The death of the Dyatlov group is one of the most interesting mysteries of the 20th century. It would not be an exaggeration to think that studying and investigating the circumstances of this tragedy has become a kind of hobby, an intellectual sport for many people.
The story of Igor Dyatlov's last hike
In January 1959, a group of Soviet students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute gathered on a hiking trip to Mount Otorten in the Sverdlovsk region. The group consisted of ten people, six students (including the head of the group - Igor Dyatlov), three graduates and one instructor from a nearby tourist base. They left Sverdlovsk by train on 23 January. The last stronghold of civilization for young people was the geological settlement of Vtoroy Severny. By the way, on January 28, one of the participants of the tourist trip here experienced he alth problems and was forced to return to Sverdlovsk. Looking ahead, let's say that this saved the life of Yuri Yudin. He lived to a respectable age and died in April 2013. The remaining nine members of the group moved out of the village on skis on their way to the mountains of Kholatchakhl and Otorten.
The death of the Dyatlov group
When the tourists did not arrive home at the scheduled time and did not even give any signal that they had safely returned to civilization, the institute began to panic. And they were supposed to return on February 12th. The first actions to organize search operations were taken on February 19, 1959. The guys' tent was found empty on February 25 and strangely cut several times on one side. The bodies of the participants of the campaign were found even until the beginning of May. At different distances from the tent, with strange signs of death - some had horrific injuries to the skull or chest, others froze in the snow, one of the members of the group literally had no tongue (with a clenched jaw, which indicated that they could not be animals). Moreover, all of them very quickly left the tent literally without clothes, which they were wearing at that moment. Actually, the reasons that forced the tourists to run away or leave (and traces at a distance of hundreds of meters from the tent indicate that they did not run at all) from their shelter in the night and in the cold are the central issue of this whole story, which the Dyatlov group got into.
The reason for the death of the guys has been hidden from the general public for more than fifty years. Moreover, there is not a single coherent theory that would fit all the features of the incident: the strange color of the skin of people found after a while, the position of the bodies, the absence of obvious traces of strangers, craniocerebral and chest injuries of unknown origin, strange cuts in the tent, it is not clear where they came from traces of radiation on the sweaters of two guys. But you mustsay that there are already several dozen versions of these. Among the most elaborated: those associated with a man-made disaster, criminal (tourists could be victims of high-ranking military poachers, escaped prisoners and even foreign spies), an avalanche, ball lightning and many others. But none of the versions explaining the death of the Dyatlov group today is able to logically and consistently describe all the events of that day. And especially the circumstances that forced the tourists to leave the tent. At the same time, supporters of a number of conspiracy theories are sure that the truth about the death of the Dyatlov group is known to the government, which at one time covered up the real causes of the tragedy. Investigator Lev Ivanov, who conducted the case back in 1959, was never able to reveal the true picture of the incidents (or could he not tell?). In the conclusion of the case, to this day there is a strange wording that the death of the Dyatlov group was caused by an unknown elemental force that the tourists could not overcome.
