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Bonus - The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass with Brett Talley
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In 2021, The Prosecutors Podcast did a five-part series on Dyatlov Pass. Brett Talley, the co-host of that podcast, joins to revisit the series, talk updates and discuss our theories on what happened to the nine hikers who disappeared in the Ural Mountains. Was it an avalanche? A Soviet military experiment? Aliens?
To listen to The Prosecutors Podcast series on Dyatlov Pass, The Dyatlov Pass Incident - Baby It's Cold Outside, click here: https://bit.ly/4eu74hS
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Transcript
Introduction to Bonus Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
Today, I've got a special treat in store. I want to share this Patreon bonus with you. um These are the kinds of things that you can get. It's only $3 a month ah to join our Patreon. um These are the kinds of things that you can get on there. And I love this conversation so much that I just wanted to be able to share it with everyone. All right, here we go.
00:00:25
Speaker
This is Silver Linings Handbook podcast bonus episode with Brett Talley, the author and co-host of the Prosecutors Podcast.
The Dyatlov Pass Incident
00:00:34
Speaker
In March 2021, on the Prosecutors Podcast, Brett and his co-host, Alice Lecor, began a five-part series on the Dyatlov Pass incident. The 1959 incident is where nine Soviet hikers cut their way out of their own tent and died mysteriously in the Ural Mountains.
00:00:55
Speaker
Was it aliens? Was it a radioactive yeti? Was it an avalanche? Or is it something even more sinister? It's one of those fascinating mysteries, as we say in this bonus episode, where Oxum's razor breaks. A little background on the diet love past incident.
00:01:15
Speaker
In 1959, in Svedlovsk Oblast in the Soviet Union, a group was formed for skiing expeditions across the northern Ural Mountains. Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old radio engineering student at Ural Polytechnic Institute, amassed a group of nine others for a trip to what was then known as Dead Mountain.
00:01:38
Speaker
Each member of the group was experienced, they were all grade two hikers with skiing experience, and they would have all been eligible for grade three certification upon their return. At the time, grade three was the highest certification available in the Soviet Union, and Dyatlov's group designed a route to reach the far northern reaches of the Oblast.
00:02:01
Speaker
The City Committee on Physical Culture and Sport listed approval for 11 people, even though there are only 10 in Diet Love's group. The 11th person was a former Soviet veteran who survived Leningrad and was added to the group's list at the last minute.
00:02:19
Speaker
On January 27th, the group began their trek. On the next day, one member, Yuri Yudin, turned back because of knee and joint pain that made him unable to continue the hike. The nine others continued up the mountain. Their journey from there?
00:02:37
Speaker
has been rebuilt through diaries and pictures from cameras they carried and evidence that was found along the way because the group never made it back, even though they were expected to return a little bit after February 12th.
00:02:53
Speaker
After they did not return on February 26th, searchers found the group's abandoned and badly damaged tent on Dead Mountain. The campsite baffled the search party. The tent was half torn down and covered in snow. The group's belongings, including shoes, had been left behind.
00:03:11
Speaker
Prints of people who were wearing either a single shoe or just socks could be followed leading down to the edge of a nearby woods on the opposite side of the pass. There the first two bodies were found shoeless and dressed only in underwear. Then searchers found three more bodies. It took more than two months to find the other four.
00:03:33
Speaker
In this discussion, Brett and I are gonna give you a little preview of Dyatlov Pass, the incident and the mysteries that surround it. We're also gonna talk a little bit about some of the theories that have come up since 2022 when the prosecutors appeared at it. And this episode, this bonus episode goes quite well with the discussion that Brett and I had on the main feed about our fascination with mysteries. I hope you all enjoy it.
Western Discovery
00:04:10
Speaker
So, you know, Brett, I've mentioned to you before that Die at Love Pass is one of my absolute favorites um among the prosecutor's episodes. Your episodes, like my children, I love them all the same, but, you know, some are more special. But in Die at Love Pass, ah you know, the it's yeah the story of these nine nine hikers in 1959 who head up on what seemed like would be a normal hike.
00:04:47
Speaker
and and you know over Overnight, something very strange happened. We do not know exactly what strange thing happened. but all nine of the the the hikers were lost. um you know Not the kind of thing I would have have expected on a true crime podcast. So I'm i'm just curious, like how did you become interested in it? How did you even...
00:05:11
Speaker
Find out about this weird event in the Euro mountains. So it's it is pretty interesting. It was a story that wasn't well known in the West at all until the fall of the Soviet Union. It was, but it was something that in Russia was well known and it was a mystery that people had talked about for a long time.
00:05:31
Speaker
Then it comes over to the united states and and ends up you know i find it the way you find all information online basically in a list i was reading crack dot com and it was a mystery great mysteries and and their answers and they had an answer that is not the answer.
00:05:48
Speaker
And that was the first time i'd ever read it and i thought wow this is so strange you got these nine young healthy experienced people. They set out on this hike it's incredibly well documented it's not they left and nobody solved and then they ended up dead there writing in their diaries they've all got cameras they're taking pictures.
00:06:07
Speaker
They make it a really long way until they come to a place called the Mountain of the Dead, which is where they decide to to pitch their tent, which turns out that's not quite as ominous as maybe you would think it's just what the local population, the Manse call the mountain because nothing grows there. It was like dead mountain, right? But nevertheless, don't, don't spend the night on dead mountain is the first lesson we learned from the Outlaw Pass. But you have these people, it's, they're on top of a mountain. It's in winter.
Theories and Mysteries
00:06:40
Speaker
It's very cold. And for some reason in the middle of the night, they, they not only leave their tent, but they cut their way out of their tent.
00:06:51
Speaker
and go into the night, not wearing some of them aren't wearing shoes, some of them aren't wearing coats, and they end up a mile away in a forest, and then basically all die in different places, suffering some of them some pretty extreme wounds. And when the people found them, the the searchers found them, they had no answer,
00:07:17
Speaker
The Soviet government eventually closed the investigation and said they had succumbed to an unknown, compelling force. That was basically all they could say. They couldn't even come up with anything.
00:07:28
Speaker
Also known as we have no idea. Yeah. And we have no idea. And then they tried to cover it up because that's what you do if you're the Soviets, right? But they couldn't, they couldn't cover it up. There were just too many family members. There was one person who had been with them. It's called Dyatlov Pass because the leader of the group was Igor Dyatlov, but there had been one person who had actually gotten a long way through the hike, but then had suffered some physical ailments and turned back. And so he, for decades, fought for his friends to find out what really happened to them. And so it's become one of these great mysteries that people people have all sorts of theories about.
00:08:03
Speaker
one of the One of the really interesting things to me about the story in terms of like talking about the cover-up, I didn't realize it hadn't become popular until the but in the West until the fall of the Soviet Union, which had been, like what, 92, something like that? um the the Or I guess, really, late 80s, early 90s.
00:08:24
Speaker
um as it started to fall or it started to open up and started to fall. But one telling thing when I was reading him about it in the books that makes me think that you know one of the theories is that yeah maybe the Soviets were doing some kind of testing there or something something of along those lines and somehow it impacted them like Obama dropped or whatever.
00:08:46
Speaker
and cause an avalanche but i had read in one of the books that they had actually closed the area for three years afterwards and i thought to myself closing something for three years does not sound like the government knows what's going on. Look i mean that's that that's one of the one of the fascinating things about it is the government seems like.
00:09:10
Speaker
they were afraid in some ways about what exactly was going on here. They, one of the, the, essentially the attorney general of Russia, the equivalent of that is overseeing this investigation. The lead investigator, the one who wrote the report saying it was an unknown, compelling force. Later on, after the Soviet Union had fallen, would write an article saying he thought, he basically thought it was aliens. And this is the lead investigator is like, you know what? It was aliens.
00:09:38
Speaker
so like That tells you how how bizarre this was and the fascinating thing about it is you have this this competition between sort of but I'll say the Occam's razor approach because I think it is the avalanche theory that the idea that this was just an avalanche you know they're on a mountain is an avalanche that's what happened.
00:10:01
Speaker
That is, that is sort of the theory of people who don't know a lot about the case is how I would describe it. Like if you just look at it from a very surface level, you can come up with avalanche theories that work. But the people on the mountain, pick your tenng tent at an angle. all Everybody ends up dead.
00:10:20
Speaker
Tints flattened sounds like an avalanche sounds like an avalanche right and recently there have been some it's it's one of those cases that solved every few years every few years of being article the yellow pass finally solved and there was.
00:10:35
Speaker
ah around a couple of years ago, there were some guys who used basically the technology from frozen, which I think is fascinating to simulate avalanches. And they came up with a theory that it was what they called a slab avalanche, which basically they sort of ordinarily you would not have an avalanche on that mountain. That's one of the problems. It's not steep enough. But they were like, if they dug in into the tent on the side of the mountain, they could have had a slab avalanche and it would have covered the tent and everyone would have freaked them out and they would have ran.
00:11:03
Speaker
One of the problems with that theory is these were experienced people. They had done this a lot. They knew about things like slab avalanches and they would have known. I mean, the the key here is leaving that tent basically unclothed in below zero temperature was as close to die just deciding to die as you could die. So whatever it was that caused them to do that had to be so bad that that was the better alternative. And so you have to believe that they the slav avalanche happened. It's a relatively minor avalanche, but they have a lot of snow on the tent. But rather than spending some time to dig some stuff out from the tent, like coats and shoes and everything else, they just went ahead and said, well, shoot.
00:11:52
Speaker
you know, but another avalanche might come. So let's flee into the darkness without enclosing them. And let's do it in a way that is not how you would fully an area where you're fearing an avalanche. Which makes you think that they were spooked by something. Right. Or compelled to do it. I mean, there's and one of the problems with it. It's like so many cases. You are dependent on the facts as reported to you.
00:12:21
Speaker
by unreliable narrators. you know People often say, we talked about the testing. Well, maybe it could have been in testing. Maybe a bomb went off and people will say, well, yeah, but they didn't find any any shrapnel. If it had been a bomb that had gone off and the Soviets realized that, they would not have included in their reports. we found Yeah, they wouldn't have needed the shrapnel. They wouldn't have known.
00:12:47
Speaker
And you have all this this weird stuff. things like one of the One of the things that has always fascinated me is you have the makeup of this group. We talk about how there are nine people. Eight of them were good friends who all went to this school together. They'd known each other for forever. They planned this hike with their buddy. than the By the way, know so something just dawned on me as you're talking and I'm thinking about your episodes.
00:13:10
Speaker
You literally did this like a profiler. with you You have the victimology, right? You know, their experience, their personalities. You have the crime scene. You're like literally, and you're just trying to find the perp. But go on.
00:13:25
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm convinced that when you look at these mysteries, you look at them, this is every mystery, whether it's a murder or something like this is the same in how you approach it. And so I think that is the way to approach it if you're trying to figure out what happened. But you have these eight people who are very all connected. Then you have one guy who was much older, who was a veteran of the Second World War, who survived Stalingrad, who was basically forced on this group at the last minute. Zolotov is his name. A lot of people have wondered if he might have been KGB operative or something along those lines. He had a camera that nobody knew about. So all these people had cameras, but there he had two. He had the one that everybody saw, and then he had another one. That night, he was wearing that camera.
00:14:13
Speaker
and he is actually found, when he's found dead, he's found with a camera around his neck. Now imagine for a second that the slab avalanche theory is what happened and they're all asleep in their tent. Slab avalanche comes down. They're like, oh my goodness, we're covered in snow. They freak out and they all flee. Would Zoloterev have grabbed his secret camera and put it around his neck to flee? That doesn't seem likely.
00:14:36
Speaker
but i He also was wearing, he was wearing his, clothes he had his clothes on. Unlike the rest of them, he was pretty much fully dressed. And when he was found, he was found with a notebook in one hand and a pencil in the other. Now he had not written anything, at least according to the Soviets, but I mean, just his existence and everything about him.
00:14:57
Speaker
is one of the reasons that even if the avalanche theory is the simplest theory and you would think ordinarily that's what happened, that's the thing about the outlaw pass. It's so fascinating. The simplest theory actually isn't that satisfying when you look at all the evidence. and Yeah, it doesn't wait. It actually, oximed razor breaks because the simplest theory I can't possibly that's it's really interesting because I hadn't thought about it that way that you know if you're sitting in the tent and because I i can get it right like if you were if you can buy into the idea that um ah that
00:15:35
Speaker
that he something happens, startles them or someone comes across across them or there's some kind of emergency, it would make sense that he would grab the secret camera um to protect it maybe or to hide it if, let's say, ah real people were there, right? Like they were getting raided by someone or something like that.
00:15:58
Speaker
But it doesn't really make sense that we grab the notebook, the pencil, and and the people if it had been an a avalanche that had been coming for for them. and you know and And so you're almost looking at every victim.
00:16:13
Speaker
in this story and the way that they're found and how they died and what they had with them. And and the pieces to the puzzle just don't really come together easily. I know people have speculated it beyond avalanche about um about other things like catabatic winds as a possibility. I knew nothing about them. I don't think I had ever heard of them.
00:16:37
Speaker
So I read about that left past but they're like these they're these really high density air that comes shooting down They don't necessarily they're not necessarily gonna cause an avalanche, but they could be disorienting Is that the idea behind that one because they can get to like hurricane speeds or something along those lines? Yeah, and they're actually it's interesting because they're necessary for the whole slab theory to even work you have these kind of wins yeah and it's The catabatic wind theory is is pretty good just because it can basically be like you're in a tornado. And it has to be something
00:17:11
Speaker
that was either so compelling or so terrifying that they would do the thing they did, that they would flee the way they did, but also in the weirdest way, because you think, you know, they're cutting their way out of their tent. They're fleeing in terror into the night, but that's not actually what they did. It seems like based on the evidence, they all kind of gathered near the tent, but didn't go recover their stuff. I mean, even if the tent is under snow, some snow,
00:17:38
Speaker
If you're standing there not wearing any clothes, surely you would try and get something out of the tent to take with you. The other problem is the tent itself, while it was a little collapsed and it did have some snow on top of it, it wasn't flattened and it wasn't moved out of yeah out of place in any way. And the stuff in the tent wasn't disturbed. So it wasn't like it did not look chaotic in the tent. You know, there were still like cups of coffee sitting You know, frozen. Yeah. Cause you would expect it all to be knocked over. Right. Exactly. And that didn't happen. So you have these people who leave the tent, they stand there for a little while, and then they head down the mountain in a, in basically a single file line, walking down this mountain. Which isn't, was that what you would do if you were fleeing in terror from an avalanche? Probably. I don't know. It's just so bizarre.
00:18:28
Speaker
Yeah, unless there's like some reason like that an experienced hiker knows that they would do that, but they were skiers, right? did they take their They didn't take their skis, did they? No, they didn't. they So they'd use their skis as like the bottom of the tent. So that's what they would do, is they would use their ski poles to kind of hold the tent up. And in fact, one of the ski poles that you see in the very last picture they took, where they're setting up the tent, you see the ski pole.
00:18:55
Speaker
In the picture where the Russians have found the tent, the ski pole is sitting stuck in the snow exactly where it was in that other picture. So you got to believe that this avalanche that came down did not move this ski pole. Like it somehow managed to do this without moving the ski pole. And you can see that with your own two eyes. So lucky ski pole. But yeah, lucky ski pole. But their skis were all underneath. The other thing, sitting on top of the tent was a flashlight.
00:19:25
Speaker
that was off. So like, huh, got this, this flashlight sitting on top of the tent. How did it get there? Why is it still there? There's all sorts of stuff. There's missing knives. There's, there are things that are there that shouldn't have been there. Just, and then when you read about what they did, when they got down to the bottom, they basically, they built this fire and then they wouldn't, the spires usually that take you off the ground, right? Like, so you're not,
00:19:56
Speaker
Or is that what it was? What was the spire? The fire, the fire. The fire, okay, okay. And then they climb the tree. Yes, that's what it was. They climb the tree. And you can tell that basically they climb high enough that they should be able to see the tent. They're like climbed up to look back to the tent, is what it seems like happened. Which is a weird thing to do for several reasons. Number one,
00:20:22
Speaker
It is the middle of the night there. It's pitch black. If you assume there's catabatic winds, what would you even be able to see anything? The only way you'd be able to see anything is if something's going on up there with some illumination, right? But they do that. And then a few of them go off into the forest to try and build sort of a a, a temporary shelter. Three of them at that point, try and head back to the tent.
00:20:49
Speaker
Which is also a weird thing to do if you're worried about an avalanche and you were so worried about it, you fled, they die on the way. They don't make it. And the ones who tried to build the shelter run into really terrible luck. It seems like what happened is they're building the shelter, not realizing they're on basically a void and it collapses and they all fall into this, into this ravine.
00:21:11
Speaker
And then all the snow falls on top of them, and and they die as well. It certainly sounds like they were looking back at the tent, needed to go back to the tent for some reason, or felt like they needed to go back to the tent for reason, which makes you sort of feel like they rushed out, left some things that they might need, like shoes, for example. um and but But before they went back, they wanted to check something out. Right.
00:21:38
Speaker
And just wait up there to see if there's really an avalanche or anything. They didn't do that, right? They went ahead and and did then and fled. So you're not buying the Havana syndrome theory?
Alternative Theories
00:21:51
Speaker
Have you heard this one? That it was infrasound, low frequency sound?
00:21:56
Speaker
That, they of course, Havana syndrome being that someone is blasting people with low frequency sounds. um And it happens to be lots of Americans and happens to be happening in places where there are lots of Russians. but That's more recent. But that was one of the theories that I heard that like maybe some low frequency sound testing doesn't seem to that one doesn't seem to explain some of the behavior. So Danny Acker in his book, and he's called Dead Mountain.
00:22:24
Speaker
Talk about this a lot and he makes a pretty compelling argument for the shape of the mountain and where they were with the catabatic winds blowing against that shape would create infrasound that infrasound can really. What you would have to have i think for someone that that's work.
00:22:43
Speaker
Obviously it's not going to make all of them lose their minds and flee into the snow. And I think people generally push back on that by saying, wouldn't have affected all of them. But what you could imagine is if it affected the important ones, like imagine the leaders of and Zolotarov, imagine they kind of lost it. They probably could have gotten everybody else to follow along with them. If, you know, if if they, if they all of a sudden are like rushing into the tent, freaking out, say, we got to get out, we got to get out.
00:23:12
Speaker
And the other people might just do it because they're used to just following these guys and doing what they say. I don't know. That's a possibility. Yeah. Yeah. You see it in the military all the time. If, you know, a leader thinks somebody's being shot on, everyone responds like they're being shot on. I can think about I covered the image of Doudialo shooting, which, you know, we were talking about mysteries before. It's less of a mystery. It would have been more interesting if it were a more complicated mystery. But ultimately, what we found out at the end was one guy who was one of the leaders of the street crime unit tripped
00:23:48
Speaker
And as soon as he tripped, the sound that was made, everyone thought he was being fired on. So as soon as number two leader in the group started firing, everybody just fired.
00:23:59
Speaker
Right. So and it's that idea that if our leaders are encouraging us to do something, we trust them. We just might do it. But what about the mancy than the indigenous people who were there? i Because I know dialogue passed that whole area dead mountain. You know, there were certain rules or certain legends or beliefs that the mancy had about where you could go, how far you could go, other things like that. Have the Has anybody put a credible theory that the mancy I know they helped afterwards with the search were were part of it. Well, it's it's it's interesting because the Soviets quashed squashed the mancy theory very quickly because they had actually spent a lot of time.
00:24:49
Speaker
Trying to build relationships with the man see and sort of have everybody simpatico with them. And so they were not interested in that being a theory. And so they put out things that people still repeat to this day that they didn't really care about that mountain. It wasn't a sacred mountain. It wasn't a holy site, but there have been some other people who've done some research.
00:25:10
Speaker
into it who say essentially, really, there were two groups of mancy. This is not surprising. It's kind of like, you know i' know, kind of like saying the American Indians and not realizing there's a thousand different tribes. Right. And the mancy who helped were the ones who were pretty friendly and were sort of more modern and were less superstitious. But there was another group of mancy who were much more sort of still in the old ways. Right.
00:25:37
Speaker
And at least what some of these people say is that the mountain actually was sacred, and that there weren't supposed to be on that mountain. And in particular, women weren't supposed to be on that mountain. And there were two women in the group, and that if they had seen that, they would have felt compelled to punish that. And there's some good books. and You may own some of them. um Oh, God. There's one on Dyatlov Path. I think it's called Death of Nine, maybe.
00:26:03
Speaker
um Yeah, there is one book, Death of Nani. And it it really goes into the mancy thing and explains this in a in a much better way. And that may not be the book, but I think it's like Svetlana Os, or something, is the one who wrote it. You're you're really testing my memory on the Dyatlov Pass at this point. um You're better than me. right well I think because it happens to be near me, I think it's it looks like Anderson on the spine. of that Okay, there's Lawton Anderson is Death of Nine. Zvetlana Oz. She wrote one of the books and it's really, her book is is great because it starts off with
00:26:49
Speaker
um After the fall of the Soviet Union, ah i would go what was his name? Not Vladimir Putin, but the guy before him, Boris Yeltsin. Boris Yeltsin was a graduate of Yekaterinburg University and was fascinated by this.
00:27:05
Speaker
and and wanted to figure out exactly what happened. Don't go there, The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass by Svetlana Oz. It's a really good book. I don't reckon it did. Anyways, back to the Mansi. So the theory is this this group of Mansi would have gone up there, they would have forced them off the mountain. They basically would have then cut up their tent so that they couldn't go back to it. So it wasn't actually cut up when they left. It was cut up to keep them from being able to use that tent again.
00:27:35
Speaker
They were very good at covering their tracks. So one of the, one of the things that people often say is it couldn't have been somebody else because there are no tracks of another person, but the, the Mansey knew how to cover that. So they would have done that. Then they would have left. And so the theory is the manseer up there, destroying the tent, the hikers have gone down to the bottom of the mountain. They climbed to the top of the tree. They're watching. They see the Mansey leave at that point, the three try and go back, but don't make it. That's sort of the Mansey theory.
00:28:03
Speaker
So they like something like they could have died of hypothermia then the tree collapses or or or or the they follow the others fall into the void are the mancy is that is that the book that goes into.
00:28:18
Speaker
There was a story at some point, because in the Soviet Union, they had a lot of women who were leaders where, you know, they send a delegation out to meet with the man. They tell them not to have a woman leader. Am I making this up in my head? Nope, you're not. OK, OK, OK. I was thinking, did I make up this story? And they and they go out there and the Soviets bring a woman with them and the man's here like, oops,
00:28:46
Speaker
right And they, they ended up killing the party, right? They do. And then the retaliation by the Soviets was incredibly vicious and they wiped out a whole bunch of the mancy. And that was one of the reasons they wanted to reestablish things with them because this area was actually really important. It was a logging area, provided a lot of, a lot of lumber for the Soviets, but it also was a really important area for mining.
00:29:14
Speaker
to the extent that compasses don't work very well there because there's so much iron ore and magnetized iron ore in that area that your compasses don't work. And this was something that the Outlaw Pass Group ran into and talked about. And they actually were a little bit off their course of where they wanted to be, which is one of the reasons they ended up doing what they did. So really, they should have gotten to the bottom of the mountain the day before camped out there, and then the next day climbed to the top of the mountain and gone through the... midweek now Yeah. The Nail Bears, Dyatlov's name, but they were behind schedule. So they ended up trying to go up halfway and camping where they did to try and make up time. Which is not a normal place you would camp. but You'd camp at the base or camp on the other side. What about the idea of an animal attack?
00:30:12
Speaker
Well, there's a couple animals that have been suggested. I know one of them. Most famously, Yetis, which apparently, at least according to some people, are radioactive. And that's important because there's radiation found on the clothes of some of the hikers. And there's this one theory made famous in a Discovery Channel documentary called Russian Yeti, The Killer Lives, that these Yetis are radioactive for some reason.
00:30:41
Speaker
were in the area, they attacked the Dyatlov group. That's what caused them to flee is because you'd flee to if you saw a radioactive yeti. And so that's one of the theories. I would say that is definitely a fringe theory. There's another one that a Wolverine got into the tent. But I think once again, radioactive Wolverine, just a regular Wolverine, because the radioactivity is kind of throwing off all the theories. Yeah.
00:31:06
Speaker
and I mean, the look, this group of people was fascinating because two of them had worked at a nuclear power plant just south of Ekaterinburg, which was the source of the Kishtim incident, which was the worst nuclear disaster in the world until Chernobyl. They covered it up, so most people didn't know about it, and two of them had been involved in sort of decontaminating that area. And that's one reason, we think, that they had radiation on their clothes is because they had been exposed to so much. It had radiation, but it explains that at least. Yep. Yep. And that there could be some some transfer. Now, has there ever been I was going to ask you two other things. Has there ever been a similar similar instance? I know we we've talked in the episode about the
00:32:02
Speaker
crime or the main incident. and But has there been a similar incident in the US s that I can only think of like the, was it ah the hikers in California or were there hikers in California? So it's you're thinking of the Yuba County Five. Those are the five guys that drove up the mountain. Yes. yeah which We have not covered that case. We need to. It's often called America's Dyatlov Pass.
00:32:28
Speaker
And it involves similar things in that you have these people who are doing inexplicable things that end up costing them their lives. And and it's yeah on top of a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm. There's a lot of similarities to it, but there are some pretty stark differences as well. But that's that's one that people often point to as a similar one. You mentioned the Kamar-Dabin incident, which happened near Lake Baikal.
00:32:55
Speaker
And in that case, there was a survivor, unlike both Yuba County and Yellow Pass, there was a survivor. And the fact there was a survivor makes it even crazier because she tells you exactly what happened. And you still don't know what happened. Right.
00:33:13
Speaker
but Yeah, but you have a better idea there, right? Like something, some kind of contaminant at least we know. um ah could Do you think dialogue could have been the same thing?
00:33:24
Speaker
like some kind of chemical weapon or something like that that. It's a theory. I mean, there is so they had to file their plan with the local hiking group. So they're at school at the Katterenberg. They have to file this where they're going to go. They have to certify it. It's one of the reasons, you know, they were able to find them because they had the plan.
00:33:51
Speaker
And some people speculated that obviously the Soviet government would have been known where they were going. And then if if if there was some sort of testing going on, they could have been sort of lab rats for this testing. Like, oh, look, we have a group of people. Let's see what happens if we You know, drop this nerve gas on them. What will they do? How will they react? Is that likely? I don't know. I think it is interesting. Something you mentioned that they then closed the mountain for three years afterwards. The government basically said, no one can go there for another three years. I mean, that's a, that's an interesting response by the government.
00:34:29
Speaker
yep Yep, it doesn't really strike me as ah they entirely and know what happened. Although, you know, if there was something on the mountain that was secret, whether it's chemical weapons or whether it was near, let's say, near a testing site or whatever it could have been, it could have been off the mountain, it might explain why they had the extra hiker. But that's the thing about mysteries that are so interesting to me. Not every fact is actually always relevant to solving the mystery. Like literally the Soviet government could have added the extra hiker on purpose because of some secret thing and it could have zero to do with what what actually happened to them.
00:35:12
Speaker
Um, and yeah, that's why these things are so hard to solve. Is there an official Russian government explanation? So the Russian government did a re-investigation a couple of years ago and basically reiterated the avalanche theory basically said slab avalanche. That's what happened. You know, they freaked out. They went down to the bottom of the mountain and then died. And that was their, their theory. It was.
00:35:40
Speaker
not well received by the survivors and their family, um the survivors are the the surviving family, because there weren't survivors. And the and the guy the guy who who put it together, I guess the reaction was so bad that in typical Russian fashion, he was fired and sent to Siberia.
00:36:00
Speaker
um Some things don't change. it so Since you guys did your episodes, when were your episodes? Were they 2022? It's been a while. At least 22. Maybe even 21. I'm not sure. It's been a while. to and so What new have you learned since that episode? What updates are there? Any closer to solving it?
00:36:25
Speaker
I mean, like you said, it solved and every every year. The the official Soviet re-investigation happened afterwards. But there's nothing really new there. I mean, people act like it's a new theory, but it's not really. It's something people have proposed for a long time, both an avalanche and sort of a slab avalanche theory.
00:36:43
Speaker
And I think the thing to remember, yeah, okay, fine. You're using frozen to show how it would happen.
Recent Developments
00:36:49
Speaker
But people knew about that. It wasn't like we didn't know that slab avalanches happened before this. And one thing we tried to emphasize in our telling the story is how.
00:37:01
Speaker
tough and resilient and experienced these people were. we We call them kids a lot, but they really were. They had done this many times and they really knew what they were doing. They had dealt with adversity before.
00:37:16
Speaker
So it just doesn't feel like a standard event on the mountain would cause them to do something that basically guaranteed their death. It would seem like it had to be something that it was better to run or not even run to walk barefoot in, you know, two foot deep snow in minus degree wind chill, then stay at the tent. And I don't know what that is.
00:37:46
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough one. So what's your theory? I don't know that I have a theory, you know, I, my theory changes a lot. I think I've been on the side of every theory at some point. Same here, by the way. Yeah. I, I, you know, I liked the Russian, the, the, the sort of,
00:38:07
Speaker
Thermobaric bomb theory. i mean like A lot of them have injuries. The major injuries suffered by the group that tried to build the shelter in the in the forest can be explained by them just falling into the ravine and the snow falling on top of them.
00:38:23
Speaker
So I'm not as interested in those injuries, but if you look at the injuries on the other people who who died in different ways, including by hypothermia, they have these very strange injuries that don't make sense. They have injuries that you know might seem typical of of being out in the woods, but they also, yeah one of them one of the women has what appears to the world to be like a large bruise of the kind that you would have if you were struck with like a baton.
00:38:50
Speaker
That's what it looks like. And that has thrown a lot of people for a loop. Like was, was she struck by somebody, you know, whether it was mancy or Soviet or or whoever. Um, there's just a lot of weirdness about the case. It's really hard to explain. I don't think it was a radioactive yeti.
00:39:13
Speaker
come on you know that's my theory was an avalanche though that always has to be a possibility i don't think you can ever rule out avalanche completely But, you know, another thing that happened that was strange, they're going over this pass. One mountain over, there's another group also from Yekaterinburg. They're going over a different mountain pass. They're camped that night. They're looking in the direction of the Outlaw Pass and and they record contemporaneously all these strange lights in the sky. Like they're recording the fact that they're seeing these flashes, they're seeing these yellow lights that they can't really explain. And they don't think anything of it until they get back to Katterenberg and the Outlaws group hasn't returned. Like something was going on over there that I think is a little bit more complex than they had a slab avalanche and freaked out.
Conclusion
00:40:05
Speaker
Right, right. I think I've learned, one thing I definitely learned from Dial of Pass, Khyber Dabane, and then there was another incident in the 70s, don't go hiking in the Soviet mountains. There you go.
00:40:19
Speaker
but Thanks, Brett. I really appreciate you giving the update. I know your listeners are going to love it. My listeners are going to love it, and I always love spending time with you. Enjoyed it. All right. Thank you, sir. This is the Silver Linings Handbook podcast bonus episode. We'll see you guys all again soon.