Googling suggests that electric discharge can create a broad family of nitrogen/oxygen combinations and different quantities depending on the discharge type, e.g. lightning vs corona discharge.
I'm fascinated by this clip, what if it's an electrical object spewing gases?
I will keep poking around on the nitrate/nitrite aspect. I have some basic understanding from curing my own bacon (it will be currency during the apocalypse trust me, lol!) which is probably why it initially jumped out at me where I might otherwise have read over it. I'm finishing up some decomposition texts regarding what variables can affect livor mortis and the decomposition process. Obviously, certain poisons appear as differently colored livor, carbon monoxide-cherry red, phosphorus-yellow brown, primary or secondary methemoglobinemia-brown, etc. (Cyanide, hypothermia and artifacts of mortuary refrigeration can all also appear bright red.) While I don't personally see an intentional poisoning as on the strong side of my plausibility spectrum, atmospheric poisoning of some sort from a weird/unique phenomenon is highly intriguing. The AET is very compelling. We know that whatever happened, the particular set of circumstances were unique. I'm not going to rule out theories just because we don't socially accept them (such as the menk; my only reservation is that the evidence puts it a little lower on my plausibility spectrum than say, a weather phenomena. And to me, UFO is simply something not identified by the observer that is in the sky. That encompasses a broad range of things including natural phenomena, man made things, etc.). Going back to unintentional poisoning, this includes the possibility of the stove, which I had wrote off for some time and should not have. Again, the circumstances would have to be specifically unique; for example, they started the stove for heat, needed the vent for the photo taking and the stove was disassembled prematurely.
Oddly enough, (I will spare the forum the details here so anyone who wants can look into it and everyone else is free to not read about the gory specifics,) I'm also now wondering about the blood reported by some on Zina's face and whether it could have been decomposition purge. What we would have attributed decades ago to antemortem violence in many cases can now be identified as part if the decomposition process. I am not saying that is definitely the case here, obviously. I was not there for the autopsies and the pictures are not the easiest to glean details. But, in some theories, if we are able to think of some of the injuries as natural to the decomposition process, we don't get stuck on needing outsider interaction to bolster those theories. That is not to say we pick and chose the evidence, just that if we can explain some things in the context of certain theories, it does affect their plausibility.