Dyatlov revisited

Seven years ago, I wrote a post here at Skeptophilia about one of the most enduring mysteries of the twentieth century -- the deaths of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in 1959, at a spot that later was named after the leader of the nine -- Igor Dyatlov.

The "Dyatlov Pass Incident" has all the hallmarks of an episode of The X Files.  The nine hikers set out in late January, almost exactly sixty years ago, with no inkling of what would happen.  When the group still hadn't showed up by the end of February, a good two weeks after their projected return date, a rescue team was sent out.

What they found is nothing short of extraordinary.  The members of the hiking group showed a variety of horrifying injuries, and a few had what looked like radiation burns.  More than one had removed most of their clothing -- and then frozen to death.  The tent they'd slept in was slit open, as if they were so desperate to get out they didn't even have time to unzip the flap.  (There are more details on my original post, if you're curious.)

The upshot of it all is that it's never been definitively established what exactly happened.  The more prosaic explanations, for example that the hikers stumbled onto a Cold War Russian weapons test, have been categorically denied by the Russian government.  (At which point the conspiracy theorists waggle their eyebrows significantly and say, "Of course they denied it.")  The more out-there explanations include an attack from the Ural version of the Abominable Snowman and/or aliens.

The reason this all comes up is not just because just last week we passed the sixtieth anniversary of the Dyatlov team's departure, but because of a surprise announcement by the Russian government that they're reopening an investigation into the incident.  Aleksandr Kurennoy, the official spokesperson of the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, released a statement on the Efir Internet channel regarding the resumption of the case.  "Our goal is to establish which of the 75 existing theories could be confirmed by reliable evidence," Kurennoy said.  "Between March 10-20, employees of the Sverdlovsk Region Prosecutor's Office will fly to the site of the incident together with geodesy experts and employees of the Emergencies Ministry.  The procedural deadlines have expired for all the other competent bodies, but this is not the case with prosecution agencies.  Apart from that, a new law has come into force that authorizes the prosecution to commission special expert evaluations as part of a probe."

I'm a little surprised about this in a couple of respects.  For one thing, the Russian government is not exactly well known for transparency, and it's odd that they want an investigation into a mystery where one of the possible solutions is shady dealings by the Russian government itself.  It's entirely possible, of course, that they'll release a report that makes them look good regardless what they find, although it does bring up the question of why they'd stir things up in the first place.  Seems like letting sleeping dogs lie would be the more prudent course.

Second, though, is what on Earth they could hope to find now, sixty years after the incident occurred.  There wasn't that much evidence to start with; in fact, the bodies of four of the nine were only recovered during the spring thaw when May came.  Heading out into a snow-covered wilderness, six decades after the fact, is unlikely to uncover anything new one way or the other.

So the whole thing is more than a little puzzling.  As much as I'd like to know what happened at Dyatlov Pass in the winter of 1959, my hunch is that we probably will never know enough to make a certain determination.  What's clear, though, is that this has renewed interest in the incident, especially amongst the conspiracy theorists, who are hoping like hell to get more fuel for their various fires.

Which they'll probably claim no matter what the Russians find.

********************************

Humans have a morbid fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  Look at the number of movies made and books written about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, not to mention hordes of predatory dinosaurs picking people off the streets.  But in the "horrifically dangerous" category, nothing can beat black holes -- collapsed stars with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape.  If you fell into one of these things, you'd get "spaghettified" -- stretched by tidal forces into a long, thin streamer of goo -- and every trace of you would be destroyed so thoroughly that they'd not even be theoretically possible to retrieve.

Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them.  Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

So no wonder there are astrophysicists who have devoted their lives to studying these beasts.  One of these is Shep Doeleman, whose determination to understand the strangest objects in the universe is the subject of Seth Fletcher's wonderful book Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable.  It's not comfortable reading -- when you realize how completely insignificant we are on the scale of the universe, it's considerably humbling -- but it'll leave you in awe of how magnificent, how strange, and how beautiful the cosmos is, and amaze you that the human brain is capable of comprehending it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Squatch of the day

In yesterday's post, we took a look at the latest from the world of extraterrestrial enthusiasts; today, we'll do the same for another topic we haven't visited in a while:

Bigfoot.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup, Skeptophilia has been quiet for a while on the subject of our giant hairy cousins.  Which is a shame, because cryptozoology was kind of how I got into all of this skepticism stuff.  I've had a thing for creepy cryptids since I was a kid.  All I can say is, however cheesy Finding Bigfoot is, if that show had been on when I was a teenager, I would not have missed an episode.

Of course, the same would have been true for Ghost Hunters and Scariest Places on Earth and Most Haunted and The Unexplained and probably even Destination: Truth.

Let's just say that I have learned some discernment as I have matured.

Be that as it may, we've had a busy couple of weeks in the field of Yetiology.  So let's take a look at what we've missed while we were focusing on such trivia as educational policy and the role of religion in the public sphere.

First, from British Columbia, we have a story about a hiker who took a video of an alleged Sasquatch.  The video, which is available from YouTube, I append here:

The hiker, who narrates the video, comments, "This is the middle of absolutely nowhere...  If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line?  Why would he not just go straight down?...  Good thing we brought beers.  Maybe we can lure him over here. I don't know how high we are, but we're probably close to 7,000 feet and this guy's just scampering up snow lines like it's no big deal."

He goes to significant lengths to point out that it is absolutely, totally remote, the middle of nowhere, but doesn't seem to recognize that it can't be all that remote, because after all, they're there.  And brought along beer.  I used to backcountry camp -- and I know from experience that if you are heading to a really remote place, that requires a long, arduous hike, you don't bring along unnecessary weight.  If they brought beer, then they were clearly close enough to civilization there could have been other hikers out there.

Or bears.  Or whatever.  Because the biggest problem is, this image is so tiny that there's no way to tell what it is.  It's not even a Blobsquatch.  It's a Dotsquatch.  Maybe this is the fabled wild hominid of the Northwest, but you certainly couldn't be sure from this video.


Even further out in left field is something from the Discovery channel, which has joined the History channel and Animal Planet in devoting themselves almost entirely to pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But they outdid themselves last week with a press release announcing an upcoming two-hour special about the infamous Dyatlov Pass Incident.

Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may remember that I did a post about this about two years ago, to which I direct you if you're curious about details.  But for our purposes here, it suffices to say that it centers around the mysterious deaths of nine experienced backcountry skiers in the Ural Mountains of Russia back in 1959.

It's an odd set of circumstances, and in my mind has never been adequately explained, although there are some compelling hypotheses about what may have caused their deaths.  But Discovery has added a hypothesis of their own to the list, although instead of "compelling" it is more "ridiculous:"

The Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by wild Yetis.

I'm not making this up.  Here's the relevant paragraph of the press release:

RUSSIAN YETI: THE KILLER LIVES, a 2-hour special airing Sunday, June 1 at 9 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, follows Mike [Libecki] as he traces the clues and gathers compelling evidence that suggests the students’ deaths could be the work of a creature thought only to exist in folklore.

Oh, hell, if you're going to make shit up, why not go all the way?  I think they should make a two-hour special about how the Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by the Lovecraftian Elder Gods because some Russian necromancer wannabe opened up a gateway to Yog Sothoth.  The one hiker with the major chest injuries had had his heart sucked out by a Shoggoth.

Makes about as much sense.


Speaking of "not making sense," just last week we had a new proposal out there to explain why Bigfoot photos are all blurry.  It's not because they're fakes, or vague images of something sort-of-Bigfoot-like (i.e. an example of cryptozoological pareidolia).

It's because Bigfoot himself is blurry.

You probably think I'm making this up, but over at Occult View, this has been thrown out there as a serious suggestion in a post called "Bigfoot as a Blurry Vibration That Lives in the Forest."  A short passage should suffice to give you the flavor:

These sightings are not hominids, but something all together different. These Bigfoot are vibrations that live in the forest. Call them blurry beings. 

When these blurry vibrations are spotted, we see something that really doesn’t make sense. Our brains then fill in the blanks; our minds complete the details. We see a creature that looks natural, but if we took a picture of it at the same time it would appear only as a blur or a fuzzy image. 

There really hasn’t been a clear photo of Bigfoot (that I assume wasn’t a hoax). But there have been photos of these blurs, these dark shapes. If I am correct, we’ll never get a clear picture of the semi-rural Bigfoot. Yet it might be worth studying these images of dark shapes and see if we can learn something from them. These blurry images might provide clues to the true nature of the vibrations that live in the forest.

What does it even mean to say that something is a "living vibration?"  I'm assuming that the author is using the term in the usual hand-waving way that woo-woos do -- like the mystics saying that humans are "energy field vibrations," even though I doubt they could define the words "energy" and "field" if I held them at gunpoint.  So we won't press any further with this, except to say that anyone who thinks this is a rational explanation is a little blurry around the edges himself.

To end on an entertaining note, we have another video clip, this one from a gentleman named Larry Surface, that he claims is a recording of Bigfoot vocalizations from Ohio.  Take a listen:

My favorite part of this is the way Surface tries to transliterate what they're saying into English spelling, thusly:  "Hamit mahamit whoop whoop hamit wa wa wa wahit mahamit hondabay hondabay hondabay kaoo mahamit whoh hamit fusayo oa getmuh whoop ma oh."

Okay, I know that there's a possibility (slim, in my opinion) that these are really Bigfoot sounds.  But human perception being what it is, if someone tells you what you're hearing -- subtitles it, even -- you are way more likely to hear "hondabay hondabay hondabay" than you are to hear random animal vocalizations.  Consider how the whole "backmasking" thing works -- the conspiracy guys always tell you ahead of time what message has been inserted backwards into the song or speech you're listening to.  Then, when you listen to it backwards... lo and behold... there it is.

So me, I'm not convinced.  I've heard enough bizarre vocalizations from perfectly ordinary non-cryptids -- animals like foxes and raccoons and skunks and barred owls can make some really peculiar, unearthly noises.  (So if you really want to find out what the fox says, you can listen to hundreds of examples on YouTube.  You will not, for the record, find one recording of a fox saying "gering-a-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.")

Anyway, that's the news from the cryptozoology world.  Dotsquatch, Blursquatch, Russian Skier-Killers, and the strange language of the Ohio Bigfoot.  All in all, about what we'd expect, given the level of evidence that has been heretofore amassed.  So until next time, I'll sign off with a cheerful "Hamit mahamit whoop ma oh," and I hope you feel likewise.

The enduring mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

Despite my claims of being a hard-headed rationalist, I have to admit to being fascinated by a mystery.  There is simply something intriguing about the unexplained.  While most of the sorts of stories you read in books with titles like Amazing Unexplained Mysteries of the Universe can be attributed to hoaxes, urban legends, flawed eyewitness testimony, and the like, there are a few that stand out as being thoroughly documented, researched in depth, and yet which defy conventional explanation.

One of the most curious ones is a story right out of The X Files, and one which I didn't know about until a friend sent me a link a couple of days ago.  It's called the Dyatlov Pass Incident, and occurred in February of 1959.  The mystery -- what caused the deaths of the nine backcountry skiers?

Events began in January of that year, when a group of students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Yekaterinburg decided to take a cross-country ski trip across the northern Urals.  It was led by Igor Dyatlov, and was composed of eight men and two women, who took a train to the town of Vizhai, and then went off on skis toward Mount Otorten.  One member, Yuri Yudin, became ill right at the beginning of the expedition and returned to Yekaterinburg via train, leaving the nine others to trek off into the wilderness.

All nine were experienced skiers and backcountry hikers.  All were in excellent physical condition, and had done similar treks before without incident.  By January 31 they had camped in a wooded valley, cached food and supplies, and the next morning headed up toward the pass that would one day bear the name of the leader of the ill-fated group.

On February 1, a snowstorm moved in, and the group lost their way -- instead of maintaining their heading toward Dyatlov Pass, they veered west, toward the peak of Kholat Syakhi.  At some point they realized their mistake, but instead of retracing their path, they chose to camp on the mountainside and wait out the storm.

Then... something happened, and all nine hikers died.

Igor Dyatlov had told Yuri Yudin that they should be back in Vizhai by February 12, and that he would send a message by telegraph when they got there.  When no word from the hikers was sent back to friends in Yekaterinburg by February 20, a rescue expedition was formed.  On February 26, the camp on the side of Kholat Syakhi was found, but there the mystery deepened.  The camp was uninhabited -- but the single large tent had been cut open from the inside.  Within the ruined tent were all of the hikers' supplies -- and all of their shoes.  A line of footprints led from the camp down the side of Kholat Syakhi, and all of the footprints showed that the individuals who made them were barefoot or clad in socks.  Five hundred meters from the camp the rescuers found the bodies of Yuri Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko, shoeless and clad only in their underwear.  Further along, and in similar states of undress, were the corpses of Dyatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustem Slobodin.  The remaining four members of the expedition were not found until May 4, when the thawing snow uncovered their bodies 75 meters further down the hillside.

The bodies were examined by doctors, and the first five were all found to have died of hypothermia.  Slobodin had a minor skull fracture, but not sufficient to be the cause of his death.  The four who were found on May 4, however, were a different story.  Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had major head injuries, and Ludmila Dubunina and Alexander Kolevatov had huge chest injuries, "similar to those that would result from a car crash."  However, none had external damage -- it looked more like "injuries resulting from high, crushing levels of pressure."  Dubunina's tongue was missing.  The hikers who had died from injuries rather than hypothermia showed no signs of having been killed in a fight -- the doctor who examined them, Dr. Boris Vozrozhdenny, stated under oath that the damage could not have been inflicted by a human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged."

A friend of the hikers, Yury Kuntsevich, who was at the time of the incident twelve years old, recalls that when the bodies of the hikers were brought back to Yekaterinburg, their faces looked "scorched," as if they had "deep brown tans."  Forensic radiation tests found that the hikers' clothing had high levels of radioactivity.

Now, if that wasn't weird enough, another group of hikers who was 50 kilometers to the south of Kholat Syakhi reported that on the night of February 2, they saw "orange spheres" hovering over the mountains in the direction of Dyatlov Pass.  Similar reports continued during February and March in the entire area, sightings that were corroborated by independent witnesses including meteorological services and members of the Soviet military.

The inquest into what had happened to the hikers was closed during the third week of May, because of the "absence of a guilty party."  All that could be concluded, the inquest said, was that the hikers had died because of a "compelling unknown force."  What caused their deaths remains a mystery.

There are a number of rational possibilities, of course.  The Russians were, at that time, testing missiles of various sorts, and it's possible that all of the facts of the case could be explained by a nuclear-powered missile firing gone wrong.  It is curious, however, that if this was the case, the military would have admitted to seeing the "orange spheres" sighted above Kholat Syekhi in February -- the Soviets were not exactly known for openness with regards to their military maneuvers.  It could be that the hikers stumbled upon the remains of an earlier nuclear test, and the combination of radiation poisoning and hypothermia led them to wander off unclad and shoeless -- but how, then, to explain the catastrophic compression injuries of Thibeaux-Brignolles, Dubunina, and Kolevatov?

However you look at it, the Dyatlov Pass Incident remains a perplexing and terrifying mystery.  I am still certain that there is a rational explanation for the whole thing, but even after reading a great deal about the facts of the case, I'm damned if I can see what it is.  All we know, 53 years later, is what we knew then -- that nine hikers died, under bizarre circumstances, on a snowy mountainside in the Urals, and no one knows why.