On January 27, 1959, nine Soviet college students embarked on a journey into the Northern Urals. When they were all found dead, some had major chest fractures that could only have been caused by an immense force, comparable to that of a car crash.
And in the most gruesome instance, one was missing her tongue, eyes, part of the lips, as well as facial tissue, and a fragment of her skull bone.
In January of 1959, nine young Soviet hikers died under mysterious circumstances while trekking through the Ural Mountains in what’s now known as the Dyatlov Pass incident.
In January 1959, a 23-year-old hiker named Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov led a journey to reach the peak of Otorten, a mountain in the Northern Urals of Soviet Russia.
The young man brought a team of eight experienced hikers, many from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, along with him for the adventure.
Before he left, Dyatlov had told his sports club that he and his team would send them a telegram as soon as they returned. But that telegram was never sent and none of the hikers of the so-called Dyatlov Pass Incident were ever seen alive again When their bodies were found in the coming weeks, their strange and gruesome injuries left investigators baffled and repulsed.
Some were missing eyes, another was missing her tongue, and many were struck by a force comparable to that of a speeding car — but no one could make sense of it.
The Soviet government closed the Dyatlov Pass case quickly and offered only thin explanations saying that the hikers died due to hypothermia because they were inexperienced and that maybe something like an avalanche was at fault.
But with that “explanation” clearing up almost none of the lingering questions, amateur sleuths have been puzzling over the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident for the last 60 years.
And while the Russian government did reopen the case in 2019, we still don’t know exactly what happened on that snowy mountainside all those years ago.
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