Hi, I’m Head Coach Pete Carroll of the Seattle Seahawks! There’s no question that football is the most important part of my life, but ever since 9/11, many of you know I’ve become very political, in the quest to uncover the truth about what really happened that day. While I’m of course disappointed to be finishing out of the playoff picture this season, this longer off-season gives me more time to explore my other passion: travelling the globe and researching about the weirdest mysteries out there. Since 9/11, I’ve become aware of so many secrets that have been hidden away from the world thanks to the shadowy globalist cabal… and now, thanks to the power of the internet, I can finally share them with you!

Wait… CenturyLink is telling me I need to upgrade to their premium server speed in order to write further. Hang on a moment…

There we go. Anyways, check in on Thursday morning each week until the end of May – I’ll be busy with OTAs after that, but until then… sit back and look into the shadows. Our first mystery takes us back to the Soviet Union in the Krushchev era.

THE DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT

Location: Kholat Syakhl, northern Ural Mountains, USSR

Date: February 1-2, 1959

The Story: In the winter of 1959, nine students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, all of whom were experienced outdoor adventurers, embarked on a ski trek through through the northern Ural Mountains. While making camp one night on a mountain known in English as “The Mountain of the Dead”, disaster struck the team; all nine of them perished, due in part to some extremely unusual circumstances; the area the group was skiing in was closed to hikers for three years after the incident, with no explanation as to why.

What’s Weird: In the report released by Soviet investigators, six members of the party died from hypothermia, while the others showed signs of brutal physical trauma. This is where things get very curious. Among the many curiosities of this mystery:

• • The adventurers all shared one very large tent; investigators at the site found it had been cut from the inside – the occupants of the tent needed to abandon their shelter in a hurry.

• • The skiers left behind almost everything, including jackets, pants, hats, gloves, and boots, despite the freezing temperatures outside.
  • Tracks from the damaged tent led almost a mile away to a cedar tree, where five of the bodies were found. These tracks were made by people who were likely wearing just socks, as they lacked the prints of boots. The branches of the tree were broken about 5 metres up, and remnants of a fire were found.

• • The official inquest stated that six of the travellers died of exposure, while three others died of physical trauma.
  • While there was an initial hypothesis that the party could have been attacked by indigenous Mansi hunters of the region, this was ultimately disproved due to the fact that A) the mountain is not solely controlled by Mansi peoples on a historical basis, and B) the wounds found on the bodies who suffered trauma were much too strong to have been caused by human assault.
  • Despite the bodies showing evidence of physical trauma, there were no outward signs of an external force upon the adventurers – no additional footprints were found, nor evidence of animals attacking humans.
  • The first five bodies were barely dressed – they were found mostly in their underwear and without boots on either, Two months later, search & rescue teams found the other four bodies further from the tree; they were better dressed than the first five, and it appeared as though they had taken some clothing off of the bodies in an attempt to keep warm. However, they all showed signs of extreme physical trauma that the others did not – one man had a fractured skull, another with broken ribs, while a woman was found also with crushed ribs, and was missing her eyes, part of her facial tissue, and her tongue – and it appeared to investigators as though her tongue had been removed when she was still alive. Oddly enough, there were no signs of scratches, cuts, or bruises – thus indicating that most of the wounds appear self-inflicted, somehow.
  • The clothing found on the bodies recovered two months after the initial search area showed strongs signs of radioactivity – an extremely odd circumstance, considering the group was in the middle of the woods, well isolated away from the rest of human civilization.
  • A young boy who attended the funerals of the adventurers noted that the bodies had “deeply tanned skin”, as though they had been exposed to a strong source of light.
  • Another group hikers about 30 miles away from the Dyatlov expedition noted the presence of “giant discs of light” in the sky, which would have also been viewable from Kholat Syakhl; apparently the light tracked across the sky for an extended period of time.
  • Despite leaving most of their belongings behind, a number of cameras were found with the bodies; one of them had a cocked shutter, indicating that it was ready to take a picture at the time when it was dropped; one of the cameras that another traveller had was also missing outright.

• Soviet investigators rushed to close the official report, declaring the hikers’ deaths by hypothermia and physical trauma; they didn’t keep it open for a particularly long period of time.

What might have happened?

A number of theories abound about the Dyatlov Pass Incident, but these are a number of hypotheses proposed by professionals and amateurs alike:

• The group was caught in an avalanche; because of the rush of snow and the force of the impact, they likely would have suffered some brain trauma and thus may not have had their usual mental faculties about themselves. This is questionable, though, because the site they were camping was not on a particularly steep incline, and thus it would have been quite difficult for the snowpack to become unstable. Also further throwing this theory into doubt is the remnants of a fire found by the cedar tree away from the main camp; this suggests that the adventurers had enough sense about them to try and keep warm – even in their final moments.
• The group might have been mistaken for escaped political prisoners, and killed; there were concentration camps dotting the rural areas of the Soviet Union in the decades after World War II concluded. They might have been witness to some event as well, and thus killed for it. One of the women was found with a piece of clothing that didn’t match anything that they had taken with them on their trek, and it is also almost identical to something that would have been found in the gulags of the era – hence the confusion.
• There were suspicions that the group was killed by the KGB, for various reasons; there was a potential that they believed somebody might have been a double-agent, or working for the United States outright; as intelligent, educated young people, they would have been ideal targets to conduct spy work.
• Mansi and Khanty hunters were both suspected of having killed the group, though the fact that the tent and expensive belongings such as the camp stove, cameras, food, and money seems to disprove this as well.
• The presence of radioactivity on some of the clothing could have indicated a number of things; they perhaps might have stumbled nearby to a controlled access zone where the Russian military was conducting nuclear testing or rocket testing, as this was the height of the Cold War; the presence of burn marks on some of the trees, which also had absolutely no order or pattern whatsoever, also indicated an alternative energy source. A few investigators, some of whom were UFO enthusiasts, seemed to believe this theory, and the presence of the strange lights in the sky might also lend credence to this, however odd it may seem.
• The group may have been caught in an infrasound event; in the correct weather conditions, winds can cause tornadoes to form – while the high winds and tornadoes are of course dangerous on their own, these particular ones can also cause vibrations that cannot be picked up by the human ear, but can still cause damage and discomfort to humans and their surroundings. The group may have been confused by what they were experiencing and have been trying to promptly escape it.

Coach Carroll’s Hypothesis:

It was clearly an inside job. I bet Igor Dyatlov himself did it. He probably just got hungry. It’s good to be hungry! You want to win out there, you need to be hungry and go after what you want – even if it wasn’t him, I bet those aliens that got ’em sure were hungry.

Information on this incident taken from here, here, here, and here. 

Banner image courtesy of Low Commander of the Super Soldiers.