Mountain of the Dead (22 page)

Most probably, this one and the same ‘light set’ makes its appearance in different parts east of the Ural Ridge following some programme built into it by no one knows who and no one knows when. It may be doing ground surveys at definite locations by picking information with a light beam.

Here are the approximate co-ordinates of its appearance:

– 29 August 2002: 60°30" N 59°25" E, from 10 p.m. to 2.30 a.m. Observed by V. Rudkovsky in quarter 357 of the Denezhkin Kamen nature reserve.

– 11 September 2002: 60°40" N 60°15" E, at 11 p.m. in quarter 11 of the Laksa forestry. The ‘set’ stayed there approximately from 9.30 p.m. to 2 a.m.

– 1 February 1959: 61°45" N 59°20" E. The eastern slope of Mount Kholat Syakhl. Time approximately from 6 p.m. to 10.30 p.m.

According to Rudkovsky, the light appeared shortly before it got dark. Probably, the ‘light set’ starts its survey after dark and continues at certain points of the earth for four to four and a half hours. Rudkovsky claimed that at 2.30 a.m. he heard a loud snapping sound, like from a strong electric discharge, and then the light was gone. After that, for two to three minutes, a strong squally wind rose.

We may suppose that on 11 September 2002, the ‘set’ started working in No. 15 pit after dark, i.e. at 9.30 p.m., and finished at 2 a.m.

On 1 February 1959, on Mount Kholat Syakhl, the light the tourists saw appeared at 6 p.m. and went out at 10.30 p.m. or around this time (plus or minus thirty minutes).

Could space satellites have recorded this light on 29 August 2002 and 11 September 2002? It might be possible to clarify the time of operation of the ‘light set’ by this data. Or maybe there are records of similar light effects in other places?

I always find it difficult remembering the event of having seen the ‘light set’, the more so every time I have to prove to someone that this had really happened to me. I try not to think about this as some awful experience. It was probably for this reason that I put this subject aside in 2002. Rudkovsky had a similar reaction, as he told me himself. Rudkovsky’s former friend in the nature reserve, V. Yefimov, told me that when he met Valentin after the night spent in the woods near that ‘light set’, Valentin looked a bit ‘haywire’ and sluggish, especially the first day after it had happened. Then, gradually, he began to feel better. After August 2002 Valentin was seriously ill twice, although nothing of the kind had ever happened to him before. In 2004 he underwent serious surgery. After the meeting with the ‘light set’ I myself had two serious injuries in the Ivdel district. I would not link my injuries directly with what I saw on 11 September 2002. But still, these are issues to be considered.

After I read the material of the Dyatlov case investigation, it dawned on me that we, Rudkovsky and myself, had got off easily. We could have gone mad or received a due portion of a shock wave from the ‘light set’. We were lucky, just because of having grasped in a short while that the ‘set’ responded to our glance and that one should plainly look away from the source of light and the approaching torches. For a group, this may have been impossible to have been quickly understood.

Science moves forward. In the flow of information we may sometimes oversee serious scientific discoveries that have been made in recent times. Under the guidance of scientists, a new, fifth, state of matter was obtained at an orbital station in outer space: frozen plasma. Before that, mankind knew of only four states of matter: solid, gaseous, liquid and plasma. Here is the discovery of one more: the frozen plasma state. It opens up great opportunities in power engineering and prospects for building spacecraft capable of reaching other planets and stars. New super-heavy elements appear in the Mendeleev periodic table. When stores of oil and gas come to an end on the Earth these elements will allow power to be safely generated from them. Also amazing scientific research results have been obtained in the USA and Russia: ‘graphic thought record’ (‘
myslegraphia
’ in Russian) – an imprint of a human thought may appear on photographic film. In other words, thought may be photographed. There was an article about such effect in
Komsomolskaya Pravda
in April 2006.

Could the ‘light set’ be equipped with an instrument able to catch human thought via a glance? When the person looks away, the ‘set’ loses sight of the person and leaves him or her alone. Or possibly does not lose sight of the person, but processes human thought according to some internal program and determines whether such a ‘witness’ needs to be eliminated. This smells of something extraterrestrial.

The fact that the ‘light set’ may not just amaze people with its abnormal behaviour (its main feature is response to human glance), but also be aggressive and inflict mortal injuries to people with a fine-focused shock wave and make them panic had caused me to sit down to commit to paper my version of the Ivdel incident.

According to my version, such were the injuries received on 1 February 1959 by the skiers: Thibeaux-Brignolle, Zolotarev and Luda Dubinina. This made the half-dressed tourists leave the tent and run as fast as they could, and finally killed them all.

This is an extremely rare phenomenon. But people must work out and remember certain rules of safe behaviour when meeting with such an effect, in order to avoid a repetition of the Dyatlov incident.

First, one has to simply turn away and not look at the source of light. One should leave the place as fast as possible. I think if someone happens to observe the phenomenon and they have a camera with them, they should take a photo only while looking away, or with closed eyes and in a very short period of time. Such occasional encounters of people with the ‘light set’ will surely happen in the future. I am sure there have already been many. When something ends well, people make little of it (so it happened to me after I met with the ‘light phenomenon’ on 11 September 2002). Other meetings end in tragedy, leaving silent dead bodies behind and many questions with no answers.

For example, in summer 2004, in the Taiga near Severouralsk, an experienced hunter left his hut without his outer clothes and never came back. Later, his body was found without signs of violent death (reported in the newspaper
Nashe Slovo
dated 27 February 2006). I got interested in the mysterious death of this person and decided to look for details of the case.

This is what I learned from relatives of the deceased. Sergey Baryshnikov, 50 years old, a physically strong person, a miner from the city of Severouralsk, knew the Taiga very well. He used his vacation time for professional hunting. He had a hut somewhere on the River Molmys in the Perm Oblast, beyond the Ural Ridge, where he lived and hunted. On 14 August 2004, he left Severouralsk in his car to check whortleberry fields on the Yelovaya Griva (Spruce Mane) ridge. This is a place on the road to Kvarkusha. He took no gun and planned to be back home on the same day. There were two dogs with him: 3-year-old Belka and 3-month-old Buran.

He drove from Severouralsk via Bayanovka to the west, in the direction of Mount Teremki on the Yelovvaya ridge, 60km from Severouralsk. There, 1km from the main road, he left his car. He did not come back, neither on that night, nor on the next day.

His relatives and friends started a search. The car was soon found because they knew where he was headed for, but there was no sign of him. A rescue team from Karpinsk was invited twice, because Severouralsk had no such team at that time. People from the Severouralsk Bauxite mines (SUBR) and other city organisations were involved in the search. A sniffer dog was brought but it failed to find a trail, because of too many footprints near the car.

Within a few days, his dogs Buran and Belka were found. The Mansi said that if the dogs had left their master it must mean he is dead. The search lasted two weeks. On 3 September 2004, in the vicinity of Mount Sredny Sennoi Kamen, a cedar nuts procurement team found his dead body approximately 20km from where he had left his car. He was without footwear and half-dressed. He wore only a singlet and sports pants. There were no traces of violent death. He had died of heart failure, which had developed as a result of strong pneumonia, which means that he died of hypothermia. His stomach was empty, despite the fact that at that time of year the Taiga abounds in cedar cones, many of which lay on the ground, and whortleberry.

What had happened to a normal healthy man in the Taiga? Being an experienced Taiga dweller and hunter he could not get lost as he knew the area very well. We can only suppose that he had met with something very extraordinary.

And here, too, we may see analogies with the deaths of the Dyatlov group. What happened to cause the hunter to suffer from hypothermia and die out in the Taiga? This is what I suppose had happened. For some reason he stopped in the Taiga for the night of 14/15 August 2004. It could be that he planned to look around the area more thoroughly. Or the dogs, Belka and Buran, sensing the infrasound emitted by the ‘light set’ ran away, so he went after them and was compelled to stay in the Taiga for the night. He could not leave the dogs and go home alone. (It is known that dogs and cats perceive vibrations below 20Hz, i.e. infrasound. That is why it is said of them that ‘they smell trouble’: animals are often the first to get alarmed and leave a village where an earthquake is soon to take place, which is preceded by infrasonic emission.)

In the evening the hunter made a fire, took off his boots and outer garments, which were wet from the rain, and started drying his clothes near the fire. Suddenly, in the dark, at approximately 10.30 p.m., he sees a strip of swinging light as if from a projector. He watches the source of light with interest. At that moment, swinging torches separate from the source of light and quickly move in his direction through the forest. In amazement, he continues looking at the torches. They get near and suddenly a strong pulse of infrasound hits him.

It may be that the blow and the shock caused fear and panic in the man. He runs away from the place half-dressed and barefoot. The dogs follow him. The impact of infrasound and the shock wave was so strong that he never recovered his normal mental condition. All his further actions were inadequate to save him.

Over a period of a number of days he wandered in the Taiga, did not pick berries or nuts, made no effort to make himself warm and find a way to habitation. He moved at random, without direction, in places where neither a house nor a road could be found. The weather was cold and rainy. He got a cold, a strong pneumonia developed, and in a few days he died, 20km from his car.

Had it been so or not, no one can tell for sure. One can only suppose. Another supposition is that he might have died from a lightning bolt.

Over 100 Russian satellites are orbiting the Earth today. There is a round-the-clock observation of the whole of the country’s territory from outer space. If satellite control centres had registered luminescence in that area on the night of 14/15 August 2004, such records could serve as indirect proof to the fact of an experienced Taiga dweller being affected by a ‘light set’. Can anyone take out this data of satellite observation? Do such people or organisations exist?

Here are the approximate map co-ordinates of the place where S.I. Baryshnikov could have been on that night: 60°07" N, 59°20" E. If necessary, more precise co-ordinates of the places where I and Rudkovsky saw the ‘light set’ in operation can be indicated on larger-scale maps, or using instruments, up to fractions of a second. If the three cases of illumination that had taken place at different times and locations were registered by satellites, much would be explained, the Dyatlov group deaths included.

The hunter’s dog, Belka, had also received some stress, or probably the ‘light set’ infrasonic action had an effect on her. Being a cheerful and active creature, she now looked quiet, frightened, as if feeling some guilt, putting her ears down all the time. Gradually, she recovered her normal condition. She still lives with S.I. Baryshnikov’s widow.

What is this trouble that wanders the Taiga at night? Who can give an answer? Maybe its appearance was noted not only in the Taiga?

I visited the Dyatlov graves at the Mikhailovskoe Cemetery in Ekaterinburg. On the 4m high monument there are nine photographs of young and beautiful boys and girls; the sign on the back of the monument reads: ‘In eternal memory of tourists of Ural Polytechnic Institute tragically killed in north Urals on 2 February 1959’.

Their deaths were not in vain. The price of their deaths helps us to understand the unknown phenomenon that had killed them. By picking every grain of truth and systematising such unusual phenomena, and with the current progress in science, people will someday answer the question of what that ‘light set’ was like, what was the purpose of its appearance on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains, where it came from, and who sent it to us.

Yury Yakimov’s theory is a translated and condensed version of the original on the website
www.Russia-paranormal.org
.

If any of the Dyatlov party were still alive in 2012, they would probably have been getting too old to make the arduous journey from Ekaterinburg to Kholat Syakhl. Luda Dubinina, for instance, who was 20 years old at the time of her death in 1959, would have been 73 years old in May 2012 had she lived. There would have been some changes on the route they took as well as changes elsewhere, not least the sweeping away of the old Soviet Union, starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The name of the city they started their journey from changed from Sverdlovsk to Ekaterinburg in 1991, and had they been around in 1991 and living in the newly renamed city they may have started to regularly see foreigners for the first time – until then it had been a closed city. There are a number of high-rise buildings in the city now, giving it a modern appearance and lifting it out of the Soviet era ‘look’, although there is still plenty of evidence of Soviet-style architecture.