The Mystery of the Mountain of the Dead. Dyatlov group

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

You can see the location of Mount Metrvetsov on a seditious map.

By a strange coincidence, groups of 9 people were killed several times on the Mountain of the Dead. According to legend, 9 Mansi were once killed here. So, in the winter of 1959, ten tourists gathered to climb the Mountain. But soon one of them, an experienced hiker, felt unwell (his legs ached) and he left the route. We went to the last assault with nine …

One may not believe in mysticism, but after exactly 40 years we did not really want to go there with nine of us. When we counted at the Sverdlovsk railway station, it turned out to be nine. True, three of them almost immediately announced that they would not be able to go, and when we were six, we breathed a sigh of relief. And taking advantage of several hours of time, we went to the city to meet with those who knew the victims … One of the first to find was Valeria Patrusheva, the widow of the pilot, who was the first to notice the bodies of the dead tourists from the air. "And you know, my husband Gennady knew them well while they were still alive. We met at the hotel in the village of Vizhay, where the pilots lived and the guys stayed there before the ascent. Gennady was much interested in local legends and therefore began to dissuade them - go to other mountains, and these peaks do not touch, they are translated from the Mansi language like "Don't go there" and "Mountain 9 dead"! But the guys were not 9, but 10, # they were all experienced tourists, # they walked a lot in the Northern Polar region, they did not believe in mysticism. And their leader Igor Dyatlov is such a strong-willed person - he even called him "die-hard", no matter how much he tried to persuade him, he did not change that route …"

* * *

The hike was declared as a route of the third (at that time, the highest) category of difficulty with ascents to low mountains. The route is quite difficult, but quite passable; nowadays many pass and much more difficult routes. In general, in such cases, they say that nothing portended trouble …

Forty years later, we are paddling along the Lozva River - the last route of the Dyatlov group, along which they climbed to the top. Peaceful nature around, majestic landscapes "as from a photo wallpaper" and complete silence around. You need to constantly remind yourself - to die in the midst of all this soporific splendor, just one mistake is enough …

… The mistake of the Dyatlovites was that they ignored the warnings and went to a forbidden place …

What a mistake our group made - we were later explained by the local natives. No, under no circumstances should we have passed through the local Golden Gate - two powerful stone arches on top of one of the rocks. A quick change in the attitude of the local deity to us, or - if you want, just nature - was noticed even by the burning materialists. Almost immediately there was a heavy downpour, which did not stop for a week (an unprecedented case, local old-timers will tell us), the rivers overflowed the banks to an incredible mark for autumn, pieces of land under our tents began to melt catastrophically, and the raging Vladimir rapids located downstream made our evacuation just a deadly occupation …

What terrified them to death?

However, forty years ago everything was much worse. So, on February 1, 1959, Dyatlov's group began to climb to the top of "1079", then unnamed. Just now everyone knows it as the Mountain of the Dead (in the Mansi language "Holat Syakhyl") or, you can guess why, it is also called the Dyatlov Pass. It was here that on February 2 (according to other sources - February 1), under very mysterious circumstances, the tragedy occurred … They did not have time to rise before dark, and decided to pitch the tent right on the slope. This alone confirms that tourists were not afraid of difficulties: at a height, without a forest cover, it is much colder than at the foot. They put skis on the snow, set up a tent on them in accordance with all tourist and mountaineering rules, ate … In the declassified criminal case, the conclusion was preserved that neither the installation of the tent, nor the gentle 15-18-degree slope itself posed a threat. Based on the location of the shadows in the last photo, the experts concluded that by 6 pm the tent was already up. We started to settle for the night … And then something terrible happened!..

… Later investigators began to establish a picture of what happened. In panic horror, having cut the tent with knives, the tourists rushed to run down the slope. Who was in what - barefoot, in one felt boot, half-naked. The chains of footprints went in a strange zigzag, converged and again diverged, as if people wanted to scatter, but some force again drove them together. Nobody approached the tent, there were no signs of a struggle or the presence of other people. No signs of any natural disaster: hurricane, tornado, avalanche. At the border of the forest, the tracks disappeared, covered with snow.

Pilot G. Patrushev noticed two bodies from the air, made several circles over the guys, hoping that they would raise their heads. The search group that came to the rescue (we even managed to find one of that group, now a pensioner Sergey Antonovich Verkhovsky) tried to dig snow in this place, and soon the terrible finds began.

Two of the dead were lying by a poorly lit fire, stripped to their underwear. They froze, unable to move. In 300 meters from them lay the body of I. Dyatlov: he crawled to the tent and died, looking longingly in her direction. There were no injuries on the body … Another corpse was found closer to the tent. An autopsy revealed a crack in the skull, this terrible blow was inflicted without the slightest damage to the skin. He did not die from this, but also froze. The girl crawled closest to the tent. She was lying face down, and the snow under her was stained with blood flowing from her throat. But there are no marks on the body.

An even bigger mystery was presented by three corpses found away from the fire. They were dragged there by the still living participants of the ill-fated campaign. They died from terrible injuries: broken ribs, punctured heads, hemorrhages. But how could internal lesions appear that did not affect the skin? By the way, there are no cliffs nearby from which one could fall. The last of the dead was found nearby. His death, according to the materials of the criminal case, "came from exposure to low temperatures." In other words, he was frozen. (Gershtein M. "Tragedy in the mountains" / "Crossroads of the Centaur" 1997, N 3 (8), pp. 1-6). However, none of the put forward versions of death is still considered generally accepted. Despite numerous attempts to find an explanation for the tragic incidents, they continue to remain a mystery both for researchers of anomalous phenomena and for law enforcement agencies …

We have been looking for those who performed the autopsies for a long time. Surgeon Iosif Prutkov, who first performed the autopsy, has already died by now, the others with whom we met (Prutkov's relatives, doctors A. P. Taranov, P. Gel, Sharonin, members of the regional commission) could not recall the details. But unexpectedly (about the miracles of Providence!) In the train compartment met a former assistant Prutkova, in fact the only living one of those who helped to open those corpses, doctor Maria Ivanova Salter. She remembered those guys very well, moreover, she remembered them still alive (she, young, then liked a strong stately conductor). But, according to her, “the corpses were not 9, but 11, where two more came from - I don’t know. I immediately recognized them, in these clothes I saw them for the last time at the bus stop. hospital, but one body was not even shown, they were taken immediately to Sverdlovsk. Some soldier was present during the autopsy, pointed at me and said to Dr. Prutkov: “Why do you need her?” Prutkov was a very polite person, but that time immediately: "Maria Ivanovna, you can go!" Subscription "about nondisclosure and non-discussion of the incident" was taken from me anyway. They were taken from everyone, including drivers and pilots who carried bodies …"

Other shocking details began to emerge. Former prosecutor-criminalist L. N. Lukin recalls: “In May, E. P. Maslennikov examined the surroundings of the scene, found that some young trees on the border of the forest had a burnt footprint, but these footprints did not have a concentric shape or other system. This confirmed the direction of a kind of heat ray or strong, but completely unknown, at least to us, energy, acting selectively, the snow was not melted, the trees were not damaged. meters down the mountain, then some of them were dealt with in a directed manner …"

Rocket version

Among the researchers, persistent rumors spread that the group of tourists was simply removed due to the fact that people became unwitting eyewitnesses to the tests of a secret weapon. The skin of the victims was, according to the search engines, "an unnatural purple or orange color." And criminologists seemed to be at a dead end because of this strange color: they knew that even a month of being under the snow could not color the skin like that … But, as we found out from M. Salter, in fact, the skin "was just dark, like ordinary corpses ".

Who and for what in their stories "painted" the corpses? If the skin was orange, it would be possible that the guys were poisoned by the rocket fuel asymmetric dimethylhydrazine (orange heptyl). And the rocket, it seems, could deviate from the course and fall (fly) nearby.

New confirmation of the rocket version appeared relatively recently, when a strange 30-centimeter ring was found in the area of the death of the Dyatlov group. As it turned out, belonging to a Soviet military missile. Talk about secret tests has surfaced again. Local researcher Rimma Aleksandrovna Pechurkina, who works for the Yekaterinburg Oblastnaya Gazeta newspaper, recalled that the search teams twice, on February 17 and March 31, 1959, observed "either rockets or UFOs" flying across the sky. With a request to find out whether these objects were rockets, she turned to Kosmopoisk in April 1999. And after studying the archives, it was possible to establish that in the USSR no launches of the IZS were made in those days. On February 17, 1959, the United States launched the solid-propellant Avangard-2, but this launch could not be observed in Siberia. On March 31, 1959, the R-7 was launched from Baikonur, the launch was unsuccessful. Launches from Plesetsk have been carried out since 1960, construction has been carried out since 1957, theoretically from Plesetsk in 1959 only test launches of R-7 could be performed. But this rocket could not have poisonous propellants.

There was one more fact in favor of the rocket hypothesis - to the south of the Mountain, modern tourists have stumbled upon several deep craters "obviously from missiles." With great difficulty in the deep taiga, we found two of them and explored them as best we could. They obviously did not pull under the rocket explosion of the 59th, a 55-year-old birch grew in the funnel (they counted in rings), that is, the explosion thundered in the remote taiga rear no later than 1944. Remembering what year it was, one could blame everything on training bombing or something like that, but … a funnel, we made an unpleasant discovery with the help of a radiometer, strong phonil.

Radioactive bombs in 1944? What nonsense … and bombs?

Radioactive trail

Forensic scientist L. N. Lukin recalls what surprised him most in 1959: “When I reported the initial data to the 1st secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union A. S. Kirilenko with the regional prosecutor, he gave a clear command - to classify the entire work. ordered to bury tourists in boarded up coffins and tell relatives that everyone died from hypothermia. I conducted extensive research on clothing and individual organs of the victims “for radiation.” For comparison, we took the clothes and internal organs of people who died in car accidents or died of natural causes. amazing …"

From the expert opinion: "The investigated samples of clothing contain a slightly overestimated amount of radioactive substances due to beta radiation. The detected radioactive substances are washed off when the samples are washed, that is, they are caused not by the neutron flux and induced radioactivity, but by radioactive contamination."

* * *

Protocol of additional interrogation of an expert from the Sverdlovsk City SES:

Question: Could there be an increased contamination of clothing with radioactive substances under normal conditions, without being in a radioactive contaminated area or place?

Answer: It shouldn't be perfect …

Question: Can we consider that this clothing is contaminated with radioactive dust?

Answer: Yes, the clothes are contaminated or with radioactive dust that has fallen from the atmosphere, and whether these clothes have been contaminated when working with radioactive substances.

* * *

Where could radioactive dust come from on the dead? At that time, there were no nuclear tests in the atmosphere on the territory of Russia. The last explosion before this tragedy took place on October 25, 1958 on Novaya Zemlya. Was this area at that time covered with radioactive dust from previous tests? This is not excluded. Moreover, Lukin drove a Geiger counter to the place of the death of tourists, and he "rang out such a fraction" there …

Or maybe the traces of radioactivity have nothing to do with the death of tourists? After all, radiation will not kill in a few hours, much less drive people out of the tent! But then what?

In attempts to explain the death of nine experienced hikers, a variety of versions have been put forward - from ball lightning flying into the tent to the harmful effects of a technogenic factor. One of the assumptions is that the guys entered the area where the secret tests of the "vacuum weapon" were carried out (the local historian Oleg Viktorovich Shtraukh told us about this version). From her, the dead were noted for the (allegedly existing) a strange reddish tint of the skin, the presence of internal injuries and bleeding. The same symptoms should be observed when a "vacuum bomb" is struck, which creates a strong vacuum over a large area. At the periphery of such a zone, blood vessels burst in a person from internal pressure, and at the epicenter the body is torn to pieces.

For some time, the local Mansi were under suspicion, who, sometime in the 1930s, had already killed a woman geologist who dared to enter the sacred mountain closed to mere mortals. Many taiga hunters were arrested, but … all were released for lack of evidence of guilt. Moreover, the mysterious incidents in the restricted area continued …

The harvest of death continues

Very soon after the death of the Dyatlov group under mysterious circumstances (which speaks in favor of the version of the involvement of the special services in the incident), the photographer Yuri Yarovoy, who was filming the bodies of the dead, died in a car accident later with his wife … Patrusheva, unwittingly got into the study of this whole story …

In February 1961, in the area of the same Mountain of the Dead, in an anomalous place and again under similar more than strange circumstances, another group of tourists-explorers from Leningrad perished. And again, supposedly, there were the same signs of an incomprehensible fear: tents cut from the inside, abandoned things, people scattering to the sides, and again all 9 dead with grimaces of horror on their faces, only this time the corpses lie in a neat circle in the center of which the tent … However, so it says rumor, but how many we did not specifically ask the locals about that case, no one remembered. There was no confirmation in the official bodies either. That is, either the St. Petersburg group was "cleaned out" more thoroughly than the Sverdlovsk one, or it was initially invented only on paper. As well as another group of three people who allegedly died here …

At least once again in the history of the Mountain, an indication of 9 corpses pops up, which is confirmed by documents. In 1960-61, a total of 9 pilots and geologists were killed in three plane crashes in the ill-fated area one after the other. Strange coincidences at a place named in memory of the 9 Mansi who died. The last living pilot of those who were looking for Dyatlovites was G. Patrushev. Both he and his young wife were sure that very soon he would not return from the flight. "He was very nervous," - V. Patrusheva tells us, - "He was an absolute teetotaler, but once I saw him pale from everything he had experienced, he drank a bottle of vodka in one gulp and did not even get drunk. When he flew away the last time, we both knew that it was the last time. Began to be afraid to fly, but every time - if there was enough fuel - he stubbornly flew to the Mountain of the Dead. I wanted to find a clue …"

However, other victims of strange circumstances have also been here. Local authorities remember how long in the 1970s they searched for and did not find the missing young geologist, since he was the son of an important ministerial rank, they were looking for him with special passion. Although he could not have done this - he disappeared almost in front of his colleagues literally out of the blue … Many have since disappeared. When we ourselves were in the regional center Ivdel in September 1999, we were looking for a disappeared married couple there for a month already …

Footprints lead to the sky

The investigation back then, in the 1950s, was also engaged in a version related, as they would say now, to the UFO problem. The fact is that during the search for the dead, colorful pictures unfolded over the heads of the rescuers, fireballs and shining clouds flew by. Nobody understood what it was, and therefore fantastic celestial phenomena seemed terrible …

Telephone message to the Sverdlovsk City Party Committee: "March 31, 59th, 9.30 am local time. 03.31 at 04.00 am in the S-V direction, the duty officer Meshcheryakov noticed a large ring of fire, which for 20 minutes was moving towards us, then hiding behind a height of 880. Before, how to hide behind the horizon, a star appeared from the center of the ring, which gradually increased to the size of the moon, began to fall down, separating from the ring. An unusual phenomenon was observed by many people raised by alarm. Please explain this phenomenon and its safety, because in our conditions, this makes an alarming impression. Avenburg. Potapov. Sogrin."

LN Lukin reports: “While the investigation was underway in the newspaper Tagilskiy Rabochy, a tiny note appeared that a fireball was seen in the sky of Nizhniy Tagil, or, as they say now, a UFO. This luminous object was moving silently towards the northern peaks of the Ural Mountains For the publication of such a note, the editor of the newspaper was sentenced to a penalty, and the regional committee offered me not to develop this topic …

To be honest, we ourselves in the sky over the Mountain, as well as on the way to Vizhay and Ivdel, did not see anything mysterious in the sky. Perhaps because the sky was just covered with impenetrable clouds.

Both the rain and the flood of a regional scale stopped only when we barely got out through the rapids on a catamaran that was rattling at the seams. Then, when we were already in the Perm region making our way through the taiga, the God of the Golden Gate made us understand that he finally forgives and lets go - the local bear simply took us to his watering hole, just at the moment when our own water supplies ran out …

Probably, all this is nothing more than an accident. And all the terrible incidents on the Mountain of the Dead are just a chain of accidents. We did not disclose the reason for the death of the tourists, although we realized that the missile launches had absolutely nothing to do with this …

Already from Moscow, I called the pilot's widow to understand - why did Patrushev voluntarily take a course towards the Mountain, even when he was afraid to fly? "He said that something seemed to attract him. He often met glowing balls in the air, and then the plane began to shake, the instruments danced like crazy, and his head just cracked. Then he turned aside. Then he flew again. He told me that he is not afraid of stopping the engine if something lands the car even on a pole "… According to the official version, pilot G. Patrushev died 65 km north of Ivdel when he made an emergency landing …

"Ural Stalkers: Escape from the Mountain of the Dead", Vadim Chernobrov, fragment.

Video lecture by Vadim Chernobrov:

A documentary about this case:

(We recommend that site visitors subscribe to the new interesting Svarga TV channel by clicking on the blue logo at the top right.)