Dead Mountain
Some human tragedies are so unusual, so dramatic, that they persist for years despite perfectly reasonable explanations, and end up folded into UFO lore without proper oversight. A modern Russian conspiracy theory holds that early in 1959, nine experienced young Russian hikers camping on the Urals’ Holatchahl Mountain were killed by UFOs. Some of that is fact. Seven men and two women from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, well trained in winter hiking and all but one between twenty-one and twenty-five years old (the oldest man was forty-eight), did indeed lose their lives on a semi-academic January–February 1959 hiking expedition into the Northern Urals. The hikers left Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinbyurg) and traveled some 110 miles north; the group’s final communication was sent from Dyatlov Pass, just east of Holatchahl, on February 1. When the bodies were finally discovered by army searchers on May 3, many questions presented themselves: Why was the back of the large communal tent neatly cut through? Why were shoes, boots, and even preparations for hot chocolate neatly laid out inside? How had the victims ended up in the frozen emptiness far from their tent? Why were the bodies in widely separated groups?
Why were most not adequately dressed? What made some of the hikers venture into the snow without boots or even socks? Did they perish from exposure, or from something else? Though the scene presented no obvious signs of struggle, several of the hikers had suffered rib and skull fractures. One of the two women no longer had her tongue. Tests of the corpses discovered the presence of a radioactive substance, potassium-40. Family of some of the victims wondered about the peculiar ochre color of the facial skin. Rumors took flight. Some held that the group had been killed by nomadic locals. Others said that the hikers stumbled onto a Russian secret-weapons site, and were killed by the weapons, perhaps accidentally, or were murdered by soldiers. In 1990, one of the searchers claimed to have seen “flying spheres.” Television documentaries in 2000 (from Russia) and 2011 (the History Channel) fastened hard onto the alien thesis. But in 2012, California documentarian Donnie Eichar retraced the hikers’ final days.
He learned that the levels of potassium-40 were normal. The woman whose tongue went missing had bitten it off herself, probably in a fall. Falls explained the broken bones. The peculiar skin tones came from normal decomposition in a cold but damp environment. No evidence suggested belligerent locals, UFOs, secret weapons, or even an avalanche.
Eicher’s 2013 book Dead Mountain offers a plausible explanation: the hikers pitched their tents within proximity of Holatchahl’s neatly shaped dome. Wind shear down the mountain coalesced into a horizontal roll vortex—a “flat” tornado that never touched the tent but produced an ear-splitting roar, and so much vibration that the young men and women could feel the force inside their chest cavities. Though experienced hikers, the wind phenomenon was something new to each of them. The group panicked, cutting through the tent and stumbling into the frigid blackness. The truth aside, filmmaker Renny Harlin produced a “found-footage” mockumentary, Devil’s Pass aka The Dyatlov Pass Incident, for 2013 release; the thriller focuses on American college students that, like Eichar, retrace the steps of the original expedition, shooting with video cameras and iPhones as they go. Instead of a wind vortex, these students stumble onto a mélange of bloodthirsty ETs, teleportation, wormholes—even Yeti.