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“I suspected at the time and am almost sure now that these bright flying spheres had a direct connection to the group’s death,” Ivanov told Leninsky Put, a small Kazakh newspaper. He retired in Kazakhstan and has since died.
The declassified files contain testimony from the leader of a group of adventurers who camped about 50 kilometers south of the skiers on the same night. He said his group saw strange orange spheres floating in the night sky in the direction of Kholat-Syakhl.
Ivanov speculated that one skier might have left the tent during the night, seen a sphere and woken up the others with his cries. Ivanov said the sphere might have exploded as they ran toward the forest, killing the four who had serious injuries and cracking Slobodin’s skull.
Yudin said he also thought an explosion had killed his friends. He said the level of secrecy surrounding the incident suggests that the group might have inadvertently entered a secret military testing ground. He said the radiation on the clothes supported his theory.
Kuntsevich agreed, saying another clue to the deaths was the fact that the faces of the first five bodies had been inexplicably tan. “I attended the funerals of the first five victims and remember that their faces look liked they had a deep brown tan,” he said.
Yudin also said the released documents contained no information about the condition of the skiers’ internal organs. “I know for sure that there were special boxes with their organs sent for examination, “ he said.
No traces of an explosion, however, have been found near Kholat-Syakhl.
No Records of Missiles
While a missile fired from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan could have reached the northern Urals, there are no records of any launches at the time, said Alexander Zeleznyakov, a historian on Soviet missiles and a senior official with the Korolyov Rocket and Space Corporation Energia. The Soviet Union’s other main launch pad, Plesetsk, only opened in late 1959. Zeleznyakov also said the surface-to-air missiles that could have been launched from the pads had not yet been built.
The Defense Ministry and the Yekaterinburg regional prosecutor’s office said they had no immediate information, citing the age of the case.
Kuntsevich said he had led a group to the area last year and found a “cemetery” of scrap metal that suggested the military had conducted experiments there at some time.
“We can’t say what kind of military technology was tested, but the catastrophe of 1959 was man-made,” he said.
Yudin said the military might have found the tent before the volunteer rescuers. He said he had been asked to identify the owner of every object found at the scene and had failed to find a match for a piece of cloth that looked like it had come from a soldier’s coat, a pair of glasses, a pair of skis and a piece of a ski.
Yudin also said he had seen documents that led him to believe that the criminal investigation had been opened on Feb. 6, 14 days before the search team found the tent.
Dyatlov’s friends have looked into whether the deaths might have been caused by an avalanche. Setting up the camp on the slope might have disturbed the snow above, causing it to tumble down a few hours later. This would explain the ripped tent, which the skiers would have had to cut open to exit.
Skeptics of this theory point out that the skiers left the camp by foot and traveled more than a kilometer in minus 30 C.
Thibeaux-Brignollel would have been unconscious due to his shattered skull, said Mikhail Kornev, a doctor with the S.M. Kirov Russian Medical Military Academy.
But his friends could have carried him. After all, investigators could not decide whether there were eight or nine pairs of footprints in the snow.
Also, Dubinina and Zolotarev could have walked with their broken ribs, Kornev said. “I can grant this possibility since the situation was extreme,” he said.
Six former rescuers and 31 independent experts gathered Friday in Yekaterinburg to look for answers about the incident. They concluded that the military had been carrying out tests in the area and had inadvertantly caused the deaths.
But “we still lack documents and ask the Defense Ministry, the space agency and the FSB to provide us with them to obtain a full picture,” the participants said in a statement.
The conference was organized by Ural State Technical University, the Dyatlov Foundation and several nongovernmental organizations.
What really happened on the night of Feb. 2, 1959, may never be known. But Dyatlov is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon.
The area where the group set up their last camp has been officially named Dyatlov’s Pass.
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