HAPPY NEW YEAR! LET'S GO 2026!

In 1959, nine young hikers set out across the frozen wilderness of the Ural Mountains in Russia — and never returned.
When their campsite was discovered, rescuers found a tent ripped open, footprints leading barefoot into the snow, and bodies scattered across the mountain — some burned, some broken, one missing her tongue.

For decades, the Dyatlov Pass mystery haunted investigators and fueled every theory imaginable — from military testing to alien encounters. The case was finally reopened in 2019, and what modern science uncovered was shocking and no less haunting.

Hear the full story — the 1959 tragedy, the forensic horror, and the modern investigation that used Disney’s Frozen to model the snow that may have killed them.

Nine hikers. One mountain.
And more questions than answers.

Sources:

• Russian Federation Prosecutor General’s Office — Dyatlov Pass Reinvestigation Report (2019–2020)
• Sverdlovsk Oblast Criminal Case File No. 659 — Dyatlov Group Incident, 1959 (declassified 1990)
• Lev Ivanov, “The Mystery of the Fireballs,” Soviet Life Magazine, 1990

• DyatlovPass.com — English-language archive of original case files, diaries, autopsy reports, and search photos
• Dyatlov Foundation — Russian-language archival materials, official documents, and family interviews

• Donnie Eichar — Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (Chronicle Books, 2013)
• Yuri Yudin & Natalia Varsegova — Dyatlov Pass: End of the Mystery (Eksmo Press, 2017)
• Aleksei Rakitin — Dyatlov Pass Mystery: Not a Cold Case (AST Publishing, 2015)
• Benjamin Radford — “The Dyatlov Pass Incident Revisited,” Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2020)

• Johan Gaume & Alexander Puzrin — “Mechanisms of Slab Avalanche Release and Implications for the Dyatlov Pass Incident,” Communications Earth & Environment, Nature Portfolio (January 2021)
• ETH Zurich / Disney Research Collaboration — Snowpack Motion Simulation Project (2019)

• An Unknown Compelling Force (Documentary, 2021, directed by Liam Le Guillou)
• Expedition Dyatlov (Russian TV Documentary, Channel One Russia, 2019)
• BBC News — “Russia Reopens 1959 Dyatlov Pass Mystery Case,” (February 2019)
• National Geographic — “Frozen in Mystery: The Dyatlov Pass Incident Revisited,” (March 2020)

• Russian Federal Service for State Registration, Cadastre and Cartography — Ural Mountains Topographic Survey Series, Sheet O-41
• NASA Earth Observatory — MODIS Snow Cover Imagery, Northern Urals Region (1959 comparative dataset, analysis 2019)