By Tim Binnall
Russian investigators recently journeyed to the location of the Dyatlov Pass incident and brought back some rather remarkable drone footage from the site. The week-long expedition was part of what is intended to be a thorough reexamination of the 1959 tragedy in which nine hikers died in the Ural mountains under mysterious circumstances which have baffled experts and the public to this day. According to a report on a television special that aired in Russia prior to the start of the trip, the group that traveled to Dyatlov Pass consisted of a prosecutor tasked with looking into the case as well as a journalist from Pravda and the producers of the TV program itself.
With the results of the investigation not expected to be revealed until August, it's anyone's guess as to what the group may have uncovered during the mid-March expedition. That said, the team behind the trip did release a somewhat eerie piece of drone footage which provides an unprecedented look at the scene of the Dyatlov Pass incident as it appears today. While there are obviously no signs of the tragedy that took place there six decades ago, the video allows one to see the desolate nature of the terrain and imagine what must have been a terrifying experience for the group to be stuck out there when whatever tragedy that killed them struck.
And, at the risk of burying the lede, it's worth noting that the Russian TV special also included an intriguing image which had never been seen before. The photo in question came from the original lead investigator of the Dyatlov Pass incident and was passed on to an organization devoted to documenting the case. Amazingly, the image shows the body of a man in the snow and this individual was apparently not one of the nine hikers known to have died in the tragedy. As one can imagine, the sensational photo raised eyebrows among researchers, but some have speculated that the person was from a different case investigated by man and the image had somehow gotten mixed into his Dyatlov Pass materials.