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Dec. 15, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:57
Edition 280 - The Dyatlov Pass Mystery

Berkshire-based Keith McCloskey has intensively researched the mysterious deaths of nineski-hikers in 1959...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope your preparations for Christmas, if you're making them, are going well.
I have to say, I tend to always, even when my parents were here, and I had a lot of presents to buy in those days, I used to leave everything till the last minute.
And I think I'm probably going to do that again this time, usually 24th of December for me.
But I know some people like to make their preparations as early as August, so I hope it's all going well for you.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, for his hard work on the show throughout this year.
Thank you, Adam.
If you get in touch with me, you can do it through the website, theunexplained.tv.
When you do, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Lovely to hear from you.
If you can make a donation to the show, especially at this time of year to allow the work to continue into 2017, you can do that at the website as well.
It's theunexplained.tv.
And if you have made a donation recently, many, many thanks.
On this edition of the show, I'm going to be talking about something you've wanted me to get into for a very long time.
I've been getting emails about this probably for the last three or four years.
It's the Dyatlov Pass incident or mystery.
And it's a very, very deeply dark and strange one.
We're going to be talking to one of the people who's done some of the most research on this.
His name is Keith McCluskey.
He's based in West Berkshire.
He's written a lot about the Dyatlov Pass mystery.
He's also been to the location, which is a great benefit, I'm sure, for him as an author to have actually been there and seen it for himself.
If you haven't heard about it, and I must admit, until recently, I hadn't, it is the case from 1959 of a group of young hikers, ski hikers, who died in very strange circumstances in the northern Ural Mountains of Russia.
Now, these were young, fit, experienced people.
So their deaths, their untimely demise, very much a mystery and very unexpected at that age in those circumstances.
So we'll talk with Keith McCluskey in just a while.
Going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
I'm going to get right to them right now before we talk to Keith McCluskey in West Berkshire.
Helen Diskin, thank you very much for your email, Helen.
I mentioned you on the radio show as well, didn't I?
We were talking about on the radio show this goo or slime that some of the papers were saying was space goo that was found by a dog walker on a hillside near Manchester, and you said that you've seen this stuff too.
So the big question is, what is it?
If you know, let me know.
And thank you, Helen, for your email.
Alex Berlin in Albuquerque, New Mexico says Linda Moulton Howe is the rock star of UFOs and unexplained phenomena.
I wouldn't complain if she was your only guest.
Thank you, Alex.
Steve says, wanted to say Linda Moulton Howe is fantastic.
Can we have her on more often?
Thank you for that.
Another Steve, though, Steve in Norfolk, asks me basically why I didn't probe and question Linda Moulton Howe as much as I do with other people.
Well, I did ask her questions when they were warranted, but there is a difference.
Linda Moulton Howe was an investigative journalist, is an investigative journalist from EarthFiles.com and came on the show to present her work.
By all means, though, Steve, and I'm glad that you got in touch, get in touch and tell me what you thought, or get in touch with her at earthfiles.com and tell her what you thought.
But that is why I didn't put Linda under the microscope that I would put somebody who was a primary researcher making claims for a book that they've published or something like that.
Linda is a different kettle of fish, and she appears, as you know, regularly on American radio and presents the work that she does.
James Alexander Davis in Swansea, nice to hear from you, says that I listen to The Unexplained while I work on commissions.
I'm a concept artist for films and games.
Great job to have, James.
And thank you very much for listening to me while you do that.
In Swansea, lovely West Wales.
Mike Norris says somebody I think would make a good guest for your show is Lindy Cowling.
Thank you.
Looking into it.
Mary Jo in Canada is happy that I talk these days a lot less about the UK weather.
Now, funny, we researched this.
And when we did, we found about 75-80% of people liked me talking about the weather in the UK.
And 25-20% of people didn't.
But different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Zeb in Israel didn't like Linda Moulton Howe.
Okay, thanks for letting me know, Zeb.
Ben Robinson made some guest suggestions.
Thanks, Ben.
Adrian in Highton Merseyside, nice to hear from you.
Maria in Vancouver, best wishes for the season to you and yours, Maria.
Mark Hunwick, nice to hear from you.
Sean asks if I can get Gerard Williams on again.
He's a very busy man, is Gerard Williams, and we're still trying to get him on either the radio show or here online.
Patrick in Vermont, nice to hear from you again.
Tracy in Manchester, nice to hear from you.
And Johnny Garza, recommending the economist Mike Norman.
I want to get an economist or somebody to talk about the global economy on here because, you know, there are people saying that it's going to go to hell in a hand cart during 2017.
We'll find out.
Right, let's get to the guest on this edition, the Dyatlov Pass incident.
And the man we're going to be talking with in West Berkshire is Keith McCluskey.
Keith, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for inviting me, Howard.
And how is rural West Berkshire as we record this?
Great, as always.
Miserable and wet.
Ah, yes, but you've got clearer air than we've got in London, so it can't be too bad.
Now, I've had a lot of requests from many, many listeners to cover this particular topic.
It is something that seems to have grabbed their imagination.
And I guess any incident where a bunch of young fit people meet their end in mysterious circumstances is going to prompt that kind of interest, I would have thought.
Yeah, definitely.
The other thing about it is there's so many theories as to how they died, really, because no single theory answers all the questions.
So I think that's why it's grabbed people's imaginations.
The thing is, it's always been a pretty well-known story in Russia and the Soviet Union as it was then.
But it's only come to Prominence in the West, probably in the past eight to ten years, if that.
And why do you think that is, Keith?
Is that because of the veil of secrecy, the veil of misinformation, disinformation, and no information that we had during the Soviet era?
Certainly, I think so.
It was, although it was well known in Russia, it wasn't that well known because the Soviet Union was a place where bad news was never particularly welcome.
This case did come to prominence and people would talk about it because so many people got to hear of it in what was then Sverdlovsk and the Urals, sorry, just east of the Urals.
But it's become pretty well known in Russia up until the end of the USSR.
And the files weren't accessible in those days.
They only became accessible with, if you like, the perestroika and the fall of the Berlin Wall that people were able to access the files, which were held in Katerinburg, as it is now.
So the story started to become known much wider.
And Rennie Harlin, who is a Hollywood film director, did a film called The Athlon Pass.
It didn't receive particularly good reviews, but that helped to spread the word about the story a bit more.
It is remarkable that how many years will it be?
It'll be 58 years as we enter 2017 that this happened.
And we are still no nearer a definitive explanation for what became of these people.
Well, the thing about it is there probably is an explanation.
But what people believe is that the authorities in Russia are withholding that information, because anybody who looks at this story, you cannot come up with an answer that answers for every question because of the nature of the injuries to them and the circumstances surrounding where they were found,
because this happened up in a very remote area.
Half of the group supposedly died of hypothermia.
The other half were found with horrendous injuries, which were likened to being a car crash, but without external marks on the bodies.
So if they'd all died of the same type of injuries, you could probably start narrowing it down.
You know, if they all died of the cold, you'd think, well, something drove them out.
And, you know, you could probably arrive at some kind of hypothesis or theory as to how they died of the cold.
If they all died of awful injuries, car crash type injuries, you could say, well, obviously something mechanical happened here and killed them all, possibly a blast, which is one of the theories.
But the strangest thing of the whole story is they were camping on a mountain, on a ridge by a mountain, and something frightened them so much that they slashed their way out of the tent and went down the mountain to get away from it.
Okay, let's not leap ahead of the story too far because we need to know about these people, this group of nine people, led by a 23-year-old who seemed to be particularly savvy, particularly fit, but then they were all fit.
They were fit young people who were up for an expedition in an area.
First of all, talk to me about the area and then talk to me about the people.
Okay, well, it took place in the northern Ural Mountains.
It was in winter.
The actual event happened on the night of the 1st and 2nd of February, 1959.
The area itself, I mean, it's where Siberia starts, basically, that side of the Urals.
So it gets very cold in winter.
You get snow drifts up to 12 feet, constant snowstorms.
So it's a very harsh environment in the winter.
The actual Urals themselves, when I say they were found in the mountains, people tend to think of mountains like Everest or the Matterhorn or whatever.
They're more gentle mountains, they're more undulating.
What they were doing was you would probably describe it more as orienteering or hiking, which required a very high level of fitness.
They weren't using climbing tackle or anything like that because the slopes are fairly gentle, but they were using skis.
It was really a test of their fitness.
And if you like, orienteer.
They call it ski tourism.
That's what it's known as in Russia.
Over here, at the present day, ski tourism is where you pack all your stuff.
You fly down to Valdez Air or you go to Vale in Colorado and basically you have a good time for two weeks and throw in a bit of skiing.
But it was nothing like that.
It was something that demanded a very high level of physical fitness.
Now, I studied Soviet politics when I was at university as one of my courses.
And I was lucky enough to study under somebody who was an expert on the regime and had actually had personal experience of it.
Back in the day when it was the Soviet Union, it was a communist regime.
And the one thing that we frequently talked about was the fact that young people of this kind inevitably would probably have been tied up with the party or something official in some way.
As far as you know, Keith, was that the case with them?
It certainly was.
They were all good young communists.
They were outstanding, if you like, you know, they were perfect examples of young Soviet men and women.
The one character in the group who stands out from them was Semyon Zolotarev.
He was much older than the rest of them.
it was actually his 38th birthday, I think, the night that they died.
But he was different to the rest of them.
He was fit.
He'd worked as an instructor.
He'd been in the Altai Mountains.
And there's a lot of, you know, there's conspiracy theories as to why he agreed, because he wasn't a student like the rest of them.
And they weren't all students either, but they'd all been students.
And he had tagged along, if you like, to go on the trip with them.
And is it thought that there might have been some reason behind that?
Well, there's talk of him being a KGB agent.
One of the theories is that they were trying to hand over some radioactive material to Western slies, but it's just a theory, but he was involved in that.
It's quite a convoluted theory, but why you would want to trek miles into the mountains to hand over, you know, it was all under the auspices of the KGB, probably be easier to do it on a street corner in the city than go to all that trouble.
That's just my view of it.
But he'd been in the army.
He'd fought in the Great Patriotic War, as they called it.
And he was a highly decorated soldier.
He was a sergeant and he'd fought in Stalingrad.
So he was quite somebody who could look after himself, basically.
So the innocent explanation of this, if we don't buy a conspiracy theory to do with it, is that this was just somebody who enjoyed, who got off on adventure.
Exactly.
And there is talk that he was a bit of a womanizer.
Whether that's true or not, I can't say.
But one of the thoughts is that there was two girls in the group and he was quite keen on one of them, Zina, who had been going, she was actually involved, romantically involved with the group leader, Igor Dyatlov, but she had also been involved with another member of the group, Doroshenko, before him.
She was a very attractive and vivacious girl and attracted a lot of male attention.
And some of the talk is that he quite liked the look of her, if you like, and tagged along to get to know her better.
Whose idea was the expedition?
Well, the thing is, it was a trip that had been the university, there was the sports club, they were organising trips every winter.
It was an activity that was quite, you know, a lot of people were involved in it.
They actually went north with another group.
But Igor Dyatlov was using it to get his highest rating for that, you know, the category three rating, which is the highest level of difficulty for undertaking that type of trip.
So they were all doing it, if you like, to get the highest rating that they could.
But to do that, they had to plan their trip, approve it, get it approved, undertake the trip, and then they would get that rating when they got back.
You know, they proved they'd undertaken a very difficult trip in extreme circumstances.
So, you know, it was all involved with that.
But they did it.
Igor Yatlov had been up there the year before on another trip, but he'd organized this one with the rest of the group.
And people would interchange, you know, some people would join one group and then decide they didn't want to be with that group and they'd go to another group.
And one thing about this particular trip, there were 10 people on it that set out.
There was meant to have been an 11th member, but he got up late that morning and missed the train, fortunately for him.
The name Dyatlov, he is Igor Dyatlov and this location is Dyatlov.
What's that all about?
Well, after the tragedy, it was named Dyatlov Pass.
Now, it wasn't given the official name, if you like.
Name in anything in Soviet times probably wouldn't have been that easy, but there was a lot of goodwill, if you like, towards people who wanted to, what's the word, commemorate their deaths.
And the area was closed off.
It wasn't actually closed off.
What happened was after the deaths and the discoveries of the bodies, the authorities wouldn't give permits to go up there to anybody unless you had a good reason to be there.
So there was forestry workers there.
The Mansi tribe lived in the area.
So obviously there was people there.
But anybody wanting to go up there had to give a very good reason as to why they would go there.
But all permits were refused for four years after the tragedy.
The first people to go up there went up to put a memorial up there, and they called it Diatlob Pass.
Understood.
But then the name stopped, and it appears on all, it started appearing on maps after that.
So the authorities were quite happy to go along with it.
Now, this is a place that you and I would not choose to go, even for the most adventurous kind of holiday, I don't think, because the conditions there, as we said, are incredibly harsh.
You've got to know what you're doing if you go to a place like that.
Now, in 1959, it was the era of Everest cost.
Sir Edmund Hillary had surmounted Everest some years before that.
So people were used to and equipped for this kind of thing.
What kind of preparations did these nine people make?
Well, you had to be very fit.
That was probably the prime thing.
You needed a knowledge of surviving.
I mean, basically what they were doing was surviving in the wild.
Okay, they had a tent, they carried food with them.
But you needed, to give you an example, I was up there in the summer last year.
And I mean, I'm not a young man anymore, but my pack was 25 kilos.
That's 55 pounds.
The girls on this trip, they were doing it in winter, which is even harder, were carrying packs that was 30 kilos.
So they were carrying heavier packs than I was, 66 pounds.
The men, the young men, were carrying packs that were 40 kilos, which is 88 pounds.
So you had to be extremely fit.
And it was a test of fitness and endurance.
They basically prepared themselves by taking enough food for the trip and anything that they needed to survive in those conditions.
Describe the route and the way that they planned to tackle that route.
Well, they headed north by train from Sverdlovsk.
They went up to a town called Serov, which is about halfway up there.
They were traveling 400 miles north of Sverdlovsk, and they went, they changed trains at Serov, and then they went by train from there to a small town called Ivdel.
From Ivdel, they spent the night in the train station there, and they took a bus to a small village called Vizhai, which is probably about another, I'd say about another 18, 20 miles further north.
From there, they took a lorry to a woodcutter's settlement.
And from the woodcutter's settlement, they then went on foot or on their skis.
They spent the night at an abandoned village there that had been used by geologists.
But from there on, from that geologist's village, it was hard going on foot.
And the 10th member of the group, Yuri Yudin, was ill.
He basically had quite a painful back and the cold wasn't helping him.
So he turned around.
So we know everything they did through the eyewitness of Yuri Yudin up to that night that they were at the abandoned village, which had been used by the geologists.
And although they have diaries, and they kept those diaries up until the last day, and they're sorry, the last night, there's various conspiracy theories that the diaries have been altered to show different things and all the rest of it.
But it basically just shows them making their way up to the mountain itself.
Okay, and of course, in this day and age, then people would be using video cameras and all sorts of things, but this is an era prior to all of that.
And of course, they didn't have, you know, whatever technology we had in the West, they didn't quite have that kind of technology there.
But nevertheless, they were fit people and they knew what they were doing, as we've said.
As far as you're aware, then, when did it all start to go wrong?
Well, sorry, could I just say, although they didn't have technology, they had cameras.
There was four cameras with the group.
And in my new book, there is evidence from a fifth camera.
So they were taking pictures all the way.
And that's what makes this so, the whole story so poignant, if you like, or eerie, because they were taking pictures of themselves right up to the last night.
Okay, well, that does make it very, very bizarre, because clearly, if you're still taking pictures of yourself, your attention is not on any problem that you might have.
So whatever happened from that, it would indicate that it was fairly sudden.
I just want to say something to my listeners now.
Thank you for bearing with me.
We're making this conversation on Skype.
There is a little bit of whining in the background, but I can hear what Keith is saying.
So I hope you can bear with it too.
And Keith, Skype is like that.
But I don't think you've got any equipment on in the background that's making a whining noise.
I think it's just a digital artifact that we're hearing.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so we talked about trying to ascertain when things had gone wrong and from what you just said, clearly a very late stage.
Yeah, they camped at the foot of the mountain on their penultimate day, if you like.
The mountain they were at, there's various names for it.
At the time, it was called elevation 1079 on all the maps, which is the height of the mountain in meters.
It's been, they've remeasured it since.
It's now 109.6, but that's by the by.
But there's a tribe in the area, the Mansi tribe, their name for it was, and I don't speak Mansi, but Kolatsiakal, which is the nearest you can get to it in Roman, you know, sorry, you know, in our, try and speak it phonetically.
But they called it Kolatsiakal, which means dead mountain.
It has been called Mountain of the Dead, which is not quite correct.
But Dead Mountain, they referred to it as that, not because of anything sinister about it, but the Mansi were reindeer herders and hunters, and they had names for everything around their area,
you know, the geographical names, and they were indications of, if you like, Dead Mountain basically meant that there was nothing grew there, and to avoid it in the winter, it was not good for herding reindeer.
They couldn't eat anything up there.
The actual destination of the Diatlov group was Mount O'Torton, which in their language means don't go there.
But that could be taken as a sinister type of warning as well.
But all that meant was in their local language was it's a very difficult place to get to in winter and best avoided.
So, you know, that's how the mystique partially has built up of it.
I could say also that the Russian Diatlov theorists now call Kolat Siakal or Dead Mountain is now known as Mountain of the Nine in memory of the nine people who died there, the members of the group.
It is a difficult Expedition.
It's an area that not just anybody would go to.
But as you said, and as we said a few minutes ago, they were still taking pictures.
The expedition was on course by the sounds of it.
One person through illness had had to return, and that's why we know some of the detail of what happened prior to their demise.
What happened then?
Well, this is where it starts to get a bit convoluted because they had camped at the base of the mountain in the trees and by a small river there.
It's not known why they went up onto the mountain.
Some people think it's because Igor Dyatlov wanted to give them, if you like, a bit more difficulty by going up onto the mountain rather than continuing on the journey at the base of the mountain to go around it, to go to Mount O'Torton, which was their final destination.
So people were thinking that he went up that mountain, which is quite steep the way they approached it, and camped up there, just if you like, to give a little more hardship and a bit more training, if you like, to what they were doing.
So that happened on the night of, sorry, on the morning of the 1st of February.
They packed up everything.
They left a small cachet of food, spare skis.
They had a mandolin with them.
They left all those at the base of the mountain with the intention of coming back to it so they didn't have to carry it up there and carry it up the following mountain.
So anyway, they got up there and the sun was starting to set.
There's photos of them going up the mountain in a line taken from their cameras.
And there's photos of them digging out the snow to pitch their tent just as the sun is setting.
And they were pitching the tent in falling snow.
Up to that point, really, other than those photographs, nobody can say exactly what happened because a couple of hours, at least three or four hours after the last photos were taken of them pitching their tent, something happened that made them slash the side of the tent in a panic.
And people say they ran out, but what the footsteps showed was they slashed the side of the tent to get out.
And then they all made their way down the slope of the mountain down to the tree line, which was a distance of about a mile.
And that's where their bodies were all found.
The first five bodies were found three weeks later.
The remaining four bodies weren't found for another two months after that almost.
So clearly something cataclysmic, catastrophic happened for them to exit the tent in that way.
Well, it must have been something that terrified them because to slash the side of the tent, I mean, it was their safety, area of safety, if you like.
They were using it to keep warm and sleep in.
Once they destroyed that, they had no shelter at all.
So whatever happened happened so fast and must have been so life-threatening that they just literally tore their way out of it to get away from it.
And that's the real start of the mystery, of course, is why did they do that?
People might say, well, why didn't they go out the front of the tent?
But the old Soviet tents were made of thick canvas and the front of the tent was, they used buttons which had covers over the buttons.
So you were having to pull the canvas cover back to unbutton it.
So that would obviously take time.
So that sort of suggests that something either was inside the tent or was using some kind of force that they didn't have to get into the tent.
That's possible.
When they examined, a seamstress looked at the tent and she said that it had been cut from the inside.
So they cut from the inside.
It's possible, it's one of the theories that there was something inside the tent.
In my new book, I have my own theory.
Three of them were outside the tent at the time and warned the others inside to get out as fast as possible.
But it doesn't explain the footsteps leading down the side of the mountain.
The ones that all of them had no shoes or some of them had socks on, some of them were in bare feet, which is even more inexplicable because the temperature was minus 27 degrees and it was thick snow.
Are you aware of the work of David Paulidis on missing people?
Because one of the factors for people who go missing in woodland and remote locations, they very often discard their shoes.
Well, that's called, well, I don't know about the shoes, but what people have talked about is paradoxical undressing, which is where you take your clothes off because the way hypothermia affects you.
I know David Paulides and his work.
Sorry, I don't know him personally, but I know of his work.
But it happens when people are dying of hypothermia.
They start discarding their clothes.
That's not really what happened in this case, though.
So something would have terrified them to the point where they acted counterintuitively.
They knew what was right in that terrain and in those conditions, but something put the fear of something else into them and they acted, as I say, counterintuitively.
They didn't do the right thing.
Well, they must have been in fear of their lives.
You would have been leaving your only place of safety with nothing on your feet, most of them.
To go out in those temperatures, I've never been in minus 27, but I mean, it was minus six here the other day, and that was freezing.
But I wouldn't even begin to think of what it would be like to walk in my bare feet In thick snow, in those temperatures, because you're heading to your certain death.
At some point, once they got over the shock of whatever had happened to them, they must have known they were heading to certain death.
And obviously, that was preferable to whatever had motivated them to behave like that.
How and in what condition were they found?
Well, this is the thing.
There's so many theories about what happened that you have to take it theory by theory almost.
But what happened was when the search party arrived, they found the tent first.
So all the searchers converged on it, but they expected to find them alive.
They thought, well, they've obviously left the tent for some reason or other, followed the footsteps down.
And the following day, they found the first two bodies.
The first two bodies were found by the remains of a fire.
And they were almost naked.
And the fire had obviously long gone out, but they had been so cold and suffering from frostbite that they'd been putting their hands and arms and their legs into the fire to try and warm it up, to try and warm themselves up.
So the cold was killing them.
And obviously putting your feet or your arms into a fire and not feeling anything shows that they were close to death at that point.
The reason they were found semi-naked was because the other members of the group, they must have died first.
The other members of the group had taken clothes of them, theirs, to put on to try and keep themselves warm.
Good Lord.
So extraordinary circumstances.
What was the reaction of the authorities to this?
How did they react?
What did they do?
Yeah, well, could I come on to that in a minute?
And I'll just say what happened after the first two bodies were found.
They then found the body of that was the first two bodies found were Doroshenko and Krivonishenko.
They then found the body of Igor Dyatlov and Zina, who was his girlfriend, in a line going that looked as if they were trying to get back to the tent.
They found them about 900 meters away and they were probably about a third of the way on the slope.
And it was just a few days later, I think it was 10 days later, they found the body of Rustam Slobodin.
All of them were under the snow, but they found his body and he was between Igor Dyatlov and Zina.
And all three of them were in a line.
And what the autopsies showed on all their bodies, those five bodies, were that they had died of hypothermia.
The next four bodies weren't found until the 5th of May.
These are the bodies.
Rustin was found on the 8th of March.
So the search continued.
And then they found the other four bodies in what looked like an area of a snow shelter that they dug out.
But the injuries to them, to two of them in particular, were absolutely horrendous.
The eyeballs were missing of two of them, the female, Luda, and the ex-soldier, Zolotarev.
Their ribs had been basically smashed as if they'd been hit by a car, but with no external markings on them.
And Luda's nose had been flattened as if she'd been punched so hard in the face that her nose had been smashed into her head.
And the other two bodies had injuries where one of them had French parents, Thibault Brignol, his name was, and he had fractures to his skull.
The fourth member there, Kolovatov, he had an injury, an open wound behind his ear.
So they were all found with very strange injuries.
And then, literally within a couple of weeks after that, the whole case was just closed down.
So what the authorities had done, they had appointed a prosecutor, which would be the equivalent of a British or American detective, to start investigating it from Ivdel, which was the nearest town to them, about 70 or 80 miles away.
He was replaced by a guy called Lev Ivanov from Sverdlovsk, who is, if you like, a big city detective, probably with a bit more experience.
He came to investigate it, then he took over the investigation.
But the whole, after those four bodies were found, they were instructed to carry out radiation tests on some of the soil where they were found and on the bodies and their clothes as well.
And there was beta radiation was found.
And what would that suggest?
What would beta radiation suggest in that area?
Beta radiation, what they're saying is that the levels weren't high enough to have killed them, but the bodies had lain in a stream.
The last four bodies were found in a stream.
The thaw had started by May the 5th when their bodies were found.
And you can wash radiation out of clothes with running water, which is what they had been doing.
But it was reckoned that the level of radiation was much higher because there'd been line in the stream and that had washed the radiation away.
But beta radiation can cause cancer.
But where that radiation has come from, nobody knows.
But it was an instruction from the authorities to check for radiation.
So it adds yet another...
I wonder why they would have wanted to look to that as an avenue.
Well, it certainly adds...
I mean, a normal policeman, a police detective, wouldn't find...
But you wouldn't expect a police detective Here or in America or anywhere else for that matter to say we'd better check for radiation.
There was nothing to make you think of it as an instruction from higher authority.
And before the investigation was closed down, before the lid was put on this, was it known whether there were any signs of a pursuit, of a chase?
Well, there was no other footprints.
That's the thing.
The only footprints that were there were believed there were eight to nine footprints starting about 20 yards away from the tent leading down the mountain to where they were found.
But there was no footprints found around where the bodies were.
The footprints petered out before they got to the tree line.
So there was no footprints or animal prints, which is the other thing, you know, in case people thinking, well, maybe they were killed by wild animals, but the way their bodies were, you know, if they'd been attacked by a bear that had been woken up from hibernation, you would have expected limbs to be torn off or scratches, if you like, bite marks, but there was none of that.
So there was no prints there at all, other than their footprints.
You know, when things have happened of this kind that I've looked into, there have been three sorts of explanations for them.
One, cryptozoological, i.e.
some kind of creature that we're not quite familiar with.
Two, extraterrestrial that it might have been something from space.
Three, what were the government-backed military up to?
Well, you've hit the nail right on the head.
That is basically what it boils down to.
I personally opt for the military option because I've studied the Soviet military for 30, 40 years now.
But even though there was a nuclear warhead storage area, which is still there, incidentally, about 70 miles south of the pass at a place called Lesnoy.
But if there'd been some kind of radiation leak from that, then you would expect the whole area to be covered.
But there was no indication of that.
There was an air base about 100 miles east at Uygorsk.
So it could be that there was something, some kind of air defense exercise.
What I put in my latest book is research that has been done on the negatives that they were examined with a high-powered telescope, microscope.
And it looks as if at least three of the cameras were photographing objects in the night sky that night.
But just because they're photographing something in the night sky doesn't mean to say that's what killed them.
but it's an indication that something may have been there.
You see, the radiation would lean you towards a military explanation of some sort, but the horrific injuries almost speaks of...
It almost sounds like that kind of thing.
Well, one of the weirdest things about the whole story was the second female, the one who is found with terrible injuries where her ribs were smashed, Luda.
Her tongue, in the autopsy, her tongue was missing, the tongue and the root.
It doesn't say it was torn out or cut out, just missing.
And that's one of the most hotly debated items of the whole story, because none of the others had any tongue missing.
She was found in the stream, but so were the other bodies as well.
There was three other bodies, but there was nothing about their tongues being missing.
So there's a theory that her tongue was cut out.
She was the most vocal and outspoken of the group, apparently.
But again, there's no real answer for it.
Now, the authorities, as you say, closed the lid firmly down on this.
I can think of two reasons for why that might be, and they're at variance with each other.
One, the authorities knew what happened and didn't want it getting out.
Two, the authorities didn't know what happened and didn't want to create alarm and despondency.
Exactly.
Exactly.
You've hit the nail on the head with that as well.
What happened was the report on the radiation was dated the 27th of May 1959, and the case was ordered to be closed down by somebody from Moscow on the 28th, the following day.
And what about the families?
If I was the family of, if I was a mother or father or some relative of one of these people, Soviet Union or no Soviet Union, I would probably leave no stone unturned until I got a few answers.
Well, you must remember, I mean, you studied the Soviet Union yourself.
It's not a place where you put your head too far above the parapet.
But in my second book, I have given details of an interview, not that I cared, I was done with journalists of the Lev Ivanov's boss.
And he said that both him and Levy Vanov had the parents sitting in front of them, calling them fascists and all sorts of names.
And that they were, he said he didn't know what to say to them.
He felt bad, but he'd been based both him and Levy Vanov.
And the overall boss of the prosecutor's office there, Nikolai Klinov, they were told to say it was an accident.
And the best thing they could come up with was an unknown compelling force.
But they had the parents sitting in front of them, calling them all sorts of names and saying, what sort of people are you?
It must have been very hard for them.
The one thing I got the impression of of both Lev Ivanov with an article he wrote in 1990 and his boss Okishov, should I say, in 2013 was that they were trying to atone for it by what they were saying in the interviews.
They still didn't say what exactly they thought it was, But everything for Okishov, everything to him seemed to point to some kind of military test.
And when you went out there, Keith, did you have doors opened for you?
Was it fairly transparent or was it difficult to get information when you went out there?
Well, the people I'm with were through the Diatlov Foundation, so you were with like-minded people.
But I remember on my first trip there with my translator, I thought, being a rather naive type of guy, I said to her, why don't we just go?
Because it was thought that the KGB have their own files, you see.
So I said, well, it's a new Russia.
It's now the FSB, it's called.
I said to her, well, can we not make an appointment to go and see them and, you know, maybe have a discussion over it, meet somebody senior.
They might have a public relations guy or something.
Anyway, she just laughed at the suggestion.
She said, you're wasting your time.
And we were actually going to the other, because they're not all buried together in the same cemetery.
Two of them are buried in another cemetery.
We were on our way to that cemetery and we passed the headquarters of the FSB.
And my translator said to me, look at them.
She said, can you imagine them inviting you in for a cup of tea?
It was like looking at, well, I don't want to, somebody might hear this in Russia.
I don't want to be too rude, but they weren't the sort of guys who you'd sit down and have a chat with, put it that way.
Well, you know, I understand your reticence to say any more because you might want to go back and do some more research.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so a great mystery, and it's a mystery that cannot be expunged from the minds of the people there in Russia, I wouldn't have thought.
How do people look back on this now?
Well, there seems to be two lines of thought in Russia itself.
The older people especially, their attitude is the military are here to protect us and look after us.
Accidents happen from time to time.
Why do you have to go digging it all up if it was an accident?
You know, what's the point?
I mean, over here, it's all about compo, of course, etc.
But over there, the attitude is let sleeping dogs lie with some people.
But of course, you know, it's very hard to envisage any kind of accident that can have somebody having their tongue ripped out.
No, well, absolutely.
But yeah, I agree.
That's true.
But there is that line of thinking.
But it's also what I found with the younger people there is that I've spoken to about it is that it happened a long time ago.
Why aren't they, you know, what's the harm in opening up the files, you know, and clearing this up once and for all and putting people's minds at rest.
And, you know, there is a strong line of thinking that way.
But, you know, you'll probably know yourself there's a lot of new legislation in Russia now about talking anything to do with the military.
You know, I give the example in my book of a military, a guy who'd worked for the GRU who was sentenced to 40.
He'd left the GRU and he thought his work on satellites would enable him to get a job in Sweden.
And he'd been five or six years out of, you know, after he'd left his employment with him and he sent his CV to Sweden, to a Swedish company.
And it got to the ears of the FSP.
He was taken to court and sentenced to 14 years, you know, for divulging military secrets, if you like.
It was reduced on appeal to six years, but it still stands.
So even if there are people who do know, you can understand their reluctance to talk.
You've done a lot of research and done a lot of writing about this, Keith, and it's all commendable.
You know so much about this.
Is there much further you can go?
Well, there isn't because, you know, there's Valentin Yakimov here, he knew the Dyatlov group and he's done a lot of research.
He did the work on the negatives and he's allowed me to use them in my book.
Now, he's dug as deep as anybody.
I mean, there's plenty of people who've been doing digging, but you can only go so far.
You know, the files that have been opened for public consumption in the Sverdlin, you know, in Yekaterinburg, there's a lot of people say, well, that's not the original file.
We do know that the gentleman who turned up from Moscow at the end took away the original file with him.
So whether that came back, but it's highly debatable.
And people have written to President Putin about it.
And there seems to be a stock response that goes in a big circle.
You write to President Putin to say, can you use your influence to clear this matter up once for all?
It goes back to the prosecutor's office in Yekaterinburg.
A standard reply then gets sent out and saying this case was closed in May 1959.
And until further evidence comes to light, it'll remain closed.
There's no reason to reopen the case.
So by the sounds of it, then, Keith, the only ones who will, you know, in the absence of any other diagnostic tool or new evidence or whistleblower, the only ones who know what really happened were those poor nine people who perished in that bizarre way.
Basically.
And I believe if it was a military accident, I don't think it was done deliberately.
I think it was an accident and it wasn't found out till afterwards.
But don't forget that people who were, I don't know, in their 20s, 30s, 40s in those days are now either dead or old men.
You know, so the actual eyewitnesses to it are passing away now, you know, who may have been involved in it.
So it's all going to pass into history and all that you'll be left with is possibly a file somewhere.
The only time I think that this might have been really sold was when Yeltsin took power, because he had been at the same university at UPI that the Diatlov group had been at.
Obviously, he was there later, but he was a big fan of ski tourism.
And Yeltsin was quite, he wanted to be open and, you know, he wasn't trying to hide things.
He was the only hope that, you know, the case might have been solved, I think.
You never know, maybe further down the road.
I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, though.
Should have asked you this at the beginning, but let's ask you it at the end.
What is the enduring fascination of this for you?
Why have you taken your research as far as you have?
Well, I hate not being.
To me, it's a problem that has to be solved.
And I just cannot get to the bottom of it.
You know, with other mysteries and, you know, I was involved in the Flannon Isles, the mystery of the three missing lighthouse.
And you can work out more or less what happened with a lot of them.
This one, and I say it, I've said it in a few interviews.
It's like a committee sat down of 20 or 30 people and said, how can we make this so complicated that nobody will ever get to the bottom of it?
And that's just what it's like, because even my theory has got flaws in it.
Every theory you come up with has got flaws with it that cannot be answered.
And at some level, Keith, do you think that somebody somewhere, and they may not be alive now, so they knew, but if they're alive, they know, exactly what happened?
I believe there is.
Without a doubt, I believe there is somebody who knows.
Whether they're alive now, I don't know, but I do believe there is somebody, more than one person who knows.
Have a look.
Sorry, I don't want to keep plugging my book, but it's the only way I've done it.
No, please do.
I mean, it's fascinating.
I want to read it now.
Yeah, it's the only thing that pays my trip because the last trip cost me a small fortune.
But what I suggest to any of your listeners, have a read of my book and look at the interview with Yevgeny Okishov at the end and make your own mind up.
Because I think he knew, he's still alive, by the way.
He's in his mid-90s.
He lives in Moldova.
I think he probably, possibly has guessed what happened, but didn't want to give too much away.
And I think there's probably more people, possibly in the KGB.
I suspect there's a file in the FSB because Okishov even says that the KGB, with their powers, would have been able to find out more than he could have done as an ordinary prosecutor.
And in your home in Lovely Hunger, for there in West Berkshire, do you sneakingly hope that one day somebody is going to send you an email or a letter that will lift the lid on this for you?
That would be my dream if that happened.
It would be lovely, but I don't think it's going to happen, unfortunately.
Well, Keith, it's not often that I speak to somebody who's done this level of research on a thing and has this passion for it.
And you clearly do.
And thank you very much for making time for me.
You've got a website about all of this because I've been looking at it today.
Yeah.
What's the website?
www.diatlov-pass-incident.com.
And there's pictures of the actual mountain when I was up there, the trip up there, of interspersed pictures of the bodies when they were found at the different locations.
There's pictures of Yekaterinburg.
So there's plenty in there.
I also had a medium contacted me and he wrote an 11-page document.
That's on my website as well.
And what did the medium make of it?
Well, it's quite a long document, but he, without giving too much away, basically what he said was that there were strangers outside the tent speaking in a foreign language.
So have a read of it.
Wow.
Boy, it poses more questions than it answers, really, doesn't it?
Keith, thank you so much for that.
And you put together a wonderful narrative, and thank you for giving me time.
Yeah, thank you, Howard.
Thank you very much for having me.
Take care, and thank you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Fascinating and disturbing stuff from Keith McCluskey.
I'll put a link to him and his work on my website at theunexplained.tv.
That's also the place to go.
The website designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot.
By the way, if you'd like to send me an email, any guest suggestions, anything you want to say.
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So, until next we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
And please, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
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