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IMAGE: Configuration of the Dyatlov group s tent installed on a flat surface after making a cut in the slope below a small shoulder. view more
Credit: Gaume/Puzrin
In early October 2019, when an unknown caller rang EPFL professor Johan Gaume s cell phone, he could hardly have imagined that he was about to confront one of the greatest mysteries in Soviet history. At the other end of the line, a journalist from The New York Times asked for his expert insight into a tragedy that had occurred 60 years earlier in Russia s northern Ural Mountains - one that has since come to be known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Gaume, head of EPFL s Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory (SLAB) and visiting fellow at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, had never heard of the case, which the Russian Public Prosecutor s Office had recently resurrected from Soviet-era archives. I asked the journalist to call me back the following day so that I could gather more i
Has the mystery of Dyatlov Pass finally been solved? Horrific deaths of nine students during Siberian ski trip in 1959 once blamed on aliens and yetis were caused by an AVALANCHE, study suggests
In 1959 a manhunt was launched to find nine hikers who had not returned from a trek in the Ural Mountains
Their bodies were found half-naked and mutilated - fuelling conspiracy theories that blamed yetis and aliens
Researchers created new computer models and 3D scans to understand the conditions surround the event
They found the group of nine hikers were likely forced out of their tent by an unusual slab avalanche