All Things Dyatlov...

I have a friend whose been hung up on the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident for about eighteen months now and who has been badgering me to look into it. Frankly the misadventures of a bunch of unfortunate trekkers has not held any appeal for me but, when my friend pushed yet another self-published work on the event at me I decided – merely in the interests of stopping this from happening again – to borrow the thing and look at it and its “new revelations”.

McCLOSKEY, Keith, Journey to Dyatlov Pass – An Explanation of the Mystery, The Author, 2016.

Octavo; paperback; 231pp., with many (blurry) photographic illustrations. Mild wear. Near fine.

The author of this book is the dogged Keith McCloskey, a Brit with the usual sentimental hang-up which pervades all things surrounding the Incident – that the group was too young and attractive for such a horrible thing to have happened – underlain with a solid set of investigatory skills and a surprisingly open mind. His website kicks off with maudlin testimonies to the dead with photographs and images of the memorials that have been erected to them, then gets straight into the hard facts before letting the weirdos in to have their two-cent’s worth – the MUFON aficionados, the ex-priests who know a demonic event when they see one, and the Yeti-trackers. That he gives these idiots even half the air-time he does is indicative of a considerable generosity of spirit.

From my perspective, what intrigues people about this event, is that it consists of a large series of clues which cannot be encompassed by a single theory about what took place; no matter what kind of box you find to put all the pieces in, some of them simply will not be accommodated. In this sense, the whole story is reminiscent of a modern-day Marie Celeste – there too, the mystery won’t be comfortably explained by any single theory. Added to this the fact that all the victims were young, fit, healthy and attractive, there is a cachet of Life being no fair considerer of its victims’ potentials. Unlike the Marie Celeste, however, in the aftermath of the Dyatlov Incident, there was a considerable amount of intrusion by high-level Communist Party activity and, to this day, ex-KGB sources insist on meeting every query with a stolid “no comment”. Thus, we may not know for sure what was going down on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl on the night of the 1^st and 2^nd of February 1959, but we can rest assured that there was a very human explanation for it all.

What does interest me about the event are the number of clues and how they work against each other in trying to find resolution. There are features which are hard to explain – the woman Luda’s missing tongue for example – and others which have several interpretations – like the group’s tracks from the tent down to the tree line. McCloskey is clear about dismissing the tongue as a deliberate falsehood in the autopsy report (and, since this is the fact that almost everybody latches onto with ghoulish glee, has been howled down for his opinion); the tracks, in the “Methanol Poisoning” scenario show blinded victims attempting to make their way downhill with some members straying a little to either side, or else they show a standard trekking practise for breaking a trail through fresh snow. The injuries displayed by the bodies are wildly interpreted to show everything from fights erupting within the group, to some kind of massive shockwave exposure. Again, because we know the autopsy reports are dodgy and that there was some kind of military cover-up in place, we’ll never know for sure.

From the point of view of writing a mystery story, or a “Call of Cthulhu” scenario, the incidents at Dyatlov Pass are an interesting case of how to go about establishing an event where something mysterious has taken place and where outside agencies are keen to keep things hush-hush. Imagine if this was a secret meeting between the Russian military and the Mi-Go – there are all kinds of clues that such a rationale could encompass, from missing organs, to shockwave weaponry, to why a bunch of well-trained, even battle-hardened, individuals would run screaming into the night without their shoes on. I’m not saying that the Fungi from Yuggoth were there that night, but it would be an interesting, “X-Files”-y way of interpreting the facts.

I’m fairly sure that we’ll never know what happened that night – unless some senior FSG figure has a sudden fit of conscience – but we can rest assured that it involved nothing but human error and human mendacity. Keith McCloskey is also pretty sure that that’s the case too, and you can find his thoughts (as well as those of the idiot fringe) here at his website:

www.dyatlov-pass-incident.com

For my money there’s not a better introduction to the Pass and its pervasive secrecy. And it’s probably a better guide than the Rennie Harlin movie...