Cell phones, GPS and black boxes have prevented modern-day travel disasters from being full-fledged unsolved mysteries—the kind that actually make you lose sleep the night before a trip. But sometimes fate opts to swallow its victims into a black hole of nothingness, leaving only a trail of scant clues and an open door for intricate theories about what might’ve happened. (Not to, ya know, scare you or anything.) We all know about the Bermuda Triangle and the Titanic, but history has provided us an ample crop of lower-profile legends that still warrant the same shock and wonder. And often there’s enough of a trail left over that curious readers can visit the sites in question and investigate the mystery for themselves. From ghost ships to UFOs and disappearing aircraft, gather around the light of the Where I’ve Been campfire and let us spin you a tale. But proceed with caution.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
In 1959, a group of nine young, experienced Russian skiers, led by Igor Dyatlov, were to set up a camp in the Ural Mountains with the goal of reaching the most difficult mountain, Otorten. Due to worsening weather and snowstorms, they had to deviate from their plans and set up camp on another slope. When weeks passed and their safety telegraph was never sent, their families demanded a search. Authorities descended upon the mountains and finally discovered their abandoned campsite—and what was found horrified and astounded the search team.
The skiers’ tent now covered in snow, had been torn open from the inside. Left behind in the tent were the skiers’ boots and shoes, and authorities followed the skiers’ bare footprints to find two of them dead under a tree, both dressed in their underwear, and then three more skiers’ bodies in between the tree and the encampment, including Dyatlov’s (pictured left). One man had a minor fracture in his skull, but it appeared all were attempting to return to camp and had died from hypothermia. Despite some odd clues, authorities suspected no foul play—hat is, until they found the four other bodies two months later.
Three of these bodies had fatal injuries; one had major skull damage, while two had sustained serious chest fractures—ll of the injuries given with the brute force “of a car crash.” One woman was missing her tongue. However, there were no signs of struggle and no other footprints, and the injuries were too forceful to be inflicted by other humans. Additionally, the bodies were found with significant levels of radiation, and some had an unnaturally orange skin color and abnormally gray hairs. Some were wearing patches of clothing from their fellow skiers, suggesting they were taken from the corpses of the already-dead, but every skier was certainly under-dressed enough to suggest they had left in haste in the middle of the night. Investigators, baffled by the circumstances, concluded that the skiers had been killed by an “unknown compelling force.” However, government authorities demanded that the investigation be halted and all documents become sealed as top-secret, including this nugget, which became public years later: fifty kilometers south of the incident, around the same time of the tragedy, another group of independent hikers had reported seeing strange orange spheres in the sky.
The cloud of fear surrounding the Cold War era spawned lots of sci-fi alarmism and UFO sightings, but the Dyatlov Pass Incident—its area now named for the ski group’s leader—was troubling enough to deserve such panic. While more documents have been released since the event, the mystery behind the incident was never solved.
