© Ekaterina Vlasenko/Sputnik
A body has been discovered by tourists at the infamous Dyatlov Pass in Russia's Ural Mountains where nine hikers mysteriously died in 1959. Emergency services have reportedly momentarily lost contact with the group.
An unidentified body has been discovered by tourist-hikers at the infamous Dyatlov pass in Sverdlovskaya region, according to local security officials. A group of nine tourists reportedly from Perm contacted emergency services overnight on Friday.
Following a message from the group via satellite phone officials lost contact with the hikers, reported V-kurse.ru. Due to bad weather conditions emergency groups are unable to reach the barely-accessible site where the body was found. Some reports suggest that it is a male of about 50 years old.
The travelers began their journey on January 1 trekking along one of the most difficult paths starting from North Ural to the town of Ivdel, according to the emergency services.
The site where body was reportedly located is infamous for the tragic and mysterious deaths of nine hikers in 1959. The causes of their deaths are still unknown while the case is surrounded with controversy.
© Google Maps
The Dyatlov pass was named after the leader of the hiking group that went missing, Igor Dyatlov. The group consisted of graduate students from of the Ural Polytechnic Institute. Their plan was to trek 350 kilometers on skis through the forests and Northern Urals to Mount Otorten (which is translated from the local Mansi language as 'Don't go There'). Initially there were 10 people in the group, but one of the hikers fell ill and was forced to abandon the venture.
On February 12, 1959 the nine failed to report to the scheduled end-point at a village called Vizhay. As a result of rescue efforts, the group's tent was found on the slope of the Mount Kholat Syakhl ("Mountain of the Dead" in Mansi) on February 26. Investigators later determined that tent had been was cut with a sharp object from the inside.
The skiers also left all their belongings in the tent while apparently trying to urgently flee the campsite. After following footprints down the hill for about 1.5 km -
some of those fleeing were wearing only socks, some were even barefoot - the search party found five bodies.
Some of the hikers were wearing only underwear and their bodies showed signs of struggle such as fractured skulls and broken ribs. One of the women had her tongue missing. The search for the remaining four travelers who were located further into the woods took more than two months.
© Wikipedia A view of the tent as the rescuers found it on February 26, 1959.
The Soviet criminal investigation in 1959 failed to establish the causes of the incident. The final report said that an "
unknown compelling force" killed the people.
The incident which remains one of the most chilling unsolved mysteries of the 20th century sparked many theories in which investigators attempted to rebuild the chronology of events.
The numerous explanations put forward included an avalanche, military tests seen by the hikers that the government was trying to hide, a hostile encounter with an unknown creature, or paranormal activity.The mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident has inspired filmmakers to make a science fiction horror movie entitled
Devil's Pass where five students investigate the incident.
This tragedy was absolutely heart-breaking, but once you put the pieces together, there is no more mystery and only cruel fate.
The nine Russian hikers, alone on an intensely freezing night in a tent on a remote snowy mountainside in the Urals of Russia. Some were tucked into their warm bags, underwear-clad and nearly asleep, while a few others were still partially dressed, just about to join their dozing colleagues. Suddenly, all were confronted with a very strong low frequency energy that shook them and everything in their tent. To ANY experienced snow camper or skier on a mountainside, that means one thing:
AVALANCHE!!
What do you do in an avalanche? In the freezing black night?
You RUN LIKE HELL! That's what you do.
No time for putting on clothes or boots. No time to deal with the fasteners on your tent. No, you grab a knife and slice a quick exit hole, while snatching that lantern to see in the snowy darkness. But you're panicking, so you handle the lantern roughly and the lantern's thorium mantle shatters into millions of particles of radioactive dust that gets in the tent and on your clothes and everything else in the vicinity, making it all 'radioactive'.
Now without light or any time to put on clothes or boots, you leave with what you have on, because if you stay, you die, period. Avalanches show no mercy or remorse. And you then run like hell, blindly yelling to each other in the freezing dark the age old, "Run for your lives". Into the night. In a sub-zero snow storm. Blind. And scared shitless.
You run down hill like a madman or woman. You run as long as you hear that low frequency rumbling, and you keep running, downhill, in the dark. And the noise continues; the slow, relentless, invisible avalanche is still bearing down, getting louder. And you keep running, because the noise is still coming. Until you reach that timberline, and then you frantically try to climb a tree, breaking branches as you scramble up to get to high ground, anything to get above the coming onslaught of droning, churning white death.
And then they appear, over the horizon: low flying military aircraft on manuevers, slowly hovering and shaking the ground and the air and your guts with their incredible energy, shaking you back to the reality that there is NO avalanche, and never was. And now you realize the horrible truth: you're dead. It's pitch black. It's snowing in sub-zero weather. You're semi-naked. It's over.
Those who had some clothes on when everyone abandoned the tent will last a little longer, maybe. But it's over.
NO! Hope springs eternal and some try to make it back, back to a shredded tent with their gear. If they can only make it back. But those three cannot, and succumb in the storm, settling into snowy graves. Those who haven't died from exposure already will, in the darkness, strip away the clothes from their fallen comrades and try to build a fire, but it's no use. The fire is made of wet wood, and finally dies out, so the last remaining members, armed with some clothing and little else, strike out in one last effort to LIVE!
But the Gods have other plans, and all four of them tumble into a ravine, suffering fractured skulls and broken ribs and unspeakable miseries until the mercy of death is extended via the cold hand of unrelenting fate.
A wandering animal makes a meal of one of the corpse's tongues. And the bodies of these poor hapless souls silently wait for their discovery, so that they may find peace in a burial where loved ones can weep and mourn and bring closure to this terrible tragedy that claimed the lives on nine young Russians.
No UFOs. No avalanche. No nuclear beam weapons. No aliens. Just fate.
How truly tragic. May they all rest in peace.