Mountain of the Dead (21 page)

It may be that, besides the blast wave, as these torches got nearer they emitted a narrow-focused infrasonic beam of energy (pulse), which acted physically on the tourists, inflicting mortal wounds and psychologically affecting the other six in the tent.

‘The human hearing capacity lies in the range from 16 to 20,000Hz. Sounds above or below this range act on the human body. Infrasound in the range of 7–8Hz is the most dangerous for humans. It is the frequency at which many human internal organs oscillate; 7Hz is the average frequency of brain alpha-rhythms. A sufficiently high infrasound amplitude (volume) may be the cause of rupture of vital organs, epileptic seizures, bouts of panic’ (magazine
Kaleidoscope
,
No. 28, 10 July 2006). Could it be that Luda Dubinina lost her tongue due to the effect of infrasound? The others in the tent were also affected by infrasound but to a lesser degree. They were not injured but the infrasound made them panic.

Panic breaks out in the tent. Where to run from these lights, those swinging and killing projector-torches? There is no escape through the tent entrance! The escape is blocked by the raging light!

Someone cuts the tent wall from inside, they rush out, having no time to put on their outerwear. They don’t know yet that they must just turn away from the light, not to look at the torches, and then, in a minute or two, those killing torches would move away and leave them alone. But they did not and could not know that.

It was enough for just one of them to keep looking at the swinging torches for the light to stay near. The territory around the tent was flooded with the white flouncing light. It made them run, without their clothes on, away from the tent, away from that terrible place. Were they panic-stricken? I think yes. That period of contact with an unknown ‘light force’ and the action of infrasound inside and outside the tent was the period of utter panic. This is only natural, given the extreme situation they were in. This is confirmed by the fact they had run so far away from the tent without warm clothes, which was a sure way to death on the cold and windy winter night.

A similar view regarding the start of the tragedy was expressedby Alexsey Koskin, a tourist who had visited the Dyatlov Pass. In a letter to the editor of a Moscow newspaper he expressed the view that the members of the group were alerted by something outside the tent and the first three who went outside were confronted by something dangerous, which I believe was the shock wave.

I believe the skiers tried to pull themselves together, they took Tibo who was unconscious and, helping the other wounded, started moving away from the tent in an organised way, down the slope. The half-dressed tourists were moving down, towards the edge of the forest, not in the direction of their storage shed by following their own previous day’s ski track, but further north. Why? Simply because in the direction they had come from by day there was now the source of light, and danger. They could not have moved in that direction. Willingly or unwillingly, someone would look back at the light, and the light responded to their glance and pointed its beams at them, and this made them move further and further, down the slope and away from the tent.

One of the skiers who was the last in the line followed the track made by the others, carrying unconscious
Tibo on his back. Luda Dubinina, badly wounded, was moving with someone’s help, then she was also carried. Wounded Zolotarev moved by himself.

Twenty-five days later, the rescue party found the tent and human tracks of pressed snow, the ‘columns’ of footprints leading 500m away from the tent. The February winds blew loose snow from the mountain slope, leaving only the snow ‘columns’ of human footprints. A path made in snow by human feet keeps until all the snow thaws away. Virgin snow near the path gets blown away or sets down from the warm air in spring, while the pressed snow columns stay longer and would be the last ones to thaw. So the skiers left this 500m long track of pressed snow ‘columns’. The snow near the ‘columns’ was gone with the wind so, when found by the rescue party on 26 February 1959, the tracks rose above the coat of snow. Two, or maybe three, wounded tourists were dragged over the snow. The closer to the forest, the deeper became the snow.

Sinking in 2m deep snow, with tremendous effort the tourists carrying their wounded stopped at the edge of the forest near a cedar standing on its own. Judging by the tracks, they covered this almost 2km distance in about one and a half to two hours.

The wind was still very strong near the cedar, so the wounded were carried 70m further down, near the frozen stream. The snow was very deep there, but the wind was not so strong. There, the beams of light did not follow them, and they did not see the light any more, since it stayed higher up on the mountain, near the tent.

The tourists cut spruce branches for the wounded and started making a hole in deep snow to hide them from wind and frost. Already all the members of the Dyatlov group had their feet, hands and faces frostbitten. On the cold, windy night they were left without outer garments, mittens and caps. The tourists realised that without warm garments they would not live until morning and would surely freeze. What to do in such a situation? It might be good to make a big fire to get warm until morning. Why did they not do that? Most probably, they abstained from making a big fire for fear of attracting the lights, to avoid a repetition of the horror they had felt near the tent. They probably supposed that the light of a candle in the tent, a burning match or a flashlight had provoked the aggressive action of that unknown light force against them. They did not know that the ‘light set’ did not react to the light of a campfire, or an electric torch, or noise. It only responded to a human glance.

They could not move deeper into the forest either, because they had not the strength to carry the wounded across that deep snow and could not leave them alone. They also understood that they should not go too far from the tent, because their clothes and skis were there and they would need them to get out of the Taiga to civilisation.

It is tens of kilometres to any inhabited places. They could only rely on themselves. They dug a hole in deep snow near the frozen stream and hid their wounded from the wind and cold. Kolevatov stayed with his wounded companions, who were probably already dead from mortal wounds. His foot is dislocated, bandaged with a piece of cloth. The remaining five go 50–70m to the stand-alone cedar. They understand that they need to get back to the tent. Once there, they would collect the tent, the stove and clothes and bring them on skis down to the wounded. They would then make the wounded warm and get warm themselves.

But the flouncing light that has wounded their friends is still there, near the tent. Rustem Slobodin climbs up the cedar to see the tent. Breaking the lower dry branches with his frostbitten hands, and leaving pieces of skin from his palms, he climbs up the cedar to a height of 5m. He can see from this height the tent flooded with the light, but the cedar branches close the view. He breaks branches to make an opening for a better view. The branches, though thick, give way easily in the frost (cedar is a generally fragile tree). Slobodin sees that the dancing light is still there, near the tent. He feels very cold up the tree, but continues watching. At approximately 10.30 p.m. the skiers hear a strong snapping sound as of an electric discharge. Slobodin cries from the cedar that the light near the tent is gone, and that means the way to the tent is open (Ranger Rudkovsky reported hearing a similar sound before the light was gone on 29 August 2002). At this moment, a squally wind rises and blows Slobodin from the cedar. Falling, he tries to grab branches with his frostbitten hands, but they break under his weight. He falls down and hits his head on the tree trunk or protruding roots. Slobodin was found with an injury: ‘cranial vault fracture 6cm long, with a parting up to 0.1cm’. In the heat of the moment Slobodin pays no attention to his bad wound and wants to crawl to the tent. In two to three minutes the squally wind dies down.

After that, Igor Dyatlov decides to make a small fire from cedar branches to serve as a light landmark for those crawling across the snow to the tent. Two of them, Doroshenko and Krivonischenko, stay to support the fire, while Dyatlov, Slobodin and Zina Kolmogorova make for the tent. It is a hard job to make their way up the slope in deep snow. It is like pulling up your body from a boggy marsh at every step.

Why did they not use their old trail to get to the tent? It may be that the blizzard had swept all traces, and they feared to take the wrong direction in the dark and fail to find the tent. Or probably they decided that they would reach the tent quicker moving in a straight line, with the fire acting as a landmark behind them.

Desperately, with their last strength, the three half-dressed frostbitten tourists try to make their way to the tent across deep snow. Their palms and feet get numb and stiff. The tormenting pain of frostbite rises higher and higher in the body. Their bodies tremble from hypothermia and cramps. There is no way to escape the cold and the biting wind. To get warm they try to crawl faster across the snow. But they quickly lose strength and breath. The last bits of strength and warmth are lost. They get sleepy. Their life forces are exhausted. They freeze.

George Krivonischenko and Yury Doroshenko supported the fire as long as they could, it kept on for one and a half to two hours, but it could not make them warm. They put their frostbitten feet and hands into the fire but did not feel the pain. They froze. Rescuers found them near the cedar tree with burnt hands and feet.

By midnight, only Kolevatov was still alive. He had been given the task to stay in the depression near the stream close to the wounded Thibeaux-Brignolle and Luda Dubinina, and to wait for the others to come back with the tent and clothes.

Kolevatov goes up to the cedar, finds Krivonischenko and Doroshenko dead, cuts their clothes off with a knife and brings the clothes to the wounded. The clothes cut and taken off Doroshenko and Krivonischenko were later found on the dead body of mortally wounded Luda Dubinina. Would she still have been alive then? Hardly probable. Kolevatov could not believe that she was dead and tried to make her life last as long as he could, and could not leave her. So he froze near her, waiting in vain for his friends to come back with the tent and warm things. Cold death has taken him too. At about 2 a.m. it was all over. The blizzard was covering over with snow the dead, cold bodies of the nine tourists.

My description of what had happened to the Dyatlov group from the moment of setting up the tent on the slope of Mount Kholat Syakhl to the death of the last of the tourists is not yet an established fact. This is my own version of the incident or, if you like, a new version of the tragedy. It is based on the diary records of the tourists, the materials of the investigation, and the facts I personally met with on 11 September 2002 in the Ivdel district, and what V. Rudkovsky saw on 29 August 2002 in the Denezhkin Kamen nature reserve. One should not try to find a logical explanation of the developments of this tragedy.

Why had the skiers acted so? Why had they moved in that direction and not in the other? Many of their actions on 1 February 1959 seem wrong and illogical to us. But they were without clothes, and they all froze. They were in an extreme situation, and could not have acted otherwise. No one knew what to do in that situation, in the presence of that ‘light set’. They all fought for their lives desperately to the end.

The main mystery is the fact that the whole of the group left the tent. One of the members of the rescue party, V. Karelin, who had known them all well, wrote: ‘The people in the Dyatlov group were such that they could have become scared only by something extraordinary, something that was out of the ordinary course of things.’

I think that it was the ‘light set’ that appeared with the fall of the night on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, reacting to a human glance by sending swinging torches and an infrasonic shock wave, which caused the tourists to leave the tent and finally killed the whole of the group.

Should any one of the Dyatlov group have remained alive to tell about the ‘light set’, the story would probably have been interpreted by the authorities at the time as the ‘machinations of imperialists’ and they would not have acknowledged what actually happened, since it was outside the official ‘materialistic’ view of the world. Investigator Ivanov had his own opinion, which did not fit in the framework of materialism. However, we must also thank the authorities. Huge material resources were involved in the search for the lost tourists, involving transport and aviation, also helicopters (which were quite rare in the 1950s). Not many lost tourists and alpinists would have received so much attention. Rescue teams, hunters, the military and investigators all took part in the search. In that deserted place, under severe winter conditions of the north Urals they performed a huge amount of work. The information gathered by these people will someday allow the cause of the Dyatlov group’s deaths to be found out.

What did the official authorities do after the tragedy? They made the relatives sign a non-disclosure declaration; they wanted the dead to be buried in Ivdel, not in Sverdlovsk; they closed access to the area for tourists for three years.

This caused multiple rumours about tests of some secret weapon in the area, and that the true information was being concealed from the people. But what to conceal? No one really knows what happened. Yet the causes of the tragedy need to be discussed, for the simple reason to suppress futile attacks on cosmonautics and intelligence services.

What might a ‘light set’ be doing in the No. 15 pit? Why did it set light on the waste rock dump? The pit hides nothing secret, just common manufactured mining machines, general mining technology and the dump, which is a pile of limestone mixed with clay. If intelligence services needed such information, they could easily get it in daytime, without the need for a light show. And what were they looking for in the dense forest beyond Mount Denezhkin Kamen, where ranger V. Rudkovsky had watched this phenomenon?