discovered
on the eastern shoulder of Kolatako, which is a mountain
(06:30):
uh and that name, in the language of the Manci
people who live in the area means dead mountain or
mountain of the dead, depending on which interpretation you see uh.
And no doubt this moniker has kind of helped contribute
to interest in the legend throughout the years. The tent
was torn open from the inside, which is creepy, yes yes,
and the hikers, winter clothes, food, and skis were all
(06:54):
left behind. The footprints of eight or nine people were
found in the meter deep snow, and they were headed
down the mountain and towards the forest. Yeah. The footprints,
according to some descriptions, uh, initially looked like they scattered
in all directions, but then they kind of all headed
in the same direction downward. Uh. And the day after
they found the camp, and it's sort of bizarre scenario,
(07:19):
the first of the bodies were found. Uri Cravanashenko your
and Uri Dorishenko were found near the edge of the forest,
and they were only wearing their underclothes. It seemed like
they had set a fire, although it wouldn't have protected
them from the freezing cold for very long. Scrapings of
their skin was found in the bark of the trees nearby,
(07:40):
suggesting that maybe they had tried to climb up away
from something, or more likely to get a better view
of the surrounding area. Yeah, because remember there had been
a terrible storm that kind of caused them to lose
their bearings in the first place, so they may have
been just trying to figure out where they were. Uh.
Soon after, the two URIs were found three other bodies,
(08:01):
so Igor Yatlov, Zina Kolmogorova, and Rustum Slubadin were found
between those first two bodies and the campsite, and their
body positions let investigators to speculate that they were actually
attempting to return to camp because they were all facing
the camp direction. Slubadon had a skull fracture, but it
was not believed to have been fatal. Two months went
(08:24):
by before the last four bodies were found in a ravine,
and that discovery was made on May four. Their deaths
were caused by trauma rather than hypothermia. Nicholas tobaubernyol skull
was crushed. Alexander Zelitaryov, who was the oldest of the
group by far at the age of thirty seven, had
a whole lot of broken ribs, but Melandemnina had broken
(08:47):
ribs and her tongue was gone. Yeah, the missing tongue
is often the thing that people go and her tongue
was gone. Like that's kind of one of the stingers.
In the ghost story versions of this, all of the
hikers that they found were either in their underwear or
sleeping clothes for the most part. Uh, we'll get to
a little bit more on that in a second, and
(09:07):
they were all either barefoot or in stalking feet. It's
believed one of them was wearing just one shoe, so
when they abandoned their tent, they were basically walking into
sub zero temperatures. I've seen it listed as thirty degrees
below fahrenheit. And some of the hikers, particularly the ones
found later, appeared to be wearing clothes of others. So
it's possible that um Kravonashenko and Derushenko had died first
(09:32):
and then their friends, disoriented and not certain that they
were going to be able to find camp, had taken
what clothes they had been wearing, because remember they were
found in just their underwear in a desperate attempt to
kind of buy time by covering themselves just a little
bit more. Dr Boris Basra's DNNY was the medical examiner
in charge of the autopsies. It was determined that the
(09:53):
first five bodies which were found had all died of
hypothermia and the cases of skullet rip fractures. He determined
that the force that caused the injuries would have been
on par with that of an automobile crash because of
a large amount of blood found in Ludmilla's stomach. It
was believed that she was alive when her tongue was severed,
(10:14):
and that she had swallowed the blood that resulted from
the injury. Yeah, that comes up as being kind of
a tricky part of the equation when people are trying
to theorize what happened. Um, there was a very brief
speculation early on in the investigation that the Mancy people
that were living in the area may have attacked the hikers,
considering them to be interlopers on their land. But there
(10:36):
was really no sign of struggle or combat, so that
theory kind of got put to bed very quickly. You know,
humans could not have caused the damage that was detailed
in those autopsy findings. In the end, the medical examiner
ruled that the students had been the victims of quote
a compelling unknown force, and with that, the official Soviet
(10:58):
investigation of the case was shut down in May nine,
just a few months after it was begun. The cases
files and the reports were closed and they were archived.
The area where the camp and the bodies had been
found was kept off limits to other explorers for several years.
Some people point to this as proof that there was
a cover up, but it's entirely likely that the officials
(11:21):
simply did not want to risk losing anyone else to
whatever killed the nine members of the party. In the
nine nineties, photo copies of the case files that have
been locked away for decades were released to the public,
but they were incomplete. There are some gaps, they're missing pages. Uh.
That's another thing, of course, that people like to point
(11:41):
out as uh part of a conspiracy theory. Later on,
I think we should also point out that at that point,
the U leadership of Russia had changed, and it had
been four decades. There's not always when it comes to
archival situations. Things are not always hand bolds with kid
gloves or properly. Things get misfiled. So those are also
(12:05):
potential things everyone wants to jump to cover up. And
I'm not saying that there couldn't have been one, but
you also have to consider them more mundane elements u uh.
And as the story of the diat Love Pass incident
has persisted through the years, there have been additional details
that have kind of been woven into the fabric of
the story. Some versions mentioned that the hikers and their
(12:26):
clothing were highly radioactive. And they are also alleged eyewitness
accounts from other hikers who were south of the area
that described glowing orange lights in the sky above the mountains.
But those details really are hotly debated. Uh. There's little
to nothing in the officially released records about these two points.
(12:47):
So depending on which blog, message board, or news article
you venture into to read, uh, some will play up
these points and kind of sensationalize them, and some will
dismiss the radiation as a normal trace level amount uh,
and the light as either being a false recollection on
the part of the witnesses or a natural phenomenon that
the viewers simply misunderstood or didn't recognize for what it was,
(13:10):
or a crackpot theory. That's my addition. Lev Ivanov, an
investigator who had worked on the case, claimed in an
interview in nine nine that he took several eyewitness accounts
describing brightly flying spears, but he was told to close
the case. Yeah, and again we don't we know that
(13:34):
eyewitness accounts of any event are always uh a little
bit suspect people's memories failed them, not through any nefarious,
you know, desire, They just they're not always correct. There is, Yeah,
there is an increasing body of scholarly work about how
hugely unreliable eyewitness accounts are. Yeah. Uh. And next up
(13:55):
we are going to talk about some of the theories
as to just what actually might have happened to those
hikers in Siberia. There are many possibilities and innumerable theories.
We will not talk about all of them exhaustively, but
we want to cover some of the more kind of
popular and well known ones. But before we get to that,
h Tracy, do you want to have a word from
our sponsor, Yes, I do so. When you have an
(14:17):
unsolved mystery that stretches on for decades, especially an unsolved
mystery that has some really weird details that have been
there since the beginning, lots of theories crop up around it.
And there are several that have cropped up around this
incident over the years. Uh. Yeah, one that actually is
kind of recent eat earlier this year, Discovery are to
(14:40):
show that blended fiction and documentary to pitch the idea
that a Russian yetti had claimed the lives of the
nine hikers. I will be super blunt and say that
this was not well received. Well, it's funny because when
we get to the part about the tent being ripped
open from the inside, my first self is thought, is where, Well,
(15:01):
I didn't even think about that. So one theory that
also does not have much traction is that escaped prisoners
from a gulag attacked them. But there was nothing taken
from the camp and there was no sign of that
sort of struggle. I mean, people clearly had some traumatic injuries,
but there were no sign that they resulted from a
fight with someone. Yeah, they really didn't have any external damage.
(15:26):
There is another theory that, uh, the entire group had
eaten contaminated food. One of the early findings was that
their last meal had been roughly five or six hours
before they died. So some had theorized that they ate
some sort of contaminated food with some sort of bacteria
that caused them to have sort of a psychotic episode,
(15:48):
and that they all became disoriented and confused, uh, and
they basically went mad from eating bad food. There's even
one theory that the hikers were killed somewhere else and
then the whole abandoned camp and all the resting places
were staged afterward. And this one is supported by statements
from your uton. Remember he's the one that got sick
(16:08):
and wind up not going on the trip. He was
asked allegedly to identify every item in the camp and
who it belonged to, and there were several items that
he couldn't recognize or identify, and this included skis, a
piece of cloth, and a pair of glasses. I think
it's kind of easy to dismiss this idea, but how
in the world would one person have knowledge of every
(16:30):
single thing every other person with them owned and carried
with them. Yeah, and I mean I uh not to
you know, discredit him. But again, we talked about eyewitness
accounts having some reliability issues anyway, and you're talking about
a kid in his early twenties who just found out
(16:51):
that nine of his closest friends died in a really
gruesome and horrible and mysterious way. So there's some shock
in the mix that can really mess with your memory
in your thought processes. In addition to it being sort
of unrealistic to expect him to know what every single
person had packed. Uh So that also factors in. And
(17:14):
because of the nature of the injuries of the four
bodies found in the ravine, they all had serious internal injuries,
but no evidence of exterior trauma. It's been postulated that
some sort of explosion may have led to their deaths,
and that like a shock wave may have hit them,
or that they were running and kind of thrown into
the ravine with great force, and this has kind of
(17:36):
fed a whole slew of ideas that the Diyat law
of hikers met with a bad end due to some
sort of military activity, such as a test missile explosion.
There is no record of such a military test happening
at this time while they were there, but proponents of
this theory argue that it might not have been divulged
even if it had happened. There are two military facilities
(17:59):
where rocket trials in nuclear testing took place that are
near the scene, but there is no record of them
having been doing that when this happened, So you're a
Uton's identifying of articles problem is also cited in support
of this theory, which you know, was sort of with
the suggestion that members of the military got to the
(18:19):
camp before the investigators and covered up the evidence but
sloppily left things behind. And I do want to say
I was not trying to discredit him, but more to say,
it's it's not it's to be expected that someone would
not necessarily be able to identify everything at the camp. Yeah,
it's unrealistic. Um. Like I said, again, this is a
(18:40):
person in shock. Young also, you know, dragged out there
by authorities and going who owned this, who owned this?
Who owned this? I would be a train wreck. So uh.
And he mentioned there's that piece of cloth that he
couldn't identify where it came from, and he specifically said
he thought it looked like it came from a military uniform,
which is another thing that kind of feeds this military
(19:00):
involvement theory. UM. Another story which kind of perpetuates theories
about alien or even military involvement is tied to the
recollections of a man who was a twelve year old
in ninety nine when all of this happened, Uh, Eurikon Svitch,
who attended the funerals of several of the deceased hikers. UM.
(19:22):
His recollection is that the bodies were a deep brown tan.
He sometimes even described them as orangesian tone. And Uh.
He went on to found the Diatlov Foundation, which kind
of searches for various UH solutions to how this all
could have happened, but some have discounted his his commentary
(19:42):
on this weird color of the skin as being attributed
to the fact that they were out in the elements
for so long, even while Street Journal book reviewer Gregory
Crouch throughout a theory in his review of Dead Mountain
by Donnie Iker and we'll be talking more about Iker
in just a bit. He suggests that one of the
nine quote suffered some kind of psychotic rage and attacked
(20:05):
his fellow hikers. And I will say one more time,
we're wolf. It's all clear now, Tracy. I know it's
obviously we're closed. Why are we doing this episode? Right?
They should have just called you to begin with this.
Is he done? We could save a lot of people
time and money. Uh so Uh. There are obviously plenty
(20:27):
of these very interesting and engaging theories regarding what happened
in the Ural Mountains, but we really also have to
consider the less sensational explanations. First, the tongue. The most
obvious explanation is that a scavenger animal ate it. And
you know, the tongue is pretty easily accessible soft tissue,
(20:49):
and it probably would have been a thing that a
meal seeking animal would go for. This doesn't really explain
the blood in her stomach, though it's possible that she
fell and bet her own tongue off, or because she
was the last found UH, or because she was found
in the last group, that her tongue had simply decomposed. Yeah,
(21:10):
her mouth was open when they found her, so it
is possible that the tongue decomposed with exposure to the elements.
I have never seen like a breakdown of the likelihood
of UH that being the case sort of worked out
with how cold it was and what the preservation of
the temperature would have been versus frost bite deteriorating something.
(21:31):
But that's just one possible explanation. So an avalanche has
also been mentioned to explain the trashed camp UH, and
it could explain some of the injuries that have been
caused by great force without external trauma, but there isn't
um a whole lot of evidence that an avalanche actually happened. However,
(21:52):
I did read several theories that the sort of more
likely scenario would actually be that the fear of an
avalanche may explain why the hikers ran from their tent
in such a poor state of dress. For the conditions.
If they heard a sound that convinced them that an
avalanche was happening, it is possible that they would have
run for their lives, thinking that they didn't have time
(22:14):
to prep uh, and that that is how they found
themselves disoriented and lost. And remember this was a stormy
time of year. It's also completely believable that hypothermia could
have played a really significant part and all the strange
things about how the deceased were dressed, behavior called paradoxical undressing,
(22:35):
is not at all uncommon in cases of extreme hypothermia,
as your brain functions are compromised in the cold. Often
this manifests as taking off your clothing because either you're
not thinking clearly at all, or you feel like you're
hot even though you're freezing to death. Yeah, we talked
a little bit about hypothermia and sort of how it
(22:58):
affects your brain, as well as some more altitude related
stuff when we did our Everest podcast, But I thought
about that a little bit. Um these weren't at the
elevations that the altitude issues were ever brought into play.
But you know, extreme conditions can really cause your brain
to do some very bizarre and seemingly nonsensical things. Uh.
(23:20):
And this paradoxical undressing is well documented in a lot
of hypothermia cases that people will try to burrow into
the snow with no clothes on because some part of
their brain thinks that's how I'm going to survive. We
don't know now, since there's no official confirmation on the
radiation levels that we mentioned earlier or the mysterious orange lights. Uh,
(23:41):
theories of secret government testing and aliens that are based
around those facts kind of struggle. It really gets into
a lot of theoretical this could be, but there's just
not much to back it up. But we don't want
to ruin all the fun for Ben and Matt. It
stuff they don't want you to know. So, for all
we know, those were all detailed out in the pages
and reports that somehow went missing from the publicly released records,
(24:02):
So we'll give them that bone. But those really don't
have a lot of substantiation to work with. Before we
get to one more kind of interesting theory about how
this may have happened. Do you want to have a
word from a sponsor, let's do that. A more recent
theory that's come about is that a Carmen vortex Street
caused the deaths. The Carmen vortex Street is this phenomenon
(24:26):
consisting of a series of vortices caused by the separation
of wind or fluid by a bluff body. So vortices
sort of like tornadoes. Uh, I didn't mean to make
that sound like a question. That's actually swirling wind is
really what that is. Uh, And bluff body. So that's
(24:49):
the shape of the landscape right right. So when like
it's it's kind of you think about in this case
wind hitting the mountain. It can't go through it, so
it splits to go around it, and because of the
shape of the mountain, it forms these whirling vortices and
they kind of dove tail on one another and you
end up with a chain of them. Yeah. And when
(25:09):
you look at atmospheric photos of these, they look really beautiful.
However they are incredibly dangerous. Yeah, there are stories of
them completely leveling buildings. Uh. And now in the modern
era that they have been studied and understood a little
bit better. Modern architecture, particularly in cities and places where
they are multiple structures close together, they really try to
(25:32):
factor in not creating an environment that will welcome these
sorts of phenomenon to happen or cause them. Uh So
Donnie I Car who we talked about earlier, he was
a filmmaker. He also wrote a book about the diet
loaf past incident. Uh as part of his kind of
press junket. As he talked about what was in his book,
he mentioned these Carmen vortex streets and he believes that
(25:55):
this movement of winds through the past could have created
such a vortex street. And moreover, he asserts that this
wind event could have resulted in an infrasound phenomenon. And
this is pertinent to the mystery because infrasound, which is
too low of a frequency to be consciously heard or perceived,
but does affect your ear drum and the pressure around you.
(26:17):
It's said to cause people to experience disorientation, they can
have shortness of breath, they can have irrational fear. So
it kind of messes with your head a little bit. Uh.
And if this were the case, and this had in
fact happened to the diet lov party, it offers another
possible explanation for why they ran out of their tent
into the you know, certainly fatal cold Ikura asserts that
(26:41):
the surroundings of the past formed the perfect environment for
the creation of a Carmen vortex street. The dome of
the so called dead Mountain is really symmetrical. It's dome
shaped as that suggests, So it's the perfect blunt object
to form eddies of splitting wind as the gusts come
up against it. Yeah. I don't know if they've ever
(27:02):
been able to. He as part of his book research
and his projects, actually tried to recreate their hike. And
I don't know that they came came into I haven't
read the whole book. I don't know if they came
into a situation where they saw a duplication of that
happening or not. But food for thought. UH. In more
recent happenings, UH. In two thousand eight, there was a
(27:24):
meeting which was organized by Eural State Technical University or Polytechnic,
which is the university that the students had attended, and
the diet Law Foundation, and they gathered independent researchers and
former rescuers UH to gather and discuss all of the
possible evidence. Because remember the Diatlaw Foundation was set up
to try to figure out exactly what happened, and this
(27:46):
group determined that when taking all of the evidence into account,
all signs really pointed to a military test accidentally causing
the deaths. However, the group also issued a statement saying that, uh,
the defenseman is three and other government agencies would have
to provide them with some additional documentation before they could
say they had definitive proof. So they kind of were
(28:08):
making a super theory, but they don't really have the
evidence to back it up. There are a whole lot
of films, both documentary and docum fiction, that have been
inspired by the Deatlove Past incident. In twelve, director Renny
Harland made a movie that was loosely premised on the
recreation of the journey, but it veered very wildly into
(28:30):
fictional territory. Oh yes, super not I think I was.
I have not seen it. It's called Devil's Pass and
I haven't seen it. But Christian from brain Stuff and
I were talking about it. He's seen it, and he
was he was saying like, yeah, they never found the bodies,
and I'm like, that is not accurate. Uh. So, clearly
that film has a lot of like liberties taken with
(28:51):
the story in order to further the plot along. Uh,
there is actually I'm really looking forward to this. There
is a PC MAC video game that's coming out that
is based on the events of the Diet Loaf past incident.
It's entitled Lot and if you're interested, it's coming out
of a Polish games company and that is going to
be out in early and I'm really curious to see
(29:12):
what they do with it. You're a Uton, the young
man who left the group before the hike because of
his illness, lived to be seventy five and he died
in April. He's often quoted as saying, if I had
a chance to ask God just one question, it would
be what really happened to my friends that night? And
I think that's one of the things that's really like,
there's such a focus on the whole unsolved mystery conspiracy
(29:37):
angle of all this um because I I've I've looked
around those websites. We've had a lot of people that
have requested this episode, and I've sort of been like,
I personally don't feel like researching that, so I'm really
glad the Holly did. But you know, I have poked
around at some websites and people have asked and like
(29:57):
they pretty universally forget about the act that these were
a group of college students who died and that's tragic,
Like that's pretty much not talked about. Yeah, it really
it really becomes about the my theory versus your theory
mentality a lot of times, uh, which I understand the
appeal of that, and it's very fun and it is
fun to theorize on sort of what might have happened,
(30:20):
kind of play armchair sleuth. But as you said, you know,
these are nine except for the one man that was
in his thirties, they were all in their early twenties.
They were really young. Then those were people's friends and
family members. Yeah, and they were by all accounts, very bright.
Three of them were engineers, Uh that I think we're
doing graduate work. And then the others were younger students.
(30:45):
I think they were undergrads. But so they all had
really bright futures ahead of them. They were all very smart.
As we said, they were accomplished um hikers like they
really you know, they were just setting out in their
lives and it and there is a small memorial monument
to them with their photos on it. Uh. But I
think you're you make a great point. Well, there was
(31:08):
there was a student who was supposed to be part
of my freshman class in college who fell from a
waterfall and died, uh right before, like on a school
sponsoring trip immediately before the school year, and it really
rocked the campus. Like people who had never even met
her were just profoundly affected by it. So I can't
(31:29):
imagine having a group this side who were all students,
who all died unexpectedly on a trip like this. I
can't imagine what it must have been like for their
classmates and colleagues and family members afterward. Yeah, and the
the gentleman we mentioned earlier, Yuri Kotsevich, who had been
twelve when this all happened. When he spoke of the incident,
(31:51):
you know as an adult, his recollections are really very um.
Their impressions of sort of the emotional state of their
community and how everyone was really devastated. I mean, it
was a huge loss, uh So something to think about.
And as enthusiasts are still looking for the real answer
to what happened in the outlaw Pass, we may never
(32:14):
know it. But part of the problem is that the
clock is kind of running out for some people Um,
the people that were actually involved in the investigation or
who knew the hikers. The hikers are all aging so
and many have already died. So in terms of eyewitness accounts,
even though they're unreliable in terms of talking to people
that were actually part of what happened there, there's not
(32:34):
really going to be anybody to ask any additional questions
of soon, although there are still people, of course that
hold out hope that there is a fuller record that
the Russian government has that they will someday release. I
personally kind of hold more to the They don't say
much because they don't know anything else, and probably some
records got lost, but that's just my sort of pragmatic
(32:56):
I presume they're kind of like shrug, which could be
perceived is a cover up, if that's what you want
to see, but I really think it's more of a
I don't know. Uh. So that is the yeah off
Path incident, which is fascinating. I'm sure we will get
lots of theories in our email. I actually kind of
hope so that would be some fun October reading exactly.
(33:19):
That will be great, uh listener mail going forward, But
for today's listener Mail, this is the roundup of several
listener mails, and we're gonna do this for a couple
of episodes. We had a recent episode where someone asked
us how we got to where we are? Uh and
I talked about how we get a lot of questions
from people saying how do I get a job as
a history major, and Holly and I are both like,
(33:40):
I don't know, we're so helpful. Uh So, after hearing that,
my friend Hayden from college, the person who UM who
recommended the Angel of Bond's episode wrote, wrote us an
email and he told us about how he got to
where he is, which includes having a b A. And
(34:01):
m A in history as well as a library science degree.
Um And he says, in addition to talking specifically about
getting the library job and what led him to it,
he says, now I happened to move into the public
services side of libraries, and while I do help the
occasional scholar with history research, I don't have a lot
of official use for my history degree. However, I do
work in a library, so I have the best resource
(34:24):
in the world to satisfy my own personal interests in history.
It's what I read about almost exclusively and I love
to take history based vacations. I'm basically using my knowledge
of history to add to my profession, but not necessarily
as my profession. After getting this email from Hayden, I
sort of had this Eureka moment of Hey, I bet
we have a lot of history people in the audience
(34:45):
who would totally be willing to tell us some things
about their careers. So we asked people to do that,
and we have picked out some of them that we're
going to read for a couple of episodes. UM. As
of right this minute, we have several email ails and
a hundred and fifty one comments on the Facebook post
where we asked about it, along with the step that's
on Twitter and Tumblr. UM. So just a few things, um.
(35:09):
Rebecca says. The areas that you study and skills you
develop undertaking a college history degree not to be confused
with high school history's love of route memorization, our skills
that can be very much utilized in other fields. Searching, sorting,
and collecting data, subsequent analysis of the data, and application
of the findings to a specific question. A timely topic
(35:30):
would be is this the first time a drought has
done a B or C I've often worked with scientists
who have been unable to translate their work for the
general public. You'll sometimes hear someone talking about the amount
of a chemical one million parts for per kilogram per
microgram or and then she puts that out numerically, and
your general position is, Oh, what I help by explaining
(35:52):
that's one drop in Olympic sized swimming pool. Other areas
where my skills have come into play is research into
historical actions that contaminated sites. Who owned the property um
at the time that the contaminating incident occurred. What does
the law say about the owner versus who may have
been an operator slash p leaseholder. It can all get
very legalistic, but a person with a history degree who
(36:14):
did research and spent time in the stacks has an
edge in this type of work. Tracy says, not me, Tracy,
a different Tracy spelled with an E. A background in
history is important for understanding the context in which artworks
and objects were made. But in addition, learning history gives
you the tools to read documents critically, to question provided narratives,
(36:34):
and to draw connections between events, people, and objects. I
had always liked history as a subject, but came to
love it when I learned how to interpret history through objects.
Tracy is working in the field of art obviously. Jennifer says,
I have a Masters in history and ended up working
in publishing, first legal publishing and now medical publishing. Being
a history major gave me very useful writing, reading, and
(36:56):
proof reading skills which I use that work every day
and close out today's Aaron says, as an archivist, I
get to put my interest in history to work on
a daily basis in acquiring, describing, processing, providing access to
and telling folks all about the archival collections. I manage
as a university archivist through classroom instruction, presentations to staff
(37:17):
and alumni groups, and our various social media outlets. I
tell stories from the past every single day. So that
is just some of what folks have written to us
about in terms of what they do with their history degrees.
Who will talk about more uh in future episode at
least one future episode, because we've had a lot and
some of them are great. Yeah, if you would like
(37:40):
to write to us and share how your degree helped you,
or talk about the missing Russian Hikers, or anything else
you would like to communicate with us, you can do
so at history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also connect with us at Facebook dot com
slash missed in history uh, on Twitter at misston history,
mist in History dot tumbler dot com, and on pinterest
dot com slash missed in History. Well. You can also
(38:02):
visit our spreadshirt store and get shirts and bags and
mugs and almost any other thing that could have a
thing printed upon it with all kinds of missed in
History fun items and that is missed in History dot
spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to learn a
little bit more about what we talked about today, you
can go to our parents site, how stuff Work. Type
in the word avalanche in the search bar and you
(38:23):
will get an article talk called how avalanches work UH.
If you would like to visit us, you can go
to missed in History dot com and reach show notes.
You can get all the episodes occasionally Tracy particularly post
spree blogs. You can visit us there, as we said,
or you can research almost anything else your heart can
yearn for at our parents site. House stop works dot
(38:43):
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
How stuff works dot com
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Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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