Any intro to the DPI brainwashes the reader or viewer with the notion that "they cut their way out and fled in panic, half-dressed into the freezing night", which then generates the big 'Guess The Emergency' game which has kept this mystery alive across 62 years. There'll be many preconditioned enough to be entirely unprepared to entertain the idea of the tent being moved, and there's been two predictable examples already.
But I like a theory, and there are only two other main contenders, which potentially explains as much as possible, satisfying all the known evidences, and it has to be said that the tent being resited, and burnt clothing removed and discarded certainly negates 75% of the oddities in the DPI in one fell swoop, so I think it more than worthwhile exploring, and I look forward to the book.
In the theory I part guessed, predicted by Teddy's clues, the hikers would build their labaz, they arrive at the forest, they make their fire, they set up their tent in their preferred place, the ridge ropes tied to trees, they are properly dressed, everything is as normal up to that point. And then the incident happens.
Anything from a downed missile to them being killed by grenade/ordnance dropped on them by the military who mistake them for escapees at night while operating a dead-or-alive recovery policy. But whatever it was this potentially explains the orbs distant witnesses saw, the burnt tree tops, injuries, scratches, and the tent damage.
Then the cover-up begins, the very next day, and it is beautifully simple, and because the real disaster zone is under tree cover, there's less chance of witnesses, and any footfall there can be explained away as hikers later looking for kindling after abandoning their tent on the ridge.
Burnt clothing is removed, and experienced hikers are left to like rookie idiots who took off clothing in a freezing tent at 3000ft, ignoring their stove and wood by their sides, before being driven out by an unimaginable emergency, for which, whatever it was, there is notably zero material evidence.
Their bodies are arranged to make it appear they all died of exposure after descending the pass, and some of them, the incident survivors, ultimately would die of the cold, but perhaps with some help along the way, a few clocks to the head (there is rather a lot of head injuries in this case), a kick to the side, to keep them on the ground, so that the cold did the rest and then they cannot speak of what actually happened. For those who prefer, this is where 3 of the survivors fight and develop knuckle injuries, perhaps after being found hiding in the den.
The tent is air-lifted in a cargo net and tarp, slung under a helicopter, and it is deposited 30 seconds later on the ridge, so that there's no ascending footprints, only the 9 crew who will walk down, in daylight, some told to do so in their bare feet, just as they have skied up. The set down point is the 'assembly footprints' 50 yards away.
Insidiously they use the last diary entry Igor made, which incredibly some here take as a literal plan to be where he expressly did not want to be, away from the sole redeeming feature of his then bleak situation, his comforting warmth, up on that ridge, or they have his handwriting forged to that effect.
But they are unable to set up the ridge ropes properly on a slope, they had nothing to directly refer to in the forest when tied to trees, and this extended tent and stove is unconventional. So they are defeated by the task, explaining why there's no ridge ropes shown tied to the tops of the skis, one of which is also in the wrong position, and the grunts told to set up the tent cannot work out how to install Igor's bespoke creation, the pipe stove, which has to be suspended from that ridge, so they leave it unpacked inside, and collapse the tent and cover it with snow so that it's presented as 'abandoned'.
They have arranged the contents inside like someone with OCD has been round, not the usual attentions of a bunch of knackered hikers who supposedly had just scaled a mountain pass and speed dug a 3ft deep trench in a frozen snowcap before relaxing in their freezing tent and stripping off.
That mock uni leaflet may or may not be genuine. If manufactured it serves to make it appear they were all having a high-functioning time, even while half-dressed in an unheated tent, and is then left in the tent doorway. Notably, too busy with that extracurricular activity, there'd been no time for hikers to write in diaries of how arduous and cold the ascent had been, by far their greatest challenge to date, or to explain why they were apparently toughing it out without heating, something not required for Level 3. Not even the stove-loving lazy Lyuda complains, sat in a tent with a hole so big it needed a coat to plug it, and that vacant tent flue hole.
The stagers make a few unforced errors, there's allegedly a tenth set of skis (maybe some of theirs left behind), a piece of broken ski found nearby (the hikers & incident damaged), and the snapped ski pole cut halfway through. For whatever reason, perhaps damage, they lose or get rid of Zina's camera, but they don't know, without processing the other films, that she is photographed by the others taking pictures.
Did they mistakenly place Zina's photo into Igor's notebook, when it was more likely Yuri D's treasured possession? We are led to believe from some sources that Igor and Zina had been an item, but there's zero body language in any hiking photo, and she had been all over Yuri Y like a bad rash, even twice photographed chatting in a Vizhay doorway, with one photo showing her arm hooked around his, or being helped up by his gallant arms after slipping, and elsewhere, her hand towards his face.
Did they even crossdress Tibo's body in Lyuda's coat and hat for their own humour, another one with a bang to the head, who they'd discover from his ID papers had a father who was executed under Stalin, with him born in a concentration camp, of a French name, so might wish to make indignified fun of him, not a 'true Russian', instead representative of a nation who 'surrendered to Hitler', and which is now the Cold War enemy. Hopefully not, but I can't help thinking it carries that vindictive ring of KGB flavour to it.
Besides the pamphlet, and potentially Igor's diary entry, which may or may not be genuine, the only things which then need faking are the two photo's of the trench digging. This is of itself bizarre, if all sources insist they arrived at 5pm, which even the new inquiry repeats, when darkness fell at 4:29pm, like it does now in Northern Englandm yet the photo's were taken in broad daylight.
Usefully/by design, only one of the 2 apparently location-specific photo's features a hiker's face, a gloweringly cold Yuri K, his face half obscured by snow stuck to it, and appropriately enough, these photo's are not determined to be matched to any hiker film, just part of a collection which came to be known as 'Loose Photo's', so that the negative strip won't be seen.
Then there's Semyon's mysterious camera to explain, which in this scenario may be either a prop strung around his neck to mislead, with images taken elsewhere, or genuine and he was dead when they found him and they didn't realise he'd managed to take photo's of their arrival before he expired. One photo looks remarkably like the shape and colour of a Snowy Owl ('Horn'), a creature which would inhabit and hunt in the forest.
There is also the issue of exchanged clothing. Yuri Y claimed he gave a shirt to Yuri D and then it ended up on Igor - this is otherwise interpreted to mean a half-dressed Igor took the shirt to stay warm after the Yuris' deaths, but equally, in this theory, it can be explained by the military not knowing what shirt to dress Igor with from the tent after they'd taken off his contaminated/burnt one, just as the two burnt Yuris had to be part-stripped, so they picked up the one given by Yuri Y.
And other clothing cut to fashion into sleeves and socks could also be because it can be extremely hard to dress rigid dead bodies in full clothing, bodies here which we know from the autopsies were in some cases moved after death, but it's easy to slip on a sleeve or sock, to make it look like they tried to beat the cold...the same cold we are expected to believe they marched off to their deaths in, inadequately dressed and without taking an axe.
This theory isn't my own preferred one, I painstakingly found one which ticked every box, but that was when accepting the known information, as presented, though the conclusion was as boring as finding Princess Diana simply died in a car accident. But this one, the idea of the tent being staged, holds particular promise IMO, fundamentally because it uniquely addresses the following set of clear absurdities about that tent:
Experienced hikers...motorcycle tourers...mountaineers etc, do not choose to pitch a tent in such an exposed position for no valid reason when there is a better option.
If they do they do not then sit inside, ignoring a stove and fuel they hauled up the elevation, when it's -31C outside around 9pm, and falling, and sit there half-dressed, naively engaging in a jolly time creating a mock publication instead of concerning themselves with survival as temperatures drop overnight and winds pick up. It's bordering on suicide.
If anything happens they do not all as one rip their way out, 9 people in an 12ft tent, via that maniacal slasher number of horizontal & vertical cuts and stabbings, with the one nearest the flap not cutting there or simply ripping the buttons open. It slows everything down.
Once outside they do not suddenly come over all calm and collected, assemble 50 paces away, and walk off in single file, and not recover what they need to take with them if their panic/false alarm has irreparably damaged their tent for overnight stay. It's one or the other; either run like hell if the danger persists, or get your stuff and then go or you'll die anyway.
And they don't waste time covering a felled tent, one which cannot possibly later be felled by snow as it's cut wide open on one side and wind scour should remove the rest, and leave a torch on top of 4 inches of this snow, not without first retrieving what they need to take with them in lethal cold.
This is why the tent has always been so critical to solving the mystery. As told it makes no sense, and that is most likely because it was nonsense all along.
Topic: Evidence (Read 131460 times)
