And if an avalanche had occurred, why was there a gap of at least nine hours, according to forensic data, between the team members cutting the slope for their encampment and the eventual avalanche? Most of the blunt force trauma-like injuries and some of the soft tissue damage were atypical of those caused by avalanches, whose victims usually asphyxiate. There was no snowfall on the night of February 1 that could have increased the weight of the snow burden on the slope and triggered a collapse. Many argued that the avalanche theory, initially proposed in 1959, still didn’t seem to stack up: The team’s tent encampment was cut into the snow on a slope with an incline seemingly too mild to permit an avalanche. This led to continued doubts around the seemingly pat explanation from a government long infamous for its lack of transparency. Key scientific details were absent from the report, however, including a clear explanation as to how an avalanche could have taken place with no documented evidence of its occurrence left behind. In the wake of renewed media interest and pervasive outlandish hypotheses, Russian authorities recently reexamined the case around the Dyatlov Pass incident and concluded in 2019 that an avalanche was primarily responsible for the nine deaths. The lack of detail about this shocking event, an apparent massacre that transpired in a deeply secretive state, gave rise to dozens of long-lived conspiracy theories, from clandestine military tests to Yeti attacks. A criminal investigation at the time blamed their deaths on an “unknown natural force,” and the Soviet bureaucracy kept the case quiet. Over the next few months, as the snow thawed, search teams gradually uncovered more spine-chilling sights: All nine of the team members’ bodies were scattered around the mountain’s slope, some in a baffling state of undress some of their skulls and chests had been smashed open others had eyes missing, and one lacked a tongue.Įach body was a piece in a grim puzzle, but none of the pieces seemed to fit together. The next day, the first of the bodies was found near a cedar tree. When a search team arrived at Kholat Saykhl a few weeks later, the expedition tent was found just barely sticking out of the snow, and it appeared cut open from the inside. The nine-seven men and two women-were never heard from again.

How many dead bodies are in space 2021