Alexey could not believe what he was hearing. As he sat dumbfounded in the cold and sterile office in front of three stone faced party officials. He begged them to reconsider. It had been a week since the body of his twenty three year old son, Georgie had been discovered, and although Alexey had long since given up hope that his son might be found alive, he had not been prepared
for the grief of finally knowing. Now having made the trip to Evedeal, he was at the very least hoping to take his son's body back home with him to Spurtlovsk. But the party officials had other ideas. A decision had been made that all of the bodies would be buried together in Evedal in a mass grave. The families were invited to attend, but there would be no public announcement and only a small obelisk to mark the spot. But Swerdlovsk is his home, implored Alexey. That is where he lived,
where he made friends. And did we bury him in Evedal? How are we to visit him? But the decision was final, and besides, they said, all the other families had agreed to it. Two by two, the parents of eager Zena, Yuri, and Roostick were called in to face the hastily assembled committee and given the exact same distressing news, each being informed that the others had consented to it. The parents
struggled to process what they were being told. Not only did it seem the authorities were trying to cover the whole instant up, but they were asking the parents to become complicit in it too. The Party was in effect asking for nothing less than their co operation in erasing the history of their children's lives. Like most people in the Soviet Union, the parents were well aware of the length the state would go to preserve their methods, but not to them, not this time, and it was of
course a lie. Not one of the sets of parents had agreed to their plan. On realizing the deception, the parents fought back and eventually the party relented, but only on one condition. The students could be buried in spurred Lovsk, but the funerals were to be held together to minimize the attention. With the exception of Georgis, who was a Russian Orthodox, would be granted a separate funeral at an
appropriate location. The funeral procession would also be strictly controlled, with the coffins being taken directly from the morgue to the cemetery. The parents had requested that the bodies be taken past the Ural Polytechnic Institute campus, but permission was refused. However, attempts to minimize the publicity of the event would ultimately prove futile in a rare moment of public defiance over
state control. On Monday, the ninth of March nineteen fifty nine, over a thousand mourners touched by the death of the young hikers took to the streets to join the procession. Together, they marched with the families as they made their way to Mikhailovskoy's Cemetery behind two trucks laden with the bodies of Yuri Rustick Zena and eager twelve year old Yuri Kon Savage lived with his parents in the east of
the city center, just opposite the cemetery. He watched in silence from his apartment window as the mourners slowly drifted into view. Yuri didn't know then just how exactly the tragedy of what happened to the Diatlov team would shape his life, but on this morning. What preoccupied Yuri was not the bodies of the students laid out in their open caskets, or the sheer number of people attending their funeral, but rather a handful of suspicious looking men dotted about
the crowd. Unlike the rest of the crowd, these men, dressed in civilian clothes, seemed to pay little attention to the bodies or the eventual service that took place. Instead, they seemed to be watching the people. Yuri could have sworn they were k GB, members of the secret Soviet police,
sent to keep a close eye on the proceedings. After the bodies were finally laid to rest, with Georgy's being buried the following day, Ordinarily, the families might now finally be able to grieve, but there was some thing glaringly absent. Despite the bodies having been discovered ten days previously, there was still no hint of an explanation from the authorities
as to just how exactly the students had died. What could possibly have driven nine experienced and strong hikers from the shelter and warmth of their tent to meet their deaths amidst the driving snow and Subsei temperatures outside, and lest it be forgotten, there were still four people unaccounted for. The day after Georgy's funeral, friends and family gathered together
at the Kryvanischenko home for Georgy's wake. It was, of course, a somber affair, but one also unsurprisingly dominated the mystery of his death. Despite the secrecy of the police investigation, due to the large number of volunteers involved, rumors had inevitably begun to circulate. Time and again. Attention seemed to turn to the mysterious lights and orbs witnessed in the
surrounding area. But Georgi's father, Alexey, had grown weary of such talk, deeming it irrelevant since the lights had been seen two weeks after the students were thought to have died, and so it was with little patience that he received two more students that night, eager to share their story of strange lights spotted in the night sky. I don't want to hear it, said Alexey. But no, they said, you don't understand. We saw the lights on February the first,
the same night that Datlov's team left their tent. The two students had been part of another team led by UPI teacher Annatolly Shumkov. The team had been climbing Kisstop Mountain, roughly twenty five miles to the south of where Daklov's
team had camped on Kolatsiakl when they saw it. With the mercury dropping to as low as minus thirty degrees centigrade, the team were just about to begin their descent when there was a sudden flash of silver in the sky, followed by a white spark that was seen flying upwards from the O'tauton Valley. Moments later, an eerie sound of thunder rumbled across the mountain. As Shumkov later recounted, this thing flew silently and slowly from the south to the
north over the ridge of the Urals. It was glowing quite brightly the way it illuminated the hovering clouds at the height of two point five to three kilometers, it was very strange. For Alex c and many others, it was hard to resist the increasingly popular theory that the students had unwittingly strayed into the path of some kind of secret weapons test. In nineteen forty five, unbeknownst to most of the planet, a new world was about to emerge.
It began at five twenty nine am on July sixteenth, with the detonation of a bomb in the middle of the Hornada del Muerto Desert in New Mexico. The bomb was named Trinity, and its subsequent explosion marked the first successful deployment of the atomic bomb. Later that year, the atomic age would formally announce itself in a mushroom cloud of death and destruction when Little Boy and Fat Man were detonated over the Japanese towns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The bombs would go some way to ushering an end to the largest scale global conflict the human race had ever known, but it would also mark the beginning of a seemingly endless arms race that to this day continues to haunt every militant aspect of major foreign diplomacy. The Stalin's government in the US SR, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made it clear just how far they lagged behind the military might and ingenuity of the United States.
What followed was an intense and accelerated program of nuclear development, but also an intense culture of military secrecy in competition with the US, fueled by the mutual distrust of each other's ideologies. It was a program that, in its eagerness to establish itself, would result in a number of catastrophic new Clear disasters, such as the Kishtim disaster that Georgi, only two years previously, had helped to clean up. Could it be that the students had found themselves pitching their
tent under a secret weapons testing zone. It was a theory making increasing sense to those who had little information to go on. However, for lead investigator lev Ivanov, who was in full possession of all available evidence, what puzzled him the most was that although the multiple sightings of strange lights may have been consistent with ballistic weapons, the injuries to the bodies weren't. It's possible, of course, that the sound of such weapons detonating nearby might have caused
the team to flee the tent in a panic. But might the strange lights have been something else entirely, something perhaps a little more other worldly. Nikolai Aniumov was a local Manci tribesman who had been part of the team that first examined the hiker's tent. Like everyone else, he had been deeply troubled by the student's disappearance, but the real fear he harbored would remain unspoken. That was until the first mention of the orbs in the sky. For
the Mansie. All around the region where the bodies were discovered, they talk of gateways to another world. Perhaps the students had upset the spirits and this was their revenge, he thought. It is said that somewhere deep in the Earls lies a sacred daific idol known as Zolotire Barber or the Golden Woman. Made entirely from gold. It is thought to have been hidden somewhere deep in the forest, perhaps in
a cave, surrounded by other worldly treasures. In ancient times, soldiers dressed in scarlet robes would fiercely guard the path to the idol, and no one else had the right to see her or go anywhere near the cave. The origins of the idol are shrouded in mystery. Some believe it to have been brought to the region by ob
Ugrian warriors as far back as the fifth century. The Obugrians were ancestors of the Mansie, who, alongside Alaric, the king of the Visigoths, conquered Rome in four hundred and ten. Some say that after their victory, the Obugrians forged the sacred idol, then carried it back to their lands to be worshiped as a goddess, though some others believe it may have originated from as far away as India or
even Sumeria. There is further dispute as to just which god exactly was thought to be embodied by the idol, with some linking it to the Manci goddess Yours Naianki, known as the mother of celestial fire and everything living, with others believing it instead to be the goddess kaltesh Anki, or Mother Earth. Kaltesh Anki is the wife of Numi Turam, the ultimate supreme being, and is known to be responsible
for the length of human lives. Once kaltesh Anki asked Numi Turam to strengthen the earth with an iron belt, and he answered the request by creating the Ural Mountains. In nineteen o four, the explorer Konstantin Nossiloff wrote of meeting an old man on his travels named Sava. The man claimed to have been blinded after mistakenly coming across the golden idol, whom he maintained appeared to him as an ordinary naked woman sitting down holding a golden plate
in her hands. Some say the Golden Woman isn't golden at all, but is in fact luminous, as if made purely from light. Had the hikers stumbled into this sacred land and be mercilessly punished as a result, it might account for the strange lights, perhaps, but not why such an experienced team would be drawn out from the safety of their camp into the freezing wild of the exposed mountain.
But for this Nikolai had another theory. It is said that kaltesh Anki, worried about how she might defend herself from enemies, asked Numiterurum to find a way to protect her. In return, he created the Menkfee, a race of monstrous creatures sometimes described as werewolves, but other times just as giants. It is said that these menk Fee or menk also known as Compoland, continue to guard the Golden Woman to this day. Nancy author Olga Koshmanova has spent over thirty
years collecting evidence of the Kompoland. She believes that many of the Manci culture's rules were formed due to their contact with these terrifying creatures such as it being forbidden to break wood when it wasn't needed, or the need to be silent when in the forest, and its being especially forbidden to sing loud songs or spoil the forest, and when in the woods at night, one must always
keep the fire burning. Writing in a book titled A Look from Behind, a reference to the strange sensation a person feels when they un knowingly step into the territory of the compoland, Olga writes of that fateful night of
February the first, nineteen fifty nine. However, she is not writing about the deattle of team, but a night when she claims to have come into contact with a compos Koshmanova also writes that once travelers have entered the forbidden territory, they begin to hear things strange, terrifying noises like whistling or the thumping of feet. The sound reverberates so as to cause a visceral reaction that induces terror and nausea.
Had the team been scared from the tent perhaps by such a sound, could it have been a compolan that smashed rustic skull and battered Zena to the ground. It certainly wouldn't be the first time a compolan had been held responsible for murder. Koshmanova cites at least two incidences where the forest Giant had been held accountable, once in nineteen forty six in the village of Shamia, a child had been ripped to shreds with his head put on a stake, and another time where a woman had been
found with her jaw ripped completely off. But with the whereabouts of four of the students still unknown, and without all the bodies to examine, it would be impossible to formulate a comprehensive theory of just what had taken place. Unfortunately for the search teams, the weather was about to take a severe turn for the worst. Many of the searches, saddened by the discovery of the first five bodies, had
become exhausted and demoralized. Maslennikov, who had been leading the search team on the ground, requested that the search be suspended, but the commission refused to call it off, deciding instead that a new team was needed. Maslennikov would at first be replaced by Abraham Kickhoin and then later by Colonel Georgy Ortiakov. The search for the missing bodies would continue to little avail, but something remarkable was about to come to light, some thing that had been hidden in plain sight.
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podcast Today to get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained podcast. It was temple of the original investigator who noticed it first something about the rips at the back of the team's tent that hadn't seemed consistent with wear and tear or weather damage, but it wasn't until weeks later that his concerns would be taken into consideration thanks
to the eagle eye of a seamstress. After Boris Slobsoff had discovered the tent, it had been gathered up and taken, along with the items at the camp, to the Evedell Department of Internal Affairs for further examination. Vladimir Koyativ, a young investigator on the case, was having his uniform mended when the seamstress took one look at the tent and concluded also that the ribs were not rips at all,
but rather cuts made deliberately by something very sharp. It was clear to her that someone or something had cut open the tent on the night that the students died. The tent was immediately taken to Sperdlovsk Forensic Lab for
closer inspection by senior forensic expert Henrietta Cherkena. If the cuts had indeed been made, it would add fuel to the burgeoning theory that the team had most likely been attacked by someone or something in the middle of the night, and chased from the tent, left to die in the snow. It didn't take cherkena very long to reach her conclusion. The cuts had indeed been made by a sharp object, but they hadn't been made from outside the tent. They
had come from the inside. The revelation did little to help uncover the mystery of what led the team to their deaths, but what was clear was that whatever had caused such a panic that an experienced team would rip open their own tent just to be able to escape into minus twenty degree temperatures must have been utterly terrifying. It was further evidence that the students were forced from their tent, whether by a perceived fear or by something
with agency. And then a further discovery comes to light when investigators examined the team's belongings. There came across the three expedition cameras of Eager, Rustick, and Gyurgi. When the photos were developed, there seemed nothing untoward at first. The photos, eighty eight in all, taken over the nine day period, reveal a touching account of the team's journey, culminating in some final shots that are believed to show the team setting up camp on their final fateful day. And then
there was the final exposure on Georgy's camera. As the photographic paper swished around in the developing tray, a strange image was beginning to emerge. The whole frame seemed to be in darkness, as if taken at night, but in the top left hand corner, a trail of light seems to be descending from the sky. The discovery of the photograph has Ivanof turning once again to the reports of
mysterious lights. But then suddenly everything changed. One morning in mid March, Ivanof announced to his team that he would be leaving for Moscow, without giving any further information. Ivanof packed up his things and left. When he returned a few days later, it was as if he had been replaced by a completely different person. Gone was any talk
of the orbs or strange lights in the sky. In April, Valdislav Karelin was called back in for questioning, at which point he was advised by Ivanov to hold his tongue on any theories relating to the mysterious lights. It has been over two months since the last body was discovered. When on May the third Nancy tribesman Stepan Kurikov, is searching an area not far from where Yuri and Gyorgy's bodies were found, when he once again spots something irregular.
Some branches of a tree seemed to have been removed with a knife. Newly appointed search leader, Colonel Georgy Ortiakov, orders a team of men to search the area immediately. As they probe with their avalanche poles, one of the team hits something. When he removes the pole, there is a piece of clothing attached to it. It must have come from at least six feet below the surface. Urgently, the men begin to dig, one after the other. The shovels come down on to the snow above what is
later revealed to be a creek bed. Eventually they will carve out a block of over eight feet in depth, covering an area of a hundred square feet, But by the end of the first day, the team find only
more clothing, including bizarrely, one solitary trouser leg. The following day, May the fourth, the search team have made it down to the slushy ice and water of the creek when they discover more shredded clothing, including another trouser leg and half a brown woolen sweater, and then they find something at a harder It is another body lying face down in the water. A short time later and three other
bodies have been discovered. Two of them are found huddled together in an embrace, no doubt a last desperate attempt of survival. The decomposition of the bodies is so much that only leuda can be identified at this stage. With the bodies wrapped in tarpaulin to preserve any further decay,
lev Ivanov is on the scene the following morning. It is clear from the state of the corpses that time is fast running out for any hope of a meaningful autopsy, but Ivanov is stunned when the chopper arrives to take them away, only for the pilot to refuse the use of his helicopter. It would seem that, despite the Investigative Commission's best efforts to quash some of the more fanciful rumors surrounding the case, an idea, once born, is not so easy to destroy, and what pilot Captain Gaitsenko is
most concerned about is radioactive contamination. The pilot eventually agrees to take the bodies, but only when Ivanoff has them placed in four zinc lined coffins that take days to arrive. It isn't until May the eighth that the bodies are finally lifted from the mountain and flown to Eve del Morg for the autopsy. When the bodies had finally thawed out, pathologist Boris Vozroscheny was once again summoned to perform the somber task of first identifying each victim and then the
cause of their death. Despite the many rumors surrounding the case, even taking into account the suspicious fracture of Rustick's skull, Vozroschdyny was very much of the opinion that the students, for whatever reason, had succumbed through simple hypothermia. But what he uncovers next will change everything. Vozroschdyny harves over the first body, one of the two found in an embrace. He will later be identified as twenty four year old
Alexander Kolovatov. He notes the now familiar lack of adequate footwear, but otherwise the amount of clothing appears normal. There is a bandage on the ankle, presumably from an injury received prior to the trip. There is a small open wound behind the ear, which Vosroshdyny deems insignificant, being most likely merely a result of exposure to the elements. He returns by now the usual verdict death by hypothermia. Expecting more of the same, he turns its attention to the second body.
It is clear from the tattoos alone that this is the body of thirty seven year old Sasha Solitarioff. At first, vos Rosdyny finds much of the same. Again, there are no shoes, and the general decay and superficial injuries are consistent with a struggle for survival. But when vos Rosdyni moves his attention to the chest region, he finds something completely unexpected. Five of Sasha's ribs on his right side
have been fractured, causing severe internal bleeding. It would take some four to fracture five ribs, and clearly, from the nature of the bleeding, it had occurred when Sasha was still alive. The pathologist concludes that it was clearly caused by some kind of large force. Turning his attention now to twenty three year old Collier Thibou Brignoles, vos Rode is shocked to find injuries similar to those sustained by Sasha,
only this time it is to his head. Vashrochdeni concludes that Collier had died after sustaining a catastrophic fracture to the right side of his skull, followed by bleeding again the result of a large force, and the worst was yet to come. Lyuda's body had been found on her knees, leant against a small drop in the ravine, with her face pressed to the rocks and her clothes soaked through with water from the stream. Wrapped around her left foot was the other half of the brown sweater, a last
ditch effort to stave off frostbite. Now lying in the morgue Vasrosdeny can clearly see the tell tale signs of a severe trauma to her chest that had resulted in nine fractured ribs and massive hemorrhaging in the right ventricle her heart. And when he examined inside the mouth, voss Roshdeny drew back in alarm. Her tongue was completely missing. And then there are a number of curious findings from
the site of where the bodies are discovered. They seemed to have been located in a makeshift den, complete with a blanket of branches laid out on the floor to provide some protection from the cold. Had they, in fact, drawing on Sasha's military survival skills, managed to stabilize the situation before succumbing to injuries sustained sometime later, And what were they to make of the camera found around Sasha's neck?
For a start, according to Uryyudin, the students only had three cameras between them, all of which had already been recovered. But perhaps more pertinently, what could possibly have provoked Sasha, in the panic of leaving the tent to remember to take his camera, Or had he, in fact, as some believe, already been standing outside the tent trying to capture something before the chaos. Whatever it was, we will never know,
since the film was too damaged to be processed. Two weeks later, the families of Liuda, Sasha, Alexander, and Collier gathered together on May twenty second at the Sperdlovsk Military Hospital to watch their children being finally laid to rest.
There would be no repeat of the public procession given to the other students, and only the family were granted permission to attend for lead investigator left even off the recent autopsies had only succeeded in generating yet more questions when he and all the families of the deceased needed answers. Despite pressure from above to bring the case to a swift and uncontroversial resolution, the revelation of Leuda, Kollia and
Sasha's injuries could not be ignored. To that end. With his superiors breathing down his neck, he would try one last thing. Just prior to the funerals. Ivanov had organs and items of clothing sent off to be examined for any sign of radiation, but it would be too late
before he could receive the results. Ivanov was ordered to shut the case down immediately, and so it was on Thursday May the twenty eighth, nineteen fifty nine, that the case of the mysterious death in the Ural Mountains of nine hikers, led by student Igordiatlov, was brought to an abrupt and inconclusive end. For Ivanov, it was a bitter and frustrating conclusion to a case that would haunt him and everyone else involved in it for the rest of
their lives. For the families, of the victims. It was a cruel and brutal end, which was, of course no kind of end at all. To this day, families of the victims continue to seek the truth about what exactly had taken place. Eurykan Savage, who as a twelve year old boy had watched the funeral procession from his parents' apartment window, will later go on to establish the Diatlov Foundation, dedicating his life to helping the families unravel the mystery
and to hopefully one day uncover the truth. The day after the case is closed and exhausted, even Off arrives at his office to find the results of the toxicology test waiting for him on his desk. The report concludes that not only as some form of radioactive substance contaminated the clothes, but the level of contamination far exceeds anything
they could ever have thought possible. The report will remain classified for the next thirty years, along with a raft of other materials collected by Ivanov, including one report he had been expressly urged to suppress. It was compiled after Ivanov's final trip to colat Seakle Mountain. The investigator had just finished inspecting the site where The last four bodies were discovered when he found himself staring at a line
of pine trees on the edge of the forest. Something about them seemed off, and then he saw it, a series of burn marks with no concentric form and no center, such as one might expect from a ballistic explosion. For a moment, he wonders if they could have been made as a result of the fire hastily built by Georgie and Yurie. But then he realizes whatever had made the burnmarks had not come from the ground, It had come
from the sky. If you enjoy listening to Unexplained and would like to show your appreciation, you can now help support us by going to Unexplained podcast dot com forward slash support. All donations, no matter how large or small, are massively appreciated. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
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