In February 1959, 9 tourists-skiers were killed in the mountains of the Northern Urals. In the middle of the night they cut open the tent, half-dressed and unclothed, they fled one and a half kilometers from the place of their overnight stay. Everyone froze. What made the tourists urgently leave the lodging remained a mystery. Andrei, a reader of Komsomolskaya Pravda, is conducting an interesting investigation of this case.
The mystery of the investigation begins with the first title page, this is not at all the case that was opened on February 28, 1959 by the prosecutor of the city of Ivdel - Tempalov.
Before us is the case of the Sverdlovsk Regional Prosecutor's Office, dated February 6, 1959, and the case does not contain a document on the basis of this initiation. This happens only if the case of the regional prosecutor's office arose from some other case, and the date of its opening migrated to the case of the regional prosecutor's office.
In the USSR, there were three prosecutor's offices, regional (city) regional and military. It is logical to assume that the case of the regional prosecutor's office arose from military materials. The general civil prosecutor's office could not refer to these secret documents and the only thing that they endured for themselves was the date of the beginning of the investigation. Consequently, the military prosecutor's office, on the basis of some unknown documents, opened a case on February 6, when the death of tourists was not yet widely known. Their first corpses, we recall, were officially found only on February 27.
HIDDEN MOST IMPORTANT
When you read the available materials of the investigation, you suspect that this is only part of the material. There are no documents specifically those that shed light on true events. Let me list the most obvious:
- There is no act of inspection of the last three bodies at the place of discovery. There is only an act of examination of the body of Dubinina, it also contains an indication of the presence of three more corpses not removed from the stream. And this act must be according to the procedure, it must indicate a camera that is visible on Zolotarev's body and is not mentioned anywhere in the investigation materials.
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- There is no protocol of interrogation of the most important witness Sharavin, his testimony contradicts the version of the investigation.
- There is no inventory of films from cameras and from a can of filmed films, the frame to which the investigation refers is not at all present on the films attached to the case.
- The photographs from the materials of the investigation have retouching, and precisely those places on the bodies where there should be mechanical damage.
- There are no protocols for examinations of all cameras and watches. The fate of these things is unknown, they were not transferred to relatives.
The above can be explained by the fact that the military prosecutor's office, realizing that the death of 9 tourists could not be hidden, notified the regional prosecutor's office and went into the shadows, obtaining the information it needed with the hands of civilian investigators. This explains the strange facts of the investigation that investigator Ivanov spoke about. For example, everyone involved in the autopsy was forced to plunge into a barrel of alcohol.
STRANGE INVESTIGATOR
Investigator Lev Ivanov was convinced that the tourists were killed by a UFO. In the materials of the case, he entered information directly relating to the observation of "fireballs" during this period. He was not allowed to lead the investigation in this direction. Ivanov himself spoke about this later to the press. Although he had witnesses. A group of UPI tourists was on February 4-5-6, 33 kilometers from the scene, on Mount Chistop, and observed bright flashes in the direction of the Dyatlov Pass. In particular, a certain Vasiliev claims that he saw such a flash in the area of the Dyatlov Pass on the night of February 5.
And here is what the investigator Ivanov said to the media: “And once again about the fireballs. They were and are. It is only necessary not to hush up their appearance, but to deeply understand their nature. The overwhelming majority of informants who met with them talk about the peaceful nature of their behavior, but, as you can see, there are also tragic cases. Someone had to intimidate, or punish people, or show their strength, and they did it, killing three people. I know all the details of the incident and I can say that only those who were in these balls know more about these circumstances. And whether there were "people" and whether they are always there - this is still no one knows …"
DATES
Two dates of February 2 and 6 are important for us. The first is the date of the tragedy according to the version of the civil investigation. Based on the second, indicating the beginning of the investigation, it can be assumed that this tragic story took place on February 4-5. The fundamental difference - in the first case, the tourists were not in the area of Mount Otorten, and in the second - they were there. The version with the date of February 2 is doubtful, there are much more facts for the fact that the tourists returned from this ascent and not everything was in order for them, something had already happened.
I will not be unfounded, this is how the tent should have stood
This is exactly that tent, set up according to all the rules, just a snapshot from another hike. Note the two skis for keeping the skate in the center of the tent. The search engines claim that one pair of skis on the pass was also not placed in the base of the tent and lay next to it. But the center of the tent needs to be propped up somehow, and they cut the ski pole to support it.
Only an extreme necessity can make you refuse from already prepared skis and spoil the ski pole. It is impossible to climb without a stick, which means they were returning and hoped to replace it in the storage shed.
After the ascent, tourists should be in these places in the evening of February 4, so the tragedy on the night of February 4-5 is confirmed by the date of the beginning of the investigation.
INCOMPLETE WITNESS
Mikhail Sharavin, who was the first to discover both the tent and the dead, claims that the bodies under the cedar were covered with a blanket. There is no record of his official interrogation in the investigation materials, although he states that the investigators took evidence from him. If Sharavin is right, the picture of events changes dramatically. The surviving tourists could not cover these victims with a blanket, because they themselves were in dire need of clothing.
Looks like Sharavin is telling the truth, look at the picture
The bodies seem to be really covered in the chest area, but this is snow, it has packed and acquired the form of folds of matter, it is also visible on the lower leg of the first body. This is possible only in one case, when bodies covered with soft snow were covered with heavy matter (blanket) and under the weight of the matter the snow took the form of natural folds of the blanket. Then someone removed the blanket, but the imprint of the folds remained.
This means that the bodies were not covered immediately after death, but later, when they were covered with 5-10 centimeters of snow. Why did you do it? Apparently someone, violating the instructions, regretted and covered them according to custom. And after the bodies were found by search engines, someone else removed this blanket.
These testimonies of Sharavin, in principle, could not get into the materials of the open investigation, they are stored in a completely different place. This means that immediately after the events and before the arrival of the search engines, this area was under covert surveillance.
OUTSIDE
Things that did not belong to tourists were found on the spot, the investigator was extremely reluctant to enter them into the protocol, witness and participant in the events Yudin says about this. The investigator can understand that the thing can and belongs to the tourist, who will check it, but he did not want to litter the investigation by finding out who owned which rag. But there are other facts that indicate the presence of strangers.
First, there was no tent pole on the north side. It turns out that either the tourists did not have time to completely put the ward, or the counter was removed by unknown persons.
The second fact concerns a pair of skis prepared for the central stretching device. In the photo, these skis are stuck in the snow, but not in those places where they should be in the role of stretch marks. According to the same Sharavin, this pair of skis lay in the snow in front of the tent entrance.
This is how he personally depicted it on the diagram.
For identification, the relatives of the victims are given everything, including the cowards of the dead. But all five cameras and watches, four of them are missing in these things. But the compasses and flashlights of tourists are given to relatives. The impression is that the civil investigation did not have these things, so they ended up in a completely different investigation.
The cameras, of course, attracted the attention of the investigation because of the ability to trace the main chronology of events. The removal of the watch from the materials of the civil case looks inexplicable, if one does not take into account one circumstance: three watches stopped with a difference of less than half an hour. Such a coincidence happens once in a thousand, which is unlikely, but if they break, this becomes the most important evidence, because this is due to the deaths of their owners.
STRANGE SHOTS
The obvious procedural violation is associated with photographs. One of them, the main one, since it substantiates the version of the investigation about the development of events, is not present on the negatives. In fact, he may be "leftist" altogether. It turns out that the filmed films were more than recorded in the investigation materials, and at least two. This can be argued on the basis of the protocol for transferring cameras to the investigation by the search engines. There are three cameras and the number of frames taken is indicated: 34, 27, 27. There is a film with 34 frames, and the last frame on it suggests that the group really collided with “fireballs”. But there are no two films with 27 frames in the materials of the investigation, the number of frames on the films is different. It turns out that two films with 27 frames each did not make it into the general civil case,Apparently they had shots that were inconvenient for the version, but important for the secret case of the military prosecutor's office.
There is one more detail in the case materials, the tourists are called the "Group of amateur tourists". But there was a professional tourism instructor in the group, and he was at work, not on vacation. The identity of Zolotarev, the instructor of the Kaurovskaya Turbaza, is mysterious, most likely he was an officer of the MGB. If this is the case, then the group was used as a cover for secret control of this territory, apparently there were reasons for that. As you can see, it was not in vain that they controlled, an abnormal situation happened and they all died. They died strangely, although according to the official investigation the cause of death was freezing, for some reason these dead were opened with extraordinary precautions.
So these events are mysterious only for the uninitiated. Publicly available documents are carefully filtered, and everything significant is kept in closed archives.
Nikolay VARSEGOV, Natalia KO.
We agree with Andrei that the “erroneous” date of the initiation of a criminal case by the civil prosecutor's office is indeed suspicious. And it is very likely that the case in reality was initiated on February 6 by military investigators, and then the file was handed over to civilians.
Soon, presumably, all military investigative materials from this folder were removed, only the crusts with the date remained. But it is interesting that in these crusts, probably much later, a strange protocol of interrogation of the head of the communications unit of the Vizhaisky forestry department, Vasily Andreyevich Popov, was inserted. On that document in black and white: "The interrogation began on February 6, 1959, and ended on February 6, 1959."
Here is what was in this interrogation: “… The witness testified: In the second half of January 1959, at the Vizhay Settlement, I saw two groups of tourists who were heading to the Ural ridge region, I personally did not speak with them. In the early days of February 1959, there were strong winds in the village of Vizhay. The wind raised a lot of snow and brought snowdrifts (although there was practically no precipitation, there were roads in open places. I live in the village of Vizhay in 1951, I don’t remember such winds that were in early February 1959.”Chudinov interrogated (the head of the police the village of Polunochny).
Most likely, the policeman Chudinov on February 6 interrogated Popov on a call from the military prosecutor's office and reported the results by phone. And when the civil prosecutor's office took up this case, then Chudinov, on occasion, handed over his interrogation protocol to the investigators. The date was not forwarded. The document is all the same …
So it looks very much like that - the dead tourists were discovered much earlier than it was announced about it.
