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Sept. 9, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:07:29

Edition 481 - Keith McCloskey

An update from Berkshire researcher Keith McCloskey who has updated his excellent book on the Dyatlov Pass Mystery - how did a group of fit, young hikers die in terror in the Ural Mountains?

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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 still the Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for all of your emails, for your messages of support, and also for your donations if you've made one recently at my website, theunexplained.tv.
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	Okay, we're going to go into the Dyatlov Pass mystery now.
	And before we get to Keith McCluskey, who spent a good portion of his life researching this, he is a very dedicated researcher about this.
	Let me just tell you the basic story.
	We're talking about nine Russian hikers.
	The year is 1959.
	They died in the Ural Mountains at the beginning of February of that year.
	They were experienced.
	They knew the outdoors.
	They were all from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, educational establishment.
	They'd established a camp on the slopes of Kolatsiaki in an area now called Dyaklov Pass, named in honor of the group's leader, Igor Dyaklov.
	During the night, something caused them to tear their way out of their tents and flee the campsite that they had, all of them inadequately dressed for the conditions, heavy snowfall, sub-zero temperatures, and their bodies subsequently found.
	Many mysteries connected with this, but the core mystery is how could something like that happen to a bunch of young, fit, trained, experienced people in an area that, yes, was forbidding, but they should have been well prepared for.
	And it's a mystery, information about which has been hard to get.
	Certainly in the Soviet Union era, it was hard to find out about such things.
	Even now, it's hard to get information out.
	Keith McCluskey in Newbury, Berkshire, has spent a lot of his time researching this story.
	He's brought his book about it up to date, so we're going to be talking with Keith in just a second here.
	The book is called Journey to Dyaplov Pass, An Explanation of the Mystery Second Edition.
	Keith has also written a book that we might, if we have time, just touch on, Unsolved Aviation Mysteries that we talked about on the radio a little while ago.
	If we don't get to talk about that, we'll come back to it at another time.
	Thank you very much for being part of my show.
	Let's get to Newbury, Berkshire now, in the same time zone, just 50 miles away from where I'm speaking, and say hello again to Keith McCluskey.
	Keith, thank you for coming back on my show.
	Pleasure to be here.
	Thank you.
	How would you describe yourself, Keith, out there in Berkshire?
	You know, you always seem to me to be a sort of gentleman investigator, come author.
	That's what a way of putting it.
	The first time I've ever been called out, I think I might get a business card with that, actually.
	But, you know, you do this for the love of it.
	And as you told me, this is an enduring mystery.
	How many years have you spent researching this?
	God, 10 years now, I think.
	And what was it about Dyatlov that grabbed hold of you?
	Well, I've always been interested in all things Russian anyway.
	And there was the military aspect to it, which first drew my attention to the story.
	But one thing I'll say about Dyatlov is it's almost to me the granddaddy of mysteries because there's so many theories about it.
	You know, as I say, there's 75 different theories at the last count.
	Some are way out there, of course, and some are more plausible.
	But I don't think there's anything that has such a variety of theories about what could have happened.
	And when you think about it, nobody's ever come up with an answer.
	You think, and I said this in my updated book, you think of all the people that have actually studied this, there must be thousands of people who have looked at it, and not one person has come up with a credible answer that answers all the queries about each theory.
	I think what we can say is that nobody's come up with an answer to this that you cannot find another explanation to, if you know what I'm saying.
	Nobody has come up with an answer that you cannot negate.
	Yes.
	And that is the frustration of it, but it's also part of the enduring mystery.
	One commentator, I read a blog about all of this, wrote these words, and I thought they were pretty good.
	There is likely to be something perpetually insoluble about the mystery that will always leave room for doubt, which is a nicer way of saying what I just said.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	I fully agree.
	And I also say that if they solved it tomorrow, you'd still have people wouldn't believe it.
	They wouldn't agree.
	Well, I mean, we're just about to get the official verdict of the prosecutor general's office in Russia telling us it's an avalanche, and there's plenty of people who don't agree with that.
	Right.
	And we'll go through that as we go through the various explanations and also what you've brought out in the new book.
	For those who are new to this, and there are people joining me all the time and people who won't be aware of Dyatlov, Let's tell the story, and it's best if you tell it because you know it far better than I do.
	This is the late 1950s, it's the old Soviet Union, it's the Ural Mountains, which is to this very day and in all eras a very forbidding place.
	And a bunch of people who get together, just as they would get together today, to go on an adventure.
	A bunch of people who are well prepared for that adventure.
	Yeah, it's a group that set out from Sverdlovsk in 1959 to head up into the northern Urals to basically test their abilities in ski tourism, which you could call it orienteering and hiking and skiing all rolled into one.
	It's ski tourism over here as you think.
	Everybody gets on a plane and goes to a ski resort in Europe to get drunk for a couple of weeks and do a bit of skiing.
	But over there, in those days, it was a real test of your fitness and your abilities.
	And it had military applications as well, which is why it was encouraged, if you like, by the authorities.
	All universities would have a department that would cater for ski tourism.
	And it would be encouraged that people would take part in it.
	But anyway, they headed off north into the Urals and into the northern Ural Mountains.
	And of the group of 10 of them, there were two females and the rest were all male.
	And one of them turned around and came back because of severe, well, I say severe, but illness, basically.
	And the others continued.
	And as most people will know, they didn't return.
	And the search parties eventually found their tent abandoned with sort of tears in the side of it, as if it had been abandoned in a rush with footprints going down the mountain.
	But they had left the tent without any preparation for the elements outside of severe cold, minus 27, minus 30 degrees centigrade, which really, to go out in socks is certain death and not enough, they weren't even clothed properly.
	They had left the tent in a real rush.
	But the footprints showed that they had walked rather than run down the mountain.
	And that's where it all starts, is what happened to them, because some of them were found with severe injuries, internal injuries, but without outside markings, injuries that looked as if they'd been hit by a car.
	And the others had died from the cold.
	So you've got really two groups of injuries, which are almost inexplicable.
	And one of the women had her tongue ripped out, I believe.
	Well, her tongue was missing.
	You know, if we keep it official, that it just said her tongue was missing.
	But there's all sorts of theories about that as to whether, you know, she was, how can we say, tortured, possibly.
	Other people say it was, she was lying in water in the stream, which had thawed out by the time her body was found.
	Other people say it was microorganisms had eaten the tongue away.
	But again, there's no real explanation for it.
	And the tongues of all the others, some of them have their eyes missing, but there's various explanations for that as well.
	But everything that happened to them raises questions, raises several questions, none of which have a single answer.
	That's the enduring mystery of it.
	And one of the things that I was going to come to later, but we might as well come to it now, since you were talking about the condition of the bodies, is that the autopsy reports, the post-mortem reports, you say are fragmented, contradictory, all different.
	And they have caused some of the confusion about this case over the decades.
	They have.
	Well, apart from anything else, one of the most peculiar things about it all is the checking of clothes and organs for radiation.
	If you were a policeman, I don't know, say you're up in the Cairn Gorms and a party of nine students from Edinburgh University had gone missing and they found their bodies, some with weird injuries, and brought them back, checking their bodies for radiation is probably the very last thing you'd even think of.
	That's the strange thing about it.
	So why would you bother checking clothes and organs for radiation?
	Unless it was an area where military experiments were being done, which is, of course, one of the speculations, and those experiments maybe involved radiation.
	But that takes us into the whole web of theories that we'll get into.
	The location that they picked to go to, it got a nickname.
	It has a nickname, Dead Mountain.
	In fact, that's the title, I believe, of Donny Icar's book about all of this in recent years.
	You say that that title, Dead Mountain, is not entirely fair, that it's not as forbidding as that suggests.
	No, I mean, locally, it was known as Elevation 1079.
	I mean, it's been since redesignated up to 1096, which is the height of it in meters.
	But it is now known amongst Russians, certainly in King Katerinburg, as the Mountain of the Nine is what they call it now, apparently.
	But Dead Mountain, you know, there's some dispute over Dead Mountain because the local Mansi apparently didn't call it strictly Dead Mountain.
	The idea was to give the impression of a place where nothing actually grew.
	and then you run into another thing with the Mansi where they said that it was a sacred mountain.
	But one of the things I've done is I've been in touch with two Mansi professors, professors of the Mansi way of life, who have said that there's nothing that they have come across that have said that it was actually a sacred mountain, because that's one of the theories as to they were killed because there were two women in the group who shouldn't have been on there.
	But the thing with the Mansi is there are sacred mountains in the northern Urals, and the punishment used to be for anybody transgressing on those mountains was they were sentenced to death.
	Okay, not just females, but males as well.
	But anybody.
	And we have to say that the Mansi were indigenous people there.
	And one of the theories that we'll get into is that the Mansi may have been behind this.
	I mean, it's one of the less plausible theories, but theory it has been.
	Why did they choose to go there?
	Presumably they could have chosen to go to other places.
	Why was that the place they wanted to be?
	Well, again, there's differing views of that.
	Everybody says why the leader of the group, Igor Diatlov, had led them up there when they were down in the valley of the Auspere.
	When I went there a couple of years back, we actually camped at their last campsite before they went up onto the mountain.
	And it's quite a trek.
	It's a hard graft going up.
	I mean, they were super fit.
	I wouldn't describe myself as that.
	But the sensible thing would have been to have continued round the actual mountain because they were on their way to a mountain that was further on, Mount O'Torton.
	And there was easier ways of getting to it.
	And even when you go up from where they were camped that final night, not the night they died, the night before, even when you go up there, you can continue down what is now the Diatlov Pass, but they even deviated from that up onto the ridge.
	I mean, there's photos of it in my book.
	You can see where they've come up, but they could have had a much easier route in two separate ways to get to their final destination.
	So why did they do that?
	Were they trying to test their abilities?
	That's the theory that Igor Dyatlov was, because they were all basically tested, pushing themselves to the limit.
	And it was supposedly, it's thought, a test of their abilities.
	It was, if you like, an instructor throwing in an extra difficulty into a task that they've got, you know, to see how they cope with it.
	And it's quite plausible.
	It is quite plausible.
	And yet, you said there was one person who, through illness, turned back.
	I think that person was Yuri Yudin.
	Is that right?
	That's correct.
	Yeah, Yuri Yudin.
	Who I think is still alive or may still be alive.
	No, no, he died a couple of years, a few years back.
	Okay, but he reported that everything was fine at the point he left them.
	And I think he left them sort of halfway.
	That there was absolutely nothing deviant about that expedition.
	There was nothing to suggest that there was anything amiss.
	Up to that point, it was just another trek up into the mountains, if you like.
	It was as normal as normal could be.
	From that day forward, although there's diaries and photographs, nobody knows really what happened because there's all sorts of theories flowing around it that the diaries have been falsified from when Nudin left, that some of the photos have been falsified.
	It gets ridiculous after a while because, I mean, I try to keep an open mind on it, but there's people on some forums who've said, you know, look, they've compared photographs and said, look at the picture of, you know, this shoe in relation to that ski.
	This is obviously false.
	And I think some people take it a bit too far, to be honest.
	Okay.
	There was a suggestion that I read, and I hadn't heard this one before.
	And I don't know what party affiliation, whether they had to have, you know, strict and loyal affiliation to the Communist Party to be allowed to do this.
	Presumably they did.
	But there was a suggestion that maybe they were trying to escape to the West.
	Well, that was a rumor that was put around the university before.
	And that's what's suspicious about it.
	It was a rumor put around the university that they were trying to make their way to the West.
	But it's a peculiar route to take when you think about it.
	Because if you said, well, I'm going to try and escape to the West from here I am in the middle of the Urals, you'd probably head south because it'd be a lot easier rather than head north.
	Because even where they were, there was 600 miles to go up to the coastline, which was covered in ice.
	And I think well over 1,000 miles to even get to the Norwegian border.
	And all the borders were heavily guarded anyway.
	So you could say, well, they were trying to head up further north to, I don't know, meet up with a western plane or a boat.
	But of course, it was all iced in.
	Why would you travel 600 miles to where they died with another 600 miles on top of that to go before you even reached the coastline?
	That doesn't make sense.
	And would you be taking jolly photographs of your expedition?
	I've seen 33 of those photographs online.
	And they all look very happy.
	In fact, those photographs could have been taken in any era.
	They could have been taken by people who went to Chamonix this year or Austria this year.
	They all look contemporary.
	They all look happy.
	They just look like young people out on an adventure.
	Yeah, enjoying themselves.
	Yeah, I mean it was hard work, but they were just a happy group and mucking around and just enjoying life, if you like.
	They were away from their studies and life was quite restrictive in communist times for younger people and it was a chance to let their hair down and get away from it all.
	And don't forget the whole society, not that any of them were anti-communist, but it was a society that was riddled with informers apart from anything else.
	So it was a chance to just get away from it all and be themselves.
	Yep, which a lot of people would have done similarly, I guess, in the same situation.
	Something we didn't talk about the last time we spoke about this is that they got to know apparently a group of school children on the way.
	And the school children were so disturbed about their disappearance that they wrote to Moscow asking for some information and some answers about what happened to their friends.
	They never got replies, apparently.
	No, no.
	I mean, even the relatives, well, school children certainly didn't, but even the relatives were, when they were delayed coming back when time went on, you had to allow a little bit of leeway.
	You couldn't go up into the mountains and say, we'll be back after an 80-mile trek through the mountains at such and such a point at 7.30 on Sunday.
	You have to allow a little leeway for the weather and problems on the way.
	But as the day started to pass, Igor Diatlov was supposed to send a telegram when he reached civilization, if you like, to let them know that they got back out of the mountains and he didn't.
	And the relatives were pushing to try and get some action as to what was going on.
	And they were being basically fobbed off.
	And it was only after several days had passed that there was talk of search parties going up.
	But it's almost as if there was a deliberate kind of delay.
	What else was going on there?
	We've talked a lot about military operations there.
	As far as we know, what sorts of military operations happened there?
	Were they army land expeditions?
	Were they, from what I've read, the testing of military aircraft?
	What was going on in that area?
	Well, finding that out is the $64,000 question because anything to do with the military, even from those times, is difficult to find out.
	But I've explained a couple of theories.
	The most common one is rockets.
	But you see, the two rocket testing sites, the ICBMs and even the shorter, the medium-range missiles, was much further south.
	And all the missile sort of firings, if you like, were to the east, not to the north.
	So it wasn't near any sort of known missile grounds, if you like.
	So it's odd that people think that a missile had come down, but it's not implausible because a number of people have said there was a moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and that they've moved some of it up to the Ural Mountains to do it secretly because satellites hadn't come in by that point.
	And although you had U-2 overflights, they were only very sketchy.
	So it was a place where you could do things secretly from a military point of view because it also wasn't known to the NATO and the Americans.
	They knew where the missile testing bases were further south, and they could keep an eye on it.
	I mean, what I've said in the book, one of the missiles was an R-5, and it had several variants, and that had a range of 750 miles.
	And they experimented with all sorts of different warheads.
	And one of the warheads that they did experiment with was one that carried liquid radiation.
	And it's quite possible that that may have been fired from anywhere in the Urals region and come down there.
	And there was the warhead carried radiation, but could have exploded to see where the spread of radiation, which is maybe why the radiation tests were done.
	But if they were aware of a blast, or they'd seen something come down close to them, or they knew that it was in the process of coming down, they wouldn't have exited the tents at a walking pace.
	If you see something that's crashing to earth, or something's just exploded near you, you run like hell.
	Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
	But you see, another thing, if there had been some kind of exercise going on up there, there's always, I mean, I've covered other military possibilities in it.
	But if there'd been an exercise, let's say there'd been an exercise with some explosions, but they were a bit of a distance away.
	And they heard an explosion, they tore their way out of the tent and stood there and sort of thought, well, what the hell was that?
	And then there was another explosion, still a bit of a distance away.
	And somebody said, look, we'd better get the hell out of here without running, but they maybe started walking fast.
	That's a possibility.
	It doesn't necessarily answer all the questions, but if you're on a hill and you think, well, I've somehow landed in the middle of a military exercise and that exercise is getting closer, you would expect, okay, maybe you might run, but you might start walking quickly because you think you're safe enough because it's far enough away and you're just putting yourself out of danger.
	But having said that, some of them had, you know, socks on and no footwear at all.
	So you're invited almost certain death by doing that in those temperatures.
	And if it was something military that they got caught up in, then in all probability, the military would have found them.
	And the military wouldn't have left them to be found.
	No, I don't.
	the thing is, with the injuries that they'd sustained, I mean, there was talk of the chest injuries, to two of them, certainly, being caused by a blast, which wouldn't necessarily leave any external marking, just the sheer pressure of the blast.
	And there's various weapons that have high concussive effects that wouldn't necessarily, you know, the others that had died.
	If you wanted an autopsy, not to give all the facts, you could say, well, he obviously died of the cold, but his eardrums could have been shattered.
	And, you know, there's some concussive blasts which cause your lungs to explode and your eardrums to shatter.
	So it may have been something like that that killed all of them, an air blast.
	It's possible.
	But again, you know, they're all lying there.
	The military find them.
	They'd have to say, well, look, you know, there's been an awful accident here.
	So what happens?
	There must have been KGB involvement.
	I don't see how there could not have been.
	They were responsible for cleaning up anything like that.
	And of course, at the height of the Cold War, would you want, I mean, no military likes details of accidents getting out because it shows them as pretty incompetent.
	If there had been an accident and they'd all died, your average Russian might be saying, well, you're supposed to be protecting us against the capitalists in the West, and you can't even stop yourselves killing nine of our best students.
	So do you believe that the KGB was involved in covering up whatever it was?
	I don't see how they could not have been involved because even in for whatever reason there was, if you take the rumor that they were trying to escape to the West, well, that's KGB involvement straight away.
	People, they were the ones that had the oversight of security in the Soviet Union.
	So I don't see how they could not have been involved.
	There must have been.
	And, you know, even from the point of view of how people would consume this story, you know, that had to be news managed, didn't it?
	You know, whatever had gone on there, and we still don't entirely know, in that era, they would have wanted to, because these were representatives of the nation, young, bright people.
	They represented the spirit of the modern Soviet Union.
	So they would want to control how that news got out.
	Yeah, but don't forget, in the Soviet Union, they decided what news was published.
	And it doesn't matter what it was.
	I've said in my book, there was a massive explosion.
	And this was in 1983, I think it was, of almost the entire missile stops of the Northern Fleet up near Murmansk.
	And an admiral died in one of the blasts.
	And the newspapers reported it as died at work.
	So, you know, as if he'd had a heart attack or he met with, you know, something had fallen on him instead of being blown to smithereens by a stock of missiles.
	And wouldn't you also think the Moscow phone directory was a state secret.
	So, you know, they decided what news was going to go out and it didn't matter what happened.
	So this has made all researchers' job all the more harder because there's been news management going on.
	One of the things we have to clear up is why did they camp where they camped?
	Because you say that they did not camp in a logical location.
	Well, it didn't seem logical because they were.
	I've been up on the location where, as I say, there's a photo of it on page 44 of my book, but I'll send you a picture of it.
	And it just didn't make any sense.
	It was like looking at a dart.
	My impression of it is it was like a dartboard and they just throw on a dart and thought, well, we'll camp there.
	I'm looking at the, I've actually got page 44 open here, Keith.
	Yeah, you can see these black and white photographs, it almost looks like you're camping in the lee of a hill in the Lake District in the UK.
	Yeah, it does, yeah.
	And it's the land, it's a very gentle slope.
	That's the top of the ridge in the top picture is the ridge is there.
	That's the one that comes down from the mountain.
	So they weren't actually under the mountain.
	They were further along the ridge, and they were quite close to the top of it.
	But they could have camped anywhere along there.
	The actual location itself just didn't make any sense.
	It wasn't near any shelter or there was no rock outcrop.
	There was nothing.
	It was just like they said, well, okay, we'll camp here and plonk themselves down in a right bang of the top of a mountain.
	Well, not of the mountain, but of the ridge.
	It really didn't make much sense at all to me.
	Now, one of my listeners, Guy, sums up the questions that we're going to be looking into, and we've already talked around.
	Guy wants to know, as everybody who's ever investigated this wants to know, why did they leave the tent?
	How come they were found in different places, in various states of undress and with different sorts of injuries, and some with strange skin discoloration.
	As Guy rightly says, it's a very tragic and strange incident.
	That's why people like you and like me and like thousands of others have been interested over the years.
	So let's start with what made them exit the tent in atrocious conditions, not properly clothed.
	That we've established.
	They didn't put on the gear that they had that would have protected them from the cold.
	So something made them exit in a hurry, but didn't make them necessarily run away.
	Well, do you know I read an interesting line on that from somebody who contacted me.
	He said that there's no reason why you would leave the safety of your tent in freezing conditions without protection.
	And he said the most logical explanation is that you were having a gun pointed at you, which to me actually makes a lot of sense because if the person said run or I'm going to shoot you, you'd run.
	But if somebody was pointing a gun at you and said, get out and walk down there, you would do it, wouldn't you?
	Almost as if they were marched out.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	I thought that was actually quite a good way of putting it.
	I've never thought of that before.
	But you know, whether, But were there signs that anybody else had been present, as far as you know?
	Well, it comes back to the nine pairs of footprints, doesn't it, that everybody talks about.
	But that theory, not theory, but that explanation has been rubbished by a few people who have said that when they found the tent, people started descending on it from all angles.
	So the footprints would have been mixed up.
	There are a few photos of some of the footprints, but a lot of people descended on the area quite quickly so that everything would have been mashed up to bits.
	So the idea that there was definitely nine pairs of footprints is open to question.
	But the other thing that occurred to me was, and we go back to the Mansi theory on it, is that nowhere have I found anything, and I didn't even do it, none of us did it while we were there, was walk up to the ridge and look over the other side of it.
	Because it could have been that somebody had approached them from the other side of the ridge, come down to the tent and march them out, whether it was a group of Mansi who had cheesed off with them, coming into their area, disturbing their sacred places.
	And I don't necessarily mean the mountain there.
	There's something else I'll come onto.
	But whoever had forced them out could have come up over the ridge because there's no, I haven't seen anything that said that the other side of the ridge was investigated.
	And there was any, there's this, the prevailing wind there comes from the west and it blows all the snow off the ridge and it blows it away on the other side of it.
	So any footprints would have been gone within a couple of days.
	Right.
	And you said that not necessarily the mountain that was sacred, but something else that they might have intruded upon?
	Yeah, one of the things when I was finding more out about the Mansi, because the general impression was that the Mansi were too nice to have done it.
	Well, according to the research I've done and spoken to these professors of the Mansi way of life, the Mansi were actually had a really hard time leading up to the war from when the Bolsheviks took over because they were viewed as, some of them viewed the central authorities, viewed them as savages to be civilized.
	And they were treated pretty appallingly.
	So the idea that there was a lot of goodwill from, I think the Mansi did as they were told, but whether there was goodwill there, I don't know.
	But it turns out that there were spirits, water, one, the Mansi worshipped all aspects of the natural world.
	And rivers contained spirits.
	And the river Lozva, which goes on up into Mount O'Torton, had water spirits.
	And women were not allowed anywhere near it, near the river, on the banks of it.
	Now, I know the river was frozen, but women were supposed to stay away from it.
	And it could be that they had followed the Lozva for part of it, and it had been assumed that the women in the group had transgressed the place where the water spirits were, and that that's why they were punished, if you like.
	But I would have thought that any investigation, especially a hardline KGB investigation, would have identified that if there'd been maybe a group of renegade people who decided that these intruders had gone one step too far, it would have been very hard to keep that secret, wouldn't it?
	Well, yeah, I would have thought so.
	But the investigated, I mean, they took statements from the Mansi, but they were all dismissed pretty quick.
	And the impression I got was that they thought, well, it's not the Mansi that have done it, because they guessed that there was something else involved, probably involving the military.
	You know, because they were going to go back up there to have another good look around the area, and they were stopped from doing it.
	That's when the case was closed down.
	Right.
	So again, that adds to the mystery.
	Ongoing.
	Radiation traces.
	You said that they were tested for radiation, and one of the explanations over the years was that they may have shown signs of radiation because of the mantles or lamps that they were using that contained thorium.
	Yes.
	Yeah, but the amount of thorium that would have been required would have been, I can't remember the exact percentages, but it would have been in terms of hundreds and hundreds of percent for the thorium to have actually been responsible for the radiation that was found in the clothes.
	Could they have been fleeing an avalanche?
	Well, but again, look at the picture.
	There's about, what, 30 feet up to the top of the ridge.
	There may have been a snow slab moved down, but would you run away from the small, It's not level, obviously, but it's a very gentle slope.
	But the gradation doesn't look like it's capable of providing an avalanche.
	No, no, and neither would there be the weight of the snow there, because, and this has been discussed by a few of the expert climbers that were involved in the searches.
	They said that with the prevailing winds on the ridge there, the wind blows the snow away on both sides from the top of the ridge, so there wouldn't be enough snow there anyway to provide enough weight for an avalanche.
	But let's face it, it was dark, and maybe they thought that they weren't sure exactly how high they were or how far from the ridge.
	They must have had some idea, but it was dark and maybe they got scared.
	It's possible.
	But I think if you were fleeing an avalanche, I don't know, I've never been in that situation, I hope I never am.
	You would find time to put something warm on.
	Well, apart from anything else, if you started to flee an avalanche, even if you went a little distance and you realized your feet were freezing and you only had a pair of socks on, you would actually, I think I would.
	I might think, I'm going to take a chance and go back and get something, some footwear and a couple of jackets.
	If I knew the terrain that I was dealing with and the conditions that I was in, which they did, then yes, of course you would.
	Now, one of my listeners, Connor, talks and alludes to a fairly recent investigation that suggests they died of hypothermia.
	And one of the signs of hypothermia that we've seen in people who go missing in wild places in North America and various other places is so-called paradoxical undressing.
	It's where people are freezing cold and yet they remove their clothes.
	Could that, on any level, tie into this?
	It's possible, but the clothes that were removed from the two first bodies that they found by the cedar tree were found on the others.
	Luda, you know, one of the females was wearing clothes from one of the two who they were almost naked.
	And the belief is that they died.
	They'd already succumbed to the cold.
	And that I suppose it's a little bit ghoulish.
	You think, well, he's not going to need those clothes.
	I'll have them because I'm freezing to death as well.
	So this indicates that something made them leave the tents and not want to go back to the extent that they were prepared to perish on the slope.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, but just going back to the person with the gun, if somebody was standing up there, say a group was standing up there and they all had guns pointed at them and said, you know, you walk down to the bottom.
	If you come back up here, we'll shoot you.
	You'd be inclined to stay down there until you thought it was maybe safe in the morning to, you know, see if they were still there and go back to try and get some clothes.
	But obviously they didn't make it.
	You know, the severe cold killed them, which could have been the intention of somebody who forced them down there.
	So they were forced into a situation where the conditions would get the worst of them.
	Yeah.
	Sorry, Harold, that would not explain the car crash type injuries, though.
	The two, you know, the collapsed chest, the crushed chest of Luda and Zolotariev.
	Could they have encountered Yeti?
	Well, I don't close my mind to anything when anybody discusses, and I have to say, that's a very popular theory.
	And again, I've bored everybody to death with this particular line.
	But when you think of the whole of Russia, from where they are to, say, where you come to the Bering Straits before Alaska, you've got about 2,000 or 3,000 miles there, and you could walk that in a straight line and not meet anybody.
	So who knows?
	You know, there could well be some kind of wild animals up in the wilderness that we don't know about yet.
	I mean, what was it?
	The coelacanth, I've mentioned that before, was a fish that everybody thought was a Stone Age fish that was extinct and they found one in 1936 in a fishing net.
	So I keep an open mind, but what I would say, though, is show me some evidence of, they reckon for what I don't know what you would call a group of Yeti, say a tribe of Yeti, you would need 200 at least to be able to survive, to keep reproducing and carry on living.
	So a group of 200 is quite a sizable amount.
	But even if they have, some people suggest they have mystical abilities, the propensity to just disappear and things like that.
	But even if there were Yeti there, I would imagine that there would be signs of them around the encampment, around the tents, hair, for example.
	Yeah, and signs that they've been there and big footprints, literally.
	And there weren't any.
	And we can't say that, again, this is something else.
	We can't say we completely rule it out, but neither can we completely rule it in.
	UFOs have been suggested.
	Lights in the sky.
	Well, there's definitely lights in the sky.
	There's absolutely no question about that, that something was going on.
	Did they take photographs of lights in the sky?
	Well, in the book, Valentin Yakimenko, who's researched it for many years, and he very kindly gave me his analysis of the negatives which were of the night sky.
	And I have to say, some of them, he's cleaned them up and he's disregarded marks caused by the damage, if you like.
	But he says there are things in the negatives that resemble what looks like a rocket breaking up or it could be a UAV, if you like, for want of a better word.
	And the Russians, the Soviets, had UAVs then.
	They had three or four different types of them that they were experimenting with.
	And one of the negatives in particular actually looks like a plane breaking up.
	it's very angular in shape.
	But again, even if they saw that and there were some, what would make them still run away?
	That's the thing.
	I mean, if the wreckage was coming their way, there would be signs of the wreckage.
	And if there'd been a big cover-up and wreckage was removed, that's one thing.
	But that cover-up would have been more comprehensive towards them.
	You know, their bodies would have either been disappeared or there'd have been a more comprehensive and fuller explanation devised by the KGB or whoever, I would have thought.
	Well, yes, there would have been, but to be honest, I don't think the KGB really cared or the authorities didn't care.
	So who's going to do anything?
	You've got a few parents who are deeply unhappy with the way it's all gone and their attitude is, so what?
	That's the truth.
	It was a very brutal regime when you come down to it.
	You know, they weren't bothered by public relations in the way, say, an accident in the West would have been treated.
	The embarrassment side of it just doesn't affect them, really.
	The idea being that nobody's going to publish it anyway, and anybody who complains might find themselves in prison.
	Donny Icar, somebody I've tried to talk to on this program and haven't been successful in so doing, but he had a book out, as you know, called Dead Mountain.
	I think there was also a documentary around it.
	Yeah, it was a good book, yeah.
	Suggested infrasound as a cause.
	Well, his theory centers on the mountain there, the mountain itself, with infrasound coming around the mountain.
	And it's based, part of it is based on the theories of somebody who is viewed in the, well, I'll explain all in a minute, but you need fairly high winds for that to happen, for these vortices to be created.
	And whilst there were winds there, they weren't that particularly strong that night.
	But the thing with infrasound is it doesn't affect everybody the same way.
	Some people feel queasy, but not everybody is affected by it.
	There was a researcher called Vladimir Gavreau, who he was actually Russian, but he was living in France and he did a lot of research into it and found basically he was trying to find out the reasons why it made people feel queasy and disorientated.
	So we're talking about a possible natural phenomenon that would create frequencies that were uncomfortable for some people to hear.
	Yeah, but not all people were affected by it, though.
	That's the thing.
	So what you're saying is that all nine of them were affected by it, which is unlikely.
	I've spoken to a couple of experts in the field of infrasound, but he also said that not everybody is affected by it.
	You know, you can have a group of people and some people within that group will not be affected at all.
	It affects different people in different ways.
	And the other thing with infrasound is it doesn't create mechanical damage, like the damage to the broken bones that were seen in the chests of these people, two of them of the group.
	And so I presume this would also do away with the theories about ultrasound and the fact that the military may have been conducting tests with ultrasound and radio frequencies in that area.
	It's possible, but again, I've spoken, the experts I've spoken to on that have told me that to get the kind of weapon for ultrasound, it would need to be the size of a 40-foot shipping container for it to work properly.
	And how are you going to get that there?
	Well, exactly.
	There was no helicopter at that time that could lift something that size.
	And why would you lift a 40-foot container, even if you could, up into the mountains to test it?
	You presumably take it somewhere where you can get it on a lorry and use it in a secret testing area that was closed up, but you wouldn't drag it up into a mountainous area in the middle of winter.
	You described the more recent, the most recent investigation two years ago or so as disappointing.
	Why so?
	Well, it was the way it was all set out to start with.
	When they announced the reopening of the case, everybody was jumping for joy.
	But then they said, we're only going to be looking at certain aspects, and they were all physical aspects.
	In other words, the weather.
	It's like they laid down the parameters before it started.
	And if you wanted to be really cynical about it, you could say it's been opened up to close it down forever.
	Not a single mention of the military.
	And I mean, the thing is, the military is a definite possibility.
	There's no getting away from it.
	It's a highly militarized area in the Urals, especially so in those days.
	And to say we're not even going to investigate it's ridiculous, really.
	Why even bother reopening it if that's what you're going to do?
	And what conclusion did they come out with?
	Well, to be honest, it's still about to be finalized.
	And I can tell you that on the 11th of July, the deputy prosecutor working for the regional office in the Urals area had a press conference with a paper called Komsomolskaya Pravda,
	pardon my command of Russian, a newspaper that have been heavily involved in investigating this case, but he turned up in civilian outfit rather than his uniform and read out a statement that they were killed by hypothermia due to running away from an avalanche.
	And there's been a protest launched by the Dyatlov Foundation against this gentleman, Andrei Kuriakov, his name is, because they're saying that the investigation has not issued its formal verdict, which we're pretty sure will be that.
	But apparently, this guy is writing his own book on it, or his own thesis, they say, but it'll probably be a book in Russian.
	And they've said that he's been misusing his position and that they've asked for a strong censure of this guy for doing it.
	So it's still all up in the air.
	Sounds like it.
	This investigation, though, involved, didn't it, the exhumation of one of the bodies?
	Oh, well, yeah, again, this was back to Komsomol Skaya Pravda.
	They sponsored it.
	They exhumed Zolotaryev's grave and looked at the bones.
	And at first there was talk it wasn't him because of the DNA analysis of the bones.
	And then there was further analysis where they said it was.
	But there's an area of doubt over it.
	But the crushed chest that he had received is present in this skeleton, in the remains that they saw.
	So I don't know.
	I mean, what they were trying to do, I think, was to prove that it was him, because there's some doubt as to whether it was his body that was in the grave.
	But I think it would prove that it was his.
	And to be honest, even if it wasn't his body, I don't know that, okay, it muddies the water a bit, but I don't really think it's really relevant to the whole case.
	I don't think it brings any light on it in any way.
	What I would be really interested in is seeing all of the bodies exhumed and examined.
	It makes you wonder why they haven't done that, Keith.
	Well, I don't think it's...
	And I think the authority has the final say on whether it goes ahead.
	Why it was done with Zolitarium, I don't know.
	It sounds like they've done half a job.
	If you're going to reinvestigate, then do it properly.
	Absolutely.
	I think, really, they should exhume all of the bodies, because I would actually put money down that the remaining bodies in the other cemetery, there's two, the Zolotariev and there's two of them buried in one cemetery, and the remaining seven are in the other cemetery.
	And I reckon if you were to exhume those seven bodies, I'm certain you would find bone damage to all of them.
	I'm certain of that.
	Possibly from a blast, and that would prove it beyond a doubt what happened.
	Right.
	So they wouldn't want that to be out there.
	No.
	Gee.
	Listener question.
	Jonathan asks if Mr. McCloskey has ever heard of anything like this.
	And I haven't.
	Maybe you have in any other part of the world.
	Well, there's been other cases in Russia.
	There's been a case in the Altai Mountains and another case up in the Muromansk area, but they weren't really like this.
	The one up in the Kola Peninsula was a group, again, similar sort of group that had gone up there and basically been frozen to death.
	But I think they're trying to, you know, you look for comparisons, but it was just misadventure.
	And it was the same one with the Altai Mountains.
	But both misadventure.
	There's nothing to compare it to the Dyatlov case, really.
	And I don't think I've come across anything comparable in the rest of the world.
	The thing is with Russia, it was very popular ski tourism.
	There'll be several cases of misadventure.
	There was a case which I've written about in my book, and I'm still trying to find out more about it.
	It's only been mentioned in a couple of places about a group of prospectors that were geologists.
	They were up in a remote area of Siberia and they had all run away from their tent in similar circumstance, wearing next to nothing and all found dead miles away from their tent.
	And they'd run in different directions.
	But they weren't on a mountain, but they were near a river.
	Well, there is a man called David Paul Idis, who you may have heard of, a former American cop, investigates missing people.
	His books are called Missing 411.
	And so many of these missing people in wilderness areas, various lonely places, discard their clothes and shoes and are found in similar circumstances.
	And that is part of the mystery there that a lot of people have highlighted.
	My listener, Philip, asks if this could be something to do with time travel.
	I mean, we've talked about UFOs, so let's go one step further.
	Yeah, that's actually been discussed.
	I can't remember the wording for it, but there is talk that they were on a kind of a fault line, if you like.
	Now, you'll have to forgive my ignorance because it's not something I've researched very well, but the information's out there on the web if he wants to look it up.
	But it is a possibility that they were talking about the time travel element of it.
	But again, the thing is, it doesn't come back and explain the injuries, though.
	You know, you could say, okay, that it involved kind of movement in the earth, and that's how they didn't know what it was, and that they had torn their way out of the tent.
	But it doesn't really explain to me why they made their way away from the tent.
	They may have thought that maybe it was like an earthquake.
	It was something to do with the movement of the earth anyway.
	And you'll have To forgive me, I have not researched it very well.
	But if your listener wants to have a look, there is information on it.
	But I presume if they'd been catapulted forward or backward in time, they might have been catapulted forward or backward in time to a slightly different place and might have found themselves in the middle of an object that might have caused them injuries.
	And then, if they're catapulted back, they would have those injuries.
	Again, I don't discount that at all, Howard.
	You know, it's a possibility.
	I keep a very open mind on the whole thing because you can't come to this mystery and say it's an avalanche, but I'll look at the other things and discount them all.
	I think one of the biggest problems with this on all the forums is people get very angry.
	You know, you start disputing their theory.
	I think that's what I was going to say.
	I've certainly noticed that over the years when I've talked about everybody has their favorite theory.
	Well, I have a, I mean, I keep an open mind.
	It could be the Man C, but I do favor the military theory mainly because of the reaction of the authorities to the whole thing.
	You don't close a case down when you're going to go back up to investigate it again.
	And it's just the reaction of the way they reacted to it, the way they behaved.
	And there's a kind of evasion all the time.
	It's like the reopening of the case.
	If you're going to re-investigate it properly, why don't you include the military?
	The thing is, nobody's going to blame today's government.
	This happened 60-odd years ago.
	And okay, everybody, the Red Army fought its way through Europe, beat the Nazis and all the rest.
	It's a long time ago now.
	Many of the people are dead.
	So it's, okay, somebody might come out of it badly.
	There might be a general who is in charge of an exercise or a couple of colonels or something that will come out of it badly.
	It's a long time ago and the communist system collapsed in the late 80s, early 90s.
	In the original book, you mentioned, I'm sorry to cut in here, but in the original book, you mentioned a man called Evgeny Fyodorov Okishev, I think that's his name, who was one of the members, surviving member, of the original 1959 investigation.
	For the new book, did you get a chance to talk with him again or is he no longer with us?
	Well, I suspect he is no longer with us, but I contributed to the foundation, Yuri Konsevich, when he lives in Moldova.
	And Yuri sent me a picture where I went down to visit him.
	I didn't go because I had a business commitment at the time or I would have gone down.
	But he was very, very frail.
	I think I'm not sure what age he is now, but he'll be 95 or 96.
	But he sleeps in his front room and he can't really get out of his bed.
	And he speaks in a whisper.
	Yuri was telling me that he went down front enough with Leonid Proshkin, the lawyer who made the petition to reopen the case.
	But Okashev himself is in, well, poorly isn't the word.
	He's just very, very frail for his age now.
	But when he was able to speak to you, when he was able to talk.
	He was, yeah, he was very lucid.
	But was he baffled by this case?
	No, not really.
	Well, again, you must remember, all these blokes have pensions that they have to look after.
	You might say it was the communist times are gone, but they're not really.
	There's still government oversight of the whole thing, and they have to be careful what they say.
	And if you look at his interview, he basically says, without saying it, that he thinks that the military were responsible.
	He was the one that wanted to go back up.
	He had everything ready to go back up and have a good, thorough search of the area and question more people.
	And he was told to shut it down.
	Well, he says himself, the deputy general prosecutor arrived from Moscow one day and closed it all down.
	And if there's a smoking gun in all of this, maybe that's it.
	I think so.
	I'm surprised people don't pay him more attention.
	I need to check to see.
	I think he's still with us, but even two years ago, he was very, very frail.
	And lastly, and we talked about this before, but I wonder if you have any more thoughts about this.
	The people who survive, the relatives today, maybe a generation or two on, they need closure and they haven't got it.
	No, no.
	And it's the relatives that were complaining about Andrei Kuriakov appearing really self-promotion is what he was doing.
	And they have, along with the foundation, have made an official complaint to the prosecutor general's office in Moscow about his behavior.
	And it's the relatives also, as you say, maybe a different generation, but some of the originals are still alive that put forward the petition to have the case reopen.
	I mean, if you had a brother or a sister who died a long time ago.
	Well, you'd never let it go.
	Well, you'd want to know what happened to them.
	And if somebody, I always think if somebody is responsible, then they should be made to pay for it.
	And equally, those people, those who are still around and those who still want to agitate about this, they can't have been pleased in any way by this new investigation because they got an investigation, but what they got by the sounds of it is going to turn out to be deeply unsatisfactory.
	It is, yeah.
	Well, I think we already know that.
	I mean, I suppose we could say, well, at least they reopened it, but for all the good it's done, they might as well not have bothered.
	Certainly.
	Here we are, edition two of the book, and it's brilliantly researched and so well written, Keith.
	So you must congratulate yourself about that.
	I Recommend that anybody who's interested in this get the book.
	If you haven't seen the book before, get the second edition.
	Where do we leave it now then?
	Well, we need to see what they finally say, what the Prosecutor General Office says, what their final verdict is, because they will not only need to give a verdict, but they'll need to give an explanation to that, which I'm pretty sure there will be several people ready to tear it to bits when it does come out.
	And when do we expect that?
	Well, we don't know.
	The trouble is, you see, with COVID-19, it's not just affected Newbury and Oxford and London.
	it's affecting everywhere because apparently it's hit them pretty hard over there.
	So it's going to be quite some time, but eventually.
	It will happen so.
	And maybe that'll be time for edition three.
	What do you think?
	Yeah, it could be.
	Just very quickly, we talked on the radio, we didn't do it on the podcast here, about your book, Unsolved Aviation Mysteries.
	I love that book.
	We must talk about that again sometime.
	But are you planning to update that?
	Because it seems to me that there is scope to update it.
	Well, actually, there is.
	And I've had a couple of interesting theories on the Lowenstein story.
	You know, the man who fell out of the plane at 4,000 feet.
	Somebody came forward with quite an interesting theory on that that I don't think anybody's considered.
	But I'll save that for the next song.
	Absolutely.
	And the one that always sticks with me is the Scottish Island and the experienced pilot whose body was found hanging in a tree.
	Yeah.
	That was another one, but that's in your book.
	I'm just reaching down here.
	I've got it with me, Unsolved Aviation Mysteries, another really well-researched and excellent book.
	Keith McCluskey, thank you for making time for me.
	Thank you, Howard.
	Thank you very much.
	Thanks for having me on.
	Keith McCluskey, there are few people in this world more dedicated than Keith to his research, as you heard.
	And I'm sure he will continue to research this because it's one of those stories, I think he's told me this before, that once it gets a grip on you, you can't let it go.
	And there's always new information coming out and there are always new people putting in their 10 cents worth and, you know, expounding their own theories.
	We have more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and please, whatever you do, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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