Your favourite unsolved mystery?

Lollipops23 wrote: »

Wouldn't explain the various injuries sustained by the campers,like the girl who's tongue was missing (ick!!) It sounds like they never found it either, which is odd.

Great thread btw, i've been reading this stuff all day!

And the ripped tent... wonder if the whole thing was staged to look as weird as possible because the government was behind their murders as they had seen something they shouldn't have.

maybe make the whole thing so obscure that no-one can ever work it out?

One of my fave threads on here in a long time...

Interesting article here and a possible explanation for what happened to the skiers... maybe not that much of a mystery at all, although I don't believe any of them would have just slept in their underwear, so not sure if this is wrong from the off...

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4108

Here is my proposed explanation of what happened. It's wrong, of course, because it's done from my armchair 50 years after the fact and with no firsthand knowledge of the region, but it's completely reasonable and does adequately satisfy the facts as we know them. Nine skiers set up camp in an area with potential avalanche danger, but no more or less danger than would have been found if they set up anywhere else they could have reached before nightfall. Sometime during the night, a loud noise, either from a nearby avalanche, a jet aircraft, or military ordnance, convinced at least five members of the group that an avalanche was bearing down on them. They burst out of the tent wearing whatever they happened to be sleeping in and ran. At some point one of them fell and struck his head on a rock. They became lost in the dark and poor visibility, or simply found themselves stranded with their injured friend, and finally built a fire. They quickly got hypothermia and probably shouted themselves hoarse for their friends. Two of them lost consciousness and the others made a desperation decision: To take what little clothes their two unconscious buddies had and risk it all to try and make it back to camp. One made it 300 meters, the second made it 480, and the third a full 630 meters before all five were dead from hypothermia. Back at camp, the four who didn't panic and run away in the night got dressed, collected provisions, and began to search for their friends. They searched for hours, circling high and low, until at some point either through a slip or just bad luck, they were caught in a real avalanche. During the resulting turmoil one received a fatal skull fracture, one received twelve broken ribs, and one bit her tongue off, all perfectly plausible injuries during such a traumatic death. Their bodies remained buried until the spring thaw, as is so common with avalanche victims. At the open-casket funeral for the first five victims, relatives saw the combination of five days of winter sunburn in those days before sunscreen, and the mortician's effort to cover up frostbite and a full month of exposure to the elements, and described it as a strange orange color; though others described it simply as a deep tan, which is consistent with reasonable expectations. And who knows what hair would have looked like after all that exposure and who knows what kind of treatment done by the mortician, so I can't assign too much significance to what amounts to a few anecdotal reports from some funeral attendees, and not even all funeral attendees. Plus I'm quite certain that if UFOs had turned all of their hair really gray, don't you think the cold war Russian authorities would have had it colored back to normal for an open casket funeral? Their bodies had been exposed outdoors for weeks. Of course they looked terrible.

What of the radiation on their clothes? Well, there is at least as much uncertainty about what the Russians were doing with their atomic and thermonuclear weapons in that area in those days, as there is about exactly what type of radiation and how much was found on the Dyatlov pass victims. Since we don't know anything about either, we can't say that any explanation is inconsistent with what was found. And, the thorium lantern mantle question quite probably makes the entire radiation issue a moot point. Assuming they'd changed a lantern mantle sometime during the trip, which nearly always has to be done, there's every reason to expect to find low-level alpha radiation on the clothes of anyone who participated.