Post by brillbilly on Oct 13, 2011 1:10:26 GMT 10
The story sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie: nine young students go on a skiing holiday in Russia’s Ural Mountains but never return. Eventually, their bodies are discovered – five of them frozen to death near their tent, four more bearing mysterious injuries – a smashed head, a missing tongue – buried in the snow some distance away. All, it seems, had fled in sudden terror from their camp in the middle of the night. Casting aside skis, food and warm coats, they dashed headlong down a snowy slope toward a thick forest, where they stood no chance of surviving bitter temperatures of around –30º C (–22º F). At the time, seemingly baffled investigators offered the non-explanation that the group had died as a result of “a compelling unknown force” – and then simply closed the case and filed it as ‘Top Secret’.
After half a century, the mystery remains. What was the nature of the deadly “unknown force”? Were the Soviet authorities hiding something? And, if so, exactly what were they were attempting to cover up? In the intervening years, a number of solutions have been put forward, involving everything from hostile tribes and abominable snowmen to aliens and secret military technology.
“If I had a chance to ask God just one question, it would be: ‘What really happened to my friends that night?’” says Yury Yudin, the 10th member of the fateful expedition and its only survivor. Yudin had become ill and turned back a few days into the trip. The fate of his friends remains a painful mystery – one which he has attempted to investigate himself.
;)The case was reopened in 1990 with some suprizing results.
THE FILES
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the case files were declassified and re-opened. What they contained only served to make the events of February 1959 still more mysterious.
Medical tests had shown very high levels of radiation on the bodies and clothes of four of the skiers, as if they had been handling radioactive materials or had been in a radioactive area. The original chief investigator, Lev Ivanov, described how he took a Geiger counter with him to the campsite on the mountain slope; as he approached, the device started to click rapidly and loudly.
Ivanov also revealed that he had been ordered by senior regional officials to close the case and classify the findings as secret. The authorities had been worried by reports from many eyewitnesses, including the weather service and the military, that “bright flying spheres” had been spotted in the area in February and March 1959, with a notable concentration of accounts dating from 17 February. “I suspected at the time and am almost sure now that these bright flying spheres had a direct connection to the group’s death,” Ivanov told Leninsky Put, a small Kazakh newspaper.
The files contained testimony from another group of adventurers, geography students, who had been camping about 50km (30 miles) south of the skiers on the same night. The leader of the group said they had seen strange orange spheres, or “balls of fire”, floating in the night sky in the direction of Kholat-Syakhl on the night the students died. Another wrote that they saw “a shining circular body fly over the village from the south-west to the north-east. The shining disc was practically the size of a full moon, a blue-white light surrounded by a blue halo. The halo brightly flashed like the flashes of distant lightning. When the body disappeared behind the horizon, the sky lit up in that place for a few more minutes.”
Ivanov speculated that one of the skiers might have left the tent during the night, seen a sphere and woken up the others with his cries, urging them to run downhill toward the forest. Then, the sphere might have exploded as they ran, killing the four who had serious injuries and cracking Slobodin’s skull.
“I can’t say what those balls were – some kind of arms or aliens or something else – but I am certain that they are directly connected to the deaths of those lads.
full story here; www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1562/the_dyatlov_pass_incident.html
great case