It took over two months for the snows to melt enough for authorities to come back and finish their search on the slope of Kholat Syakhl. They expected to find four more hikers dead of hypothermia, probably further out than the other five who had been trying to return to the tent. The latter part, at least, was correct. The final four hikers were out much further than the rest, but their cause of death would turn the entire case on its head, according to the BBC.

Instead of death by hypothermia, the four hikers were situated around a dry creek bed. While they had undeniably experienced extreme colds, what actually killed them was extreme trauma, not unlike what someone might experience in a fatal car accident. Some of the other five had bruises and other minor injuries, but the last four hikers had broken bones and other signs of some sort of large impact.

Obviously, there aren’t many things in nature that can do that kind of damage to a person. Falling off a cliff, perhaps, but these four weren’t climbing. It was as if something struck them very hard, and perhaps struck some of the others in a less serious fashion, and then vanished into the sky. What seemed like a simple case of hikers taken by surprise by an extreme cold snap now looked like something else entirely.

Already, investigators had a conundrum on their hands. Why would the hikers have tried to escape their tent in the middle of winter? Why would they leave partially clothed? Furthermore, why did the footprints seem to indicate that the hikers weren’t running but walking at a normal pace?

Even putting aside the trauma injuries, there were other oddities, according to the BBC. Two of the hikers had been found near an improvised campfire and had badly burned hands and feet, seeming to show that the two had actually intentionally put parts of their bodies into the fire in order to warm up. Then, there were the post-mortem injuries to the hikers found in spring. Two were missing their eyes, and one was missing her tongue. These are signs of natural predation, which can happen when a body is left to the elements, but it also indicates that they were not buried deeply, otherwise the animals wouldn’t have discovered them in the first place.

Finally, there were the rumors of weirder things. One is that police apparently found radiation on one of the hikers’ clothes. The source was unexplained, and while the official report only mentions this small amount, there’s some suspicion that there was much more that wasn’t documented. Additionally, according to people who attended the hikers’ funerals, their skin was an odd reddish or orange color.

What seemed far more likely than attacks by the Mansi was the possibility of some sort of natural event. The two leading contenders here were an avalanche (obviously a possibility in the mountains in winter time) or extreme, possibly even hurricane level, winds, according to the BBC.

Avalanches can shift a whole lot of snow, and they can easily crush people to death. Mass amounts of snow get very heavy quickly, and it can put forth more than enough force to batter a human like the hikers found on the mountain. However, there are some problems with this theory. For one thing, the tent wasn’t buried under snow when investigators found it nor were the hikers’ footprints, according to Museum Center. The bodies that suffered the most damage were buried under snow but not deep enough for the kind of avalanche that would have caused so much damage. On top of that, the area where the hikers were found wasn’t really steep enough for an avalanche.

While high winds in the range of 70 miles per hour could definitely have caused the hikers to flee their tent and seek shelter elsewhere, and possibly fling something hard enough to cause traumatic injuries, these sorts of events are very rare and none were reported in the area at the time.

What happened at Dyatlov Pass (since named in honor of Igor Dyatlov and his fellow hikers) was indeed forgotten, for several decades anyway. However, In the early 1990s, two things changed. First, there was the fall of the Soviet Union, after which the files on the case were no longer quite so secret (after all, the regime that had classified them was now gone). The second was the dawn of the internet.

As people involved with the investigation found they were no longer restricted from talking about the case, several in-depth interviews and books were published in the 1990s, according to The Atlantic. The relatively new world wide web turned out to be a great place for this formerly secret case to really flourish in its weirdness. Articles and even entire sites about the case sprang up as people tried to figure out just what happened in 1959.

In fact, the case became so popular outside of Russia that in 2019, authorities actually re-opened the case and examined the evidence collected 60 years prior. The investigation kept things simple and opted not to examine some of the far out explanations. Instead, they looked at a standard avalanche, a slightly different kind known as an ice block avalanche, or high winds. In 2020, they announced their findings — officially, the Russian government now has recorded an avalanche as the cause of death of the lost hikers.

While the exact specifics of the hikers’ deaths will never be explained to everyone’s satisfaction, the investigations into it did reveal another particularly odd mystery. In 2018, a Russian tabloid called Komsomolskaya Pravda reached an agreement with one of the hikers’ families. Semyon Zolotarev, one of the four hikers with traumatic injuries and the oldest of the group at age 38, was exhumed so they could examine him.

Because this was just shy of 60 years after Zolotarev’s death, there wasn’t a lot more that could be determined due to decades of decay. The tabloid did arrange to have some of the corpse’s DNA sampled for testing purposes, though. While they didn’t find anything useful to the Dyatlov Pass incident, they did discover that Zolotarev’s DNA didn’t match any of his living ancestors, which is strange because they were able to confirm that the body was the man known as Semyon Zolotarev based on photos taken after Zolotarev returned from World War II. 

There are several possible explanations, but two seem most likely. The first is that Zolotarev might have been adopted and simply never knew. There’s no documentation that said he was, but it’s possible that none ever existed. The other possibility? The man known as Semyon Zolotarev might have been an imposter. The real Zolotarev may have died in the war, and the man who returned afterward was someone else who took his name, like a real life Don Draper.