Someone or something terrified them?and then slaughtered them. Who or what? How and why? We?re unlikely to ever know?
?A compelling natural force.??Lev Ivanov
Junior welterweight Ruslan Provodnikov is defending his WBO title tonight against Chris Algieri. A crowd-pleaser, ?The Siberian Rocky? has been interviewed left, right, and center?but not by me. Ruslan is a Mansi, and I would have asked him to theorize about what happened to the nine young Russian hikers who died so terribly and mysteriously on the night of February 1, 1959, upon a Siberian mountain slope aptly named Kholat Syakhl, or Mountain of the Dead.
The rescue party found the tent, cut and ripped open from the inside, they found the prints of bare feet running toward the treeline of that bleak and frozen Ural mountain, they found?the bodies.
One of the corpses was that of Igor Dyatlov, the 23-year-old engineering student from Ural Polytechnic Institute who organized and led the expedition, and whose name was later given to the area. The party consisted of seven men and two women, some of whom suffered broken bones and massive internal injuries, but without sign of external injury. One of the women, Luda Dubinina, was missing her eyes and tongue. Their clothing, the little they were wearing, showed signs of radiation.
A mad scramble from their tent, which they didn?t open but cut their way through, scantily clad and barefoot on a night freezing cold. Why? What terrified them? What killed them? The lead investigator, Lev Ivanov, reported that the deaths were caused by ?an unknown elemental force which they were unable to overcome.? He privately mused that the nine were killed by extraterrestrials. Good an explanation as any, given that no single theory explains all the facts.
Sexual tension? After all, seven men and two women, one of whom, Zina Kolmogorova, was particularly toothsome. That might explain the lack of clothing, but not their leaving the tent. And why cut their way through? Why not simply open the flap?
Bears or wolves? No such tracks. A Yeti? Assuming he exists, he?s not so elusive as not to leave a massive footprint or two. An avalanche? No sign of one. Were they overrun by escapees from a gulag? Soviet special forces engaged in a secret operation, and dead men tell no tales? The notoriously territorial Mansi? Again?no footprints, save those of the nine. The legendary and much-feared Zolotaya Baba, or Golden Woman? Hey, why not?
Someone or something terrified them?and then slaughtered them. Who or what? How and why? We?re unlikely to ever know. Our only clue is that it was ?an unknown elemental force.? But I prefer the translation, ?a compelling natural force.? Which brings me back to Ruslan Provodnikov, who?ll win tonight by seventh-round kayo.
