Dyatlov pass surrounded by mystery

As an avid lover of the unknown, I have come to be especially interested in the story of the Dyatlov pass, the mysterious death of nine hikers in the Russian mountains.

In 1959, nine bodies were found frozen in the Ural mountains of Russia, also known as the Dead mountains to the indigenous Mansi language. The team had left on Jan. 27 to travel to the Gora Otorten mountain, also known as “Don’t Go There” in Mansi. However, the team was stopped by a snowstorm and decided to camp out on the eastern slope Feb. 2 on Kholat Syakhl. That night, the nine students and graduates froze to death, and no one knows why.
Upon finding the bodies, the tent was sliced open from the inside and supposedly quickly abandoned, because the belongings were still inside but the people were not. The bodies were found up to almost a mile away under thirteen feet of snow, very strange.
Footprints were found of eight to nine people walking in socks, a single shoe or barefoot, in the middle of a Russian winter. The footprints were leading to a forest, but disappeared after 500 meters, according to the Telegraph.

The bodies of two men, barefoot and dressed in underclothes, were discovered near the forest by what remained of a fire. The expedition leader, Dyatlov, and a man and a woman were found halfway to the tent from the fire, researchers assume they were returning to the tent. Autopsies showed that all five had died from hypothermia.
The rest of the party was found two months later in a forest ravine. They did not suffer the same fate as the first five bodies. They were discovered to have traumatic pressure or crush injuries, and one body had a tongue ripped out and all four had small traces of radiation.
Now, these five bodies add to the strange mystery of the Dyatlov pass, and conspiracy theories soon followed.

The first suggested theory is fireballs, and while this does seem crazy, there is eye witness proof. As reported, some eyewitnesses saw fast-moving “balls of fire” in the northern Urals around the time of the Dyatlov incident. Some believe this can be disregarded as Soviet missile tests, but others believe the balls of light emitted a time of energy that caused the deaths of the nine skiers.
This theory was proposed by one of the original investigators of the case, Lev Ivanov, but 31 years after the deaths. Ivanov’s theory assumes the balls of light correlate with the day the skiers died, and some investigators say otherwise.
Prior to this theory, the case was explained as natural causes such as an avalanche, animal attack, human attack or even covert government activity, but the strange circumstances of the bodies does little to resolve the case.

Another theory is that three of the members of the Dyatlov party, Alexander Zolotaryov, Alexander Kolevatov and Yuri Krivonischenko were Russian secret agents who were supposedly hired to deliver fake proof of radioactive clothes for the benefit of Russia fooling Western enemies. This sounds absurd, but holds some truth.
Zolotaryov joined the group last minute. A strange addition to the group since he previously worked in Moscow in a top-secret, unnamed “atomic” science facility. Strange coincidence considering the radioactive remnants found on the clothes.
Krivonischenko worked in in the plant Mayak in Chelyabinsk-4010, where a nuclear disaster took place second only to Chernobyl. What is the chances that two scientists working with radioactive material were in the same hiking group, and is there truth behind the Russian intelligence agents theory?

The last theory I am going to cover perhaps be the most ridiculous, a yeti. Also known as the abominable snowman or BigFoot.
Asia has been rumored to hold Yetis in the wilds of Siberia and Ural Mountains, but there is no verifiable evidence to date. Mike Libecki, however, sees the Yeti as the only answer.
“When I found out one of the students was missing a tongue immediately I knew this was not caused by an avalanche,” Libecki said. “Something ripped out the tongue of this woman.”
However, a simple hypothesis can be proposed to the disappearance of her tongue, and apparently some soft tissue around her eyes, as well. Perhaps a scavenging animal ate her tongue, or even it decomposed.
While the theory of the Yeti is fun and interesting to consider, there really is no evidence besides this photo of a “Yeti-like creature.”