The injuries of Semyon and Lyuda are very similar in nature and force. One or two massive blows from a gorilla or Yeti would do the job. They would have been attacked while on the ground. Beaten from above with very large hands. 30 cm would span most of the rib cage. The force delivered by fleshy pads reduces the chance of soft tissue damage. Thibo's depressed skull fractures is identical in shape and proportion to the ball of a thumb on a 30 cm long hand, as if his head was pushed into the snow crushing his skull. Rustem may have had a similar, but less severe head crush. His fractured skull in temporal region is matched by another injury directly opposite. Its odd that he has injuries on both temporal regions, but there may be other ways he could have received these injuries. The cut knuckles and lips was probably a fist fight amongst the hikers, caused by the tress of the situation. Not all injuries have to have been inflicted by a Yeti.
So a Yeti could punch someone and cause those injuries but a 180 pound man jumping on the chest of Lyuda from a 6 foot height would not be able to deliver the same kind of injuries or worse? I would place my bets on the 180 pound man over the imaginary creature. As for the 30cm being thrown around? What are you basing it off of?
Here is a puzzle I still haven't seen a satisfactory explanation for:
Doroshenko had severe frost bite on his hands and yet there is strong evidence that he climbed the cedar tree. The cuts and abrasions around his armpits and on his legs suggest he struggled to climb the tree, possibly using his arms, armpits and legs to cling on. If there were others there in better shape why allow him to climb the tree? The hikers climbed the tree up to 4 metres and cleared branches many of which were from the one side facing the tent. Clearly not all of the branches were collected as fire wood as some were still found hanging on the lower branches when the bodies were found by the rescuers. Why cut the branches from mainly one side and not collect them all to burn? Why go up as far as 4 metres when there were still branches lower down to collect?
The frostbite is preventing him from participating in whatever other task was designated(Firewood, Shelter, Weapons, Reconnaissance etc…), so Yuri K and Yuri D are designated with the fire management while the other 6 break out into 2 or more groups. Yuri D decides to climb the tree 4m up to try and see if the tent is clear of the threat. At some point it might have become apparent to him that he will die that night, so he decides to do whatever he can to help his friends increase their chances of survival. If you read his bio he seems like a person who is willing to endure hardships for his friends and risk his life to protect others if we are to believe the story about the bear. I don’t see how its so hard to believe that in his last hours of life he tried to improve the chances of survival for his friends. It could have been pride(refusing to show weakness so that his friends can focuse on survival rather than taking care of him) or just siply knowing he is going to die since even if the tent was clear and the threat was gone he was still 1.5km away from the tent and that would be an almost insurmountable distance to someone who suffered on the way down and now hours later is much weaker and injured to boot.
Boogey man or Baba Yaga? There have been over 10,000 eye witness accounts of big foot/Yeti? Not sure how many eye witness accounts there are of the Boogey man or Baba Yaga? Your scepticism is perfect,y understandable though.
So with all this attention on them and thousands of witnesses no one has been able to get a picture of big foot? Seriously? How many people went in the area for the search effort? And how many encountered the Yeti during the search? How many people have gone to the region over the last 60 years on overnight or multi-night trips and have never run across the yeti?
If Zina's bruise was caused by a yeti then I suspect it was because she was grabbed, possibly while in the tent. I dont think it was a face to face punch up.
Her face has injuries that suggest someone punched her in the face at least once but maybe more than once. And the torso injury why grab her and let her go? So did the Yeti cut the tent? And if he reached in and grabbed her why didn’t the others grab for the weapons nearby and fight him off?
Instead of using imaginary animals to explain this why not look at it rationally? In 1960 the USSR shot down an American U-2 Spy Plane right over Sverdlosk if I’m not mistaken. Who is to say that in 1959 there wasn’t a similar incident where an aircraft was shot down or crashed due to mechanical issues, either the Soviet Military didn’t know the plane crashed or they didn’t realize they shot it down. The Americans send a rescue party to get the pilot, they get the pilot or the body of the pilot and leave only to encounter the hikers. During the cold war, having a bunch of American Special Forces soldiers running around the middle of the USSR might have escalated tensions a little too much and therefore they might have had orders to keep a very low profile. If at any point they ran across the hikers and the hikers reached the conclusion those were not soviet hikers but were in fact Americans that might explain Frame #17 from Thibeaux-Brignolle’s camera and why the hikers made so little headway on their last day and why they pitched their tent where they did, knowing they cant outpace them so maybe if they acted like nothing happened and slowed down the Americans would outrange them be in enough rush to not stop and they set up camp in the open in the hope of line of sight giving them advance watining or were afraid of going to the treeline.
The Americans cant leave the hikers alive because they are 1) witnesses to American troops conducting an operation in the middle of the soviet union and 2) 1 or 2 of the fittest of them could use the next day or two to rush back to civilization to warn the soviet authorities before the Americans can escape. For the Americans it would be a kill or be killed situation since having American soldiers on Soviet soil would not be a good place to be for those soldiers if discovered. They wait until the hikers pitch a tent are already inside, when it gets dark they make their way to the camp, capture the two men outside and proceed to order the rest of the hikers to leave the tent. They leave the tent and grab their boots on the way out, at some point someone throws a punch when they are outside, the two men that were already outside are restrained at this point and only 4 of the 7 hikers inside the tent might have been in a position to resist, whatever happens punches are exchanged and the hikers are subdued when they are overwhelmed by sheer strength or someone fires a warning shot.
Hikers are told to take off their boots which are then dumped in a pile in the tent and whoever has a jacket is told to take it off. The hikers are either not searched, or are allowed just enough to give them hope of survival but not enough to actually let them survive. If they went down to the treeline with a knife the attackers took it back, the camera around Zolotaryov’s neck might have been a plant as well to cause confusion. Expectations would have been succumbing to the elements within a few hours but most of the hikers proved resilient and the attackers had to go down and finish the job. At this point Rustem is dead, Yuri K and Yuri D are also dead, the 6 remaining hikers have split into two groups, one is centered around Zolotaryov who focuses on shelter hopping the attackers let them live or have already left while the other group made up of Zina and Igor make their way back towards the tent. At some point the attackers catch Igor or Igor intentionally stays behind the give Zina a chance to run, he is brought down hard on his knees and restrained and eventually weakened enough to be left to die. Zina is weakened, scared and in a rush which is why when she passes by Rustem who is dead she doesn’t strip him of some clothes such as the shirts and socks at least. Eventually she slows down and is caught again where the baton injury might come into play if it was not acquired earlier in the night. She succumbs to the elements after that hit combined with the exhaustion of the previous several hours.
Now there are four remaining hikers and the attackers find them and deal with them, in the previous 20 years there have been two major wars with a third in its opening stages, so whoever it was would have had plenty of combat experience and might have experience with how to hurt people. They stun 3 of them with hits to the head but the fourth is hit a little too hard and was left unconscious. Kolevatov dies from the broken neck which leaves Zolotaryov and Lyuda, either they resisted the most, or for whatever reason angered the attackers and as a result suffered the injuries they did. Once those last 4 hikers are killed the attackers go back, cover their tracks and stage the scene, cut the tent and make sure all traces they were ever there are gone. They stage the scene in such a way as to point in 5 directions at once, a panicked egress from the tent(tent cut) but an orderly and seemingly calm walk down the slope. A knife being used at the cedar tree but not being found with any of the dead hikers. Flashlight being thrown down while on the decent from the slope but no one bother to pick up. Zolotaryov had a camera and a notepad, so if he had both it wasn’t some one killing them it had to be an act of god since no sane killer would leave a camera and notepad behind. Take some clothes form Lyuda and put them on Zolotariov and Tibo while Tibo also had a second watch. Throw in enough contradictory evidence and you end up with 60 years of discussion and likely a few more decades of speculation before interest dies down.
The Americans will not admit to this or acknowledge this because this would be a public relations nightmare and would also be a diplomatic relations nightmare. The Soviet Government would keep their mouths shut because an American aircraft crashed in the middle of the soviet union, the Americans Send SF team to rescue the pilot, the SF team killed the hikers and then escaped all before the Soviet Military knew what happened. For them to admit it would have been humiliating and made them look incompetent and the aircraft would not be missed easily since it would be a CIA Aircraft and they can cover this up real quick. Both sides have a reason not to talk and that would be why the Soviet authorities put such pressure to end the investigation quickly and incomplete. Once the bodies were found no one was scouring the area, and since 9 people died the authorities could order people to not go to the area while they search for the crash site.
This explains why the investigation was so obviously mismanaged, why the area was shut down for a long while after the tragedy and why everything is so quiet. No one wants to admit what happened because the Soviets cant prove conclusively that the Americans did it and throwing accusations like that without at least some dead or captured Americans will only hurt them, the Americans wont admit it for obvious reasons so the conclusion the Soviet Authorities presented was that they died because Igor Dyatlov made a series of mistakes and died as a result of overwhelming force, which the hikers were not able to overcome.
In 1960 a Soviet Pilot was shot down by his own side while trying to intercept the U-2 aircraft and no one knew he was dead aside from his family and close friends for over 30 years, when announced in the news paper for his actions it was never mentioned he died. If the Soviet Union covered up that they shot down their own aircraft by accident, they would definitely be willing to cover up being presented as fools for not knowing there was an aircraft spying on them, that it crashed, and that the Americans send a rescue team that got the pilot or the body of the pilot all before the Soviet Authorities knew anything was up. Without proof the US will deny deny deny, without conclusive proof the Soviet citizens will think the government incompetent and likely still believe it was the soviet government that killed them.
If the hikers died during the night of the second or the early morning of the second, then the attackers would have a day of daylight to cover their tracks and then make their way from the region as a group or split into smaller less conspicuous groups.