The enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser

On the 26th of May, 1828, a strange teenage boy showed up on the streets of Nuremberg, Germany.  He was dirty and wore tattered clothing, and appeared terrified, refusing to speak to anyone when approached.  After a time he was coaxed into revealing that he carried a letter addressed to a Captain von Wessenig of the Fourth Squadron of the Sixth Bavarian Cavalry.

The heading of the letter read:

Von der Bäierischen Gränz
daß Orte ist unbenant
1828

[From the Bavarian border
The place is unnamed
1828]

The letter, which was unsigned, said that the boy was named Kaspar Hauser, and had been given to the letter's author as an infant on 7 October 1812.  It went on to state that Kaspar was born on 30 April 1812, and that Kaspar's father was a member of the Sixth Cavalry, but had died, so the anonymous author of the letter said he had instructed the boy in reading, writing, and the Christian religion, but had "never allowed him to take a step outside the house."  Now -- for no apparent reason -- Kaspar had been set free.

"Either make him a cavalryman, as his father was," the letter read, "or else hang him."

At first, all Kaspar would say was "I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was" and "Horse, horse!"  Pressure to say more, or to give an account of himself, resulted in tears.  After several months of being shuttled from one place to another -- including a stint locked up in Luginsland Tower in Nuremberg Castle for being a vagabond -- he went to live with Friedrich Daumer, a schoolteacher, who helped him to learn to speak.  At this point, a strange story emerged.

Kaspar told Daumer he'd spent his entire life in solitary confinement in a tiny darkened cell, two meters by one meter, and one-and-a-half meters tall.  All he had was a straw mattress to sleep on and a couple of toys including a dog carved out of wood.  His food and water were provided by a man who wore a mask, never revealing his face.  Sometimes the water tasted bitter; afterward he slept soundly -- and woke up to find the straw had been changed, and his hair and nails trimmed.

This, of course, initiated a firestorm of inquiry into who could have imprisoned a child in this fashion, but none of the leads turned up anything solid.  Kaspar himself couldn't give directions for retracing his steps back to where he'd lived.  Once every avenue had been investigated, the authorities more or less gave up, and the controversy seemed to settle down.

Then, on 17 October 1829, Kaspar was attacked by a man who uttered the words, "You will have to die before you leave Nuremberg," and gashed him on the forehead with a knife.  The man's voice, he said, was identical to that of his former captor.  Oddly, though, the blood trail led first to Kaspar's bedroom -- then, instead of toward the quarters where Daumer slept, it led downstairs and through a trap door into the cellar.

When asked why he'd done that, Kaspar said he didn't know.

Concerns for his safety after the incident led the police to transfer him to the home of Johann Biberbach, a municipal authority.  But that didn't last long; on 3 April 1830, there was a gunshot in Kaspar's bedroom, and Biberbach rushed in to find him bleeding from a superficial head wound.  Kaspar explained that he'd been standing on a chair to reach for some books, lost his balance, and struck a pistol that was mounted to the wall, causing it to go off.

A painting of Kaspar Hauser by Carl Kreul, from late 1830.  Note the scar on his forehead from the knife wound the previous year.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

This far-fetched story got him transferred first to the house of a Baron von Tucher, then to another schoolteacher named Johann Georg Meyer, and finally to a printmaker named Anselm von Feuerbach.  All three men quickly found Kaspar to be a sneaky, unreliable habitual liar.  Von Feuerbach was especially blunt, writing in a letter, "Caspar [sic] Hauser is a smart scheming codger, a rogue, a good-for-nothing that ought to be killed."

It seems like someone agreed with that assessment.  On 14 December 1833, Kaspar came home after a walk with a deep stab wound in the left side of his chest.  He'd been lured to the Ansbach Court Garden, he said, and then assaulted by a man with a knife who had handed him a small cloth bag and then stabbed him.  Kaspar said he'd dropped the bag, but a policeman searching the garden the following day found it.  It contained the following note: "Hauser will be able to tell you quite precisely how I look and from where I am. To save Hauser the effort, I want to tell you myself from where I come [unreadable].  I come from from [unreadable] the Bavarian border [unreadable].  On the river [unreadable].  I will even tell you the name: M. L. Ö."

Kaspar Hauser died three days later without ever explaining further.

So we're left with a perplexing question: who was Kaspar Hauser?

Explanations, as you might imagine, are kind of all over the map.  The first, and simplest, is that he was lying about his entire backstory.  It's possible he'd been raised in an abusive family and had run away, but the story of solitary confinement by a masked man wasn't true.  The letters were written by Kaspar himself and the wounds, including the one that ultimately killed him, were self-inflicted.  In this case, Kaspar Hauser suffered from Munchausen syndrome -- a psychological condition in which an individual claims illness or injury, sometimes even injuring him/herself deliberately, in order to garner attention and sympathy.  This is certainly consistent with the opinion of people who knew him personally, such as von Feuerbach.

Another possibility is that the confinement story was substantially true, and he was driven mad by the neglect and abuse he'd suffered.  Proponents of this explanation differ as to how much of his later story was true.  Some believe the wounds were self-inflicted; others that his captor feared being caught, and so hunted Kaspar down and killed him.  "M. L. Ö," as you might guess, has never been identified.

The last, and wildest, possibility is that Kaspar Hauser had been hidden away because he was the hereditary prince of Baden.  His parents, Charles, Grand Duke of Baden and Stéphanie de Beauharnais, had feared for the boy's life -- the birth of a male heir would have bumped Charles's successor, his uncle Louis -- so they switched him with the dying infant of a servant, claiming their own baby had died, then spirited the boy away to be raised in safety.

Mitochondrial DNA samples from Kaspar Hauser's hair and clothing were compared to that of a female-line descendant of Stéphanie de Beauharnais, and they weren't identical -- but were close enough that the theory "could not be ruled out."

It's profoundly frustrating, but the fact is we'll probably never know the truth.  This is summed up by the inscription on his tombstone, in the city of Ansbach: "Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time.  His birth was unknown, his death mysterious."

It's an evocative story, though, and has made its way into many works of fiction (in fact, the tale of Kaspar Hauser inspired my novella Adam's Fall, which also starts out with someone finding a strange, mute, ragged teenage boy -- but the two stories diverge completely thereafter).  

But as far as the mysterious German boy goes, as good skeptics we have to leave it there.  It's unlikely that any other evidence will surface -- so we have to be content to let the enduring mystery of Kaspar Hauser remain that way, probably forever.

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The Flannan Isles mystery

In the classic Doctor Who episode "The Horror of Fang Rock," the Fourth Doctor and his companion Leela investigate a malfunctioning lighthouse off the coast of England -- and find that it's under siege, and its unfortunate crew are being killed one at a time by something that appears to be able to shapeshift.

The culprit turns out to be a Rutan, an alien that (in its original form) looks a little like a cross between a giant jellyfish and a moldy lime.

The Rutans were attempting to wipe out humanity so they could use the Earth as their new home base, something that (if you believe classic Who) was the aim of every intelligent alien species in the galaxy and happened on a weekly basis, but for some reason this bunch of aliens decided the best place to launch their attack was a lighthouse out in the middle of nowhere.  Be that as it may, by the time the Doctor and Leela foiled the Rutans' evil plot, all the people in the lighthouse were dead and/or vanished, so this definitely stands out as one of the Doctor's less successful ventures (although he did save the Earth, so there's that).

There are two curious things about this episode that are why it comes up today.

The first is that during its premier broadcast, on November 22, 1987, transmission was suddenly interrupted and replaced by a signal showing a guy wearing a Max Headroom mask babbling about random stuff (including his opinion of "New Coke" and the television series Clutch Cargo) and finally ending with him getting spanked on the bare ass with a flyswatter while a female voice shouted, "Bend over, bitch!"

The source of this transmission -- which I swear I am not making up -- was never identified.

The other strange thing about the episode is that it's based on a true story.

Well, not the green jellyfish alien part, but the mysterious deaths/disappearances from a lighthouse part.  On December 15, 1900, the steamship Archtor was near the Flannan Isles in the seas off the Outer Hebrides and noticed that the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, the largest island in the chain, was not working.  They reported this to the authorities, but bad weather kept anyone from investigating until eleven days later.

When they got there, the lighthouse was abandoned, and the three crew -- James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur -- were all missing.

There were plenty of signs of recent habitation -- unmade beds, lamps cleaned and refilled, and so on -- but no indication of what might have happened to the crew.  The lighthouse logs indicated nothing amiss other than some inclement weather, which is hardly unusual off the coast of Scotland in winter.  It must be mentioned that there had been extensive storm damage downslope from the lighthouse; a metal storage box thirty meters above sea level had been broken open, presumably by the surf, its contents strewn, and an iron railing set in rock was bent nearly flat.  Robert Muirhead, superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, said some of the damage was "difficult to believe unless actually seen."

Still, it's presumed that the three missing men -- all highly experienced lighthouse operators, who had been on the job for years -- would have known better than to go out and walk the beach in the middle of a December storm.  The lighthouse itself was undamaged, so whatever killed its keepers seems to have taken place outside the building.  Muirhead's conclusion was that they'd gone out to try to secure the metal storage box that was later found damaged, and a rogue wave had swept them away.

There are two problems with this explanation.  The first is that there was only one missing set of oilskins, implying that two of the men went out into a raging winter storm in their shirtsleeves.  The second is that the worst of the damage seems to have happened after the lighthouse was abandoned; it was already not operating on the 15th, and the serious storms (the ones that prevented anyone from investigating for a week and a half) didn't start till the 16th.  It's possible they were killed by rogue surf and/or bad weather, but this doesn't really answer all the questions.

So of course, this didn't satisfy most people, and that's when the wild speculation started.  Sea serpents, an attack by the malevolent spirits of drowned sailors, abduction by foreign agents, and even that the three men had absconded so they could take up new lives elsewhere.  A logbook surfaced claiming that there had been a devastating storm lasting four days -- from December 11 to December 14 -- bad enough that all three men had "spent hours praying" and Donald McArthur, an experienced lighthouse keeper, had "been reduced to helpless crying."  The weirdest part about this bit is that contemporary weather records show no indications of an intense storm during that time -- as I mentioned, the seriously bad weather didn't really start until the 16th -- and certainly if there'd been a gale bad enough to trigger fits of weeping in a veteran seaman who was safely inside an extremely sturdy building on dry land at the time, someone on one of the nearby islands would have mentioned it.

However, the veracity of the entries has been called into question, and some investigators think the entire thing is a fake.

Then there's the fact that McArthur himself was said to be "volatile" and to have a bad temper, so another possibility is that there'd been a fight -- or perhaps a murder -- and after dumping the bodies into the ocean, the guilty party had thrown had thrown himself in as well out of remorse and guilt.  However, there was no sign of any kind of altercation inside the lighthouse, and no notation in the (real) records left by the keepers that anyone had been acting out of the ordinary.

So we're left with a mystery.  Three men in a remote lighthouse off the coast of Scotland vanished, and despite a thorough investigation at the time and a lot of speculation since then, no one has been able to figure out why.

Me, I'm voting for the Rutans.

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A modern Mary Celeste

There's something compelling about a story with no definitive answers.  It's no wonder a lot of our favorite works of fiction have an element of mystery, and in some of them, the loose ends are never completely tied up.  Think of how many of our spooky Tales Around A Campfire end with a line like, "... and no one ever found out what happened to the missing teenagers."

In real life, though, unsolved mysteries have a way of inviting wild speculation, usually based on evidence for which even the word "slim" is an overstatement.  Consider, for example, the off-the-rails "explanations" people came up with to account for the fact that even powerful telescopes couldn't see any surface detail on the planet Venus.  Here's how Carl Sagan described one of these lines of thought, in the episode "Heaven and Hell" of his wonderful series Cosmos:

I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus.  Why not?  Because it’s covered with a dense layer of clouds.  Well, what are clouds made of?  Water, of course.  Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.  Therefore, the surface must be wet.  Well, if the surface is wet, it’s probably a swamp.  If there’s a swamp, there’s ferns.  If there’s ferns, maybe there’s even dinosaurs.

Observation: I can't see a thing.  Conclusion: dinosaurs.

What got me thinking about this tendency is a curious story out of Cambodia that hit the news earlier this week.  On Koh Tang Island, in Preah Sihanouk Province, on July 12, a "ghost ship" ran aground -- no sign of the captain and crew, no markings indicating where the ship had originated.  Three lifejackets were found washed up on a nearby beach, but there are no bodies, nothing to indicate what happened to the ship and its passengers.  Stormy conditions have made further investigations impossible for the time being.

Immediate comparisons were made to the most famous of all "ghost ships," the Mary Celeste.  The Mary Celeste set sail from New York City on November 7, 1872, headed for Genoa, Italy.  Being in the days before shipboard radio, nothing more was heard from it until it was found drifting in the Azores a month later.  It was completely deserted.  The last entry in the ship's log was ten days earlier, and indicated nothing amiss.  It was amply provisioned with food, and none of the crew members' belongings were disturbed, as you'd expect if it had been captured and boarded by pirates.  There was no damage to the ship itself; it looked as if somehow, the captain and crew had simply... evaporated.

And to end the tale in appropriate campfire story fashion: no one ever found out what happened to the crew, and none of them was ever seen again.

The story of the Mary Celeste is certainly puzzling and creepy, but most rationalists still think there's a logical (and natural) explanation for what happened to it.  The same is true in the case of the Cambodian ghost ship.  Here, the most plausible answer is probably either that it was a ship that had been put out of service (the lack of markings and identifications suggests that the "service" might have been hauling illicit cargo, possibly drugs), and either had accidentally slipped its moorings and drifted off, or had been scuttled deliberately.

But just as with Carl Sagan's "I can't see anything = dinosaurs" example, the lack of anything definitive has touched off a lot of wild speculation about what happened to the ship.  Amongst the "explanations" I've seen:

• the Bermuda Triangle has opened a branch office in the Indian Ocean, and the crew went through a portal to parts unknown
• the crew were abducted by aliens
• the ship got too close to an island run by the Illuminati, so the crew had to be eliminated
• the ship was attacked, and the crew eaten, by (choose one): a giant squid, a marine version of the Loch Ness Monster, beings from Atlantis, Cthulhu

Okay, just hang on a moment, here.

Let's stop and consider another quote, this one from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Remember what the 'U' in 'UFO' stands for...  If something is 'unidentified,' then that's where the conversation should stop.  You don't go on and say 'so it must be' anything."  There's (at present) no real evidence for what happened to the ghost ship, so we should put any further speculation on hold for as long as need be.

And keep in mind that here, it's not even like most UFO sightings, which are one-offs that leave behind no traces and no chance of a repeat performance; the Cambodian authorities have the actual ship, meaning at some point when the conditions improve they'll be investigating further.  All we have to do is wait a while and see what they discover.  Chances are they'll find evidence that it's an illicit/unregistered cargo ship that was used in drug-running.  Which will send the aficionados of the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, and Cthulhu sulking off to their rooms...

... until the next mystery, at which point they'll all come roaring back.  Like they have every other time something odd happens.

It'd be nice if sometimes we could just let mysteries be mysteries.  Saying "we don't know, and might not ever know" isn't satisfying, but as good skeptics we have to be willing to say it when it's warranted.  I won't say that I'm not fascinated by cases like the Mary Celeste, where there really seems to be no plausible explanation, but intellectual honesty forces us to put aside our wild imaginings and accept that sometimes, there may never be a definitive answer.

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Vanished into the triangle

My thought process is like a giant game of free association at the best of times, and there have been occasions when I've tried to figure out how I got (for example) from thinking about a news story from Istanbul, Turkey to pondering nettle plants' dependency on phosphorus in the soil, and reconstructing the chain by which I got from one to the other has proven impossible.

But even considering the labyrinthine recesses of my brain, I think I'm to be excused if a link sent to me by a friend immediately reminded me of a short story by H. P. Lovecraft.  My dear friend, the brilliant author K. D. McCrite, messaged me saying "this immediately made me think of you," along with a link to a YouTube video called "Five Strange Disappearances in Vermont's Bennington Triangle."  The video, which is well-researched and pretty damn creepy, is about five unsolved disappearances in rural southwestern Vermont between 1945 and 1950, and despite my decades of interest in the paranormal, of which I had never heard.  The victims all were seen by multiple witnesses shortly before they vanished, and in fact one of them reputedly evaporated while on a public bus -- at stop A, he was there in his seat, and by stop B he was gone, despite the bus being in continuous motion the entire time and no one noticing his moving, much less leaping out of an open window or something.

The five -- Middle Rivers, Paula Welden, James Tedford, Paul Jephson, and Frieda Langer -- varied in age from eight to seventy-four, and their personal lives had nothing particular in common.  They all disappeared in the late fall or early winter in the region of Glastenbury [sic] Mountain, and with the exception of Langer, no trace of them was ever found despite extensive searching.  Langer's badly-decomposed body was found seven months later, but there was no apparent cause of death.  (The strangest part is that Langer's body was found very close to the last reported sighting of Paula Weldon.)

One of the last known photographs of Paula Welden

Interestingly, even though these five are considered the canonical Bennington Triangle cases, there are at least four other unexplained disappearances in the area -- one in 1942 and three in 1949 -- that some people think are related.  Additionally, the Bennington Banner did a piece on the topic back in 2008, starting with the much more recent account of a local man, an experienced hiker, who got lost for almost a day on a straightforward three-mile hike in the area, and upon finding his way back, reported that he had become disoriented and dizzy.  He ended up stopping for the night, and when the morning came he was six miles away from where he thought he was -- and on the walk back passed landmarks that included "stuff that [he didn't recognize, but] couldn't have missed."

Immediately I was reminded of Lovecraft's wildly terrifying short story "The Whisperer in Darkness," not only because it's about strange disappearances, but because it is set in the same part of Vermont.  The main character, Henry Akeley, writes a panicked letter to a friend that he's been hearing "voices in the air," and has become convinced that there are invisible creatures in the woods stalking and abducting the unwary, and that he's doomed for sure but wanted to let someone know what had happened to him because he's going to go missing very soon, and that the friend should under no circumstances interfere or attempt to help him.  Of course, being that this is a Lovecraft story, the friend says, basically, "Okay, be right over, bro," and it doesn't end well for either of them.

The disappearances -- the real ones, not the ones in Lovecraft -- are well enough documented that they merit a Wikipedia page, and more details (although less in the way of rigor) can be found on a page over at All That's Interesting.  Apparently the area has a bad reputation, at least amongst aficionados of the paranormal; it's supposedly a hotspot for Bigfoot and UFO sightings, and was feared and avoided by the local Native Americans (that bit seems to be an almost compulsory filigree to these kinds of stories).   I also saw more than one reference to alleged cases of "voices being heard on dead-air radio," but I wasn't able to find any independent corroboration of the claim.

But "voices in the air," amirite?  I think I'm to be excused for thinking of Lovecraft's dark tale.

The more pragmatic people approaching this story -- I'm one, which is probably unsurprising -- suspect that if the five canonical cases weren't the work of a serial killer, then it's simply a case of people going off into wilderness and doing something stupid that kills them.  The southern part of Vermont is largely trackless forest, and even though I'm an experienced back-country hiker and camper, I would make plenty sure to have survival gear, water, and food if I went off by myself into those mountains.  I know first-hand how big the wilderness is and how easy it is to get lost or have a mishap.  (Didn't stop me from solo camping in the Cascades and Olympics when I was young and reckless; that I survived unscathed is more a testimony to my luck than my brains.)

Still, there's something about both of those explanations that is unsatisfying, largely because of the completely different circumstances of each disappearance.  Tedford, as I mentioned, vanished from a public bus.  Eight-year-old Paul Jephson was accompanying his mother in a pickup truck as she drove around her family's acreage -- she stopped to do some chores, was gone a short time, and when she came back, the little boy was nowhere to be found.  Langer disappeared while hiking with a friend -- she'd gotten wet and decided to make the quick half-mile return to camp to change her clothes, but never got there.  Her body was found near a reservoir several miles away the following year -- in an area that had been searched extensively after her disappearance.

So all in all: pretty freakin' creepy.  Thanks to K. D. for cluing me in to a story that, all paranormal trappings aside, you have to admit is a curious one, and which admits of no obvious explanation.

Oh, and if you're wondering: Istanbul > Byzantine Empire > the Plague of Justinian (mid-sixth century) > the problems with burial of disease victims during an epidemic > bones enrich soil phosphorus > a proposal to use distribution of nettle plants in England to identify mass burial sites of people who died during the Black Death.  See?  Makes perfect sense.

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Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds go to support Skeptophilia!]

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.

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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.

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