Indeed. To quote Sherlock Holmes inaccurately from memory, "Once the impossible is eliminated, then what is left, no matter how improbable, is the answer."
Weiner's Paradox is that when eliminating wild hypotheses, one is sometimes left with nothing but the likelihood that the event never occurred in the first place.
Anything as complex as the evidence for this place blunts Occam's Razor. There's no simple unified and likely cause. Anytime something's this complex, I suspect some massive screwup.
Finally, some of the most God-forsaken areas are quite interesting to the military. The Urals sweep down as the dread isles of Novaya Zemlya sprinkled with atomic radiation, ashore past the People's Mountain, to Yekaterinburg and beyond. Secrets on a secret path.
Why would a Hare be aloft that night? Yet three helos were devoted to the search just a few days later.
The hikers were surprised, shocked by something sudden. What can travel fast? A reindeer is faster than a man. But a Hare travels 3 km/min, perhaps giving a five minute lead to nervous rabbits like Zolotaryov; but not bothering tired students until the Light of Heaven burst over them.