Mystery: Nine Are Found Dead by a Puddle of Water

Actually, you know those cold opens. I really liked when you used to do those things, and then the intro rolls. When did we do that? I don't even remember when we did that. I've I've heard them a couple of times where I just like, ha ha haa, my god, Yeah, what I didn't know you could do this? Well you did never did that? Did I imagine that? We never did that? Really? You never have done that? Have you always started with just the yeah, you were saying it'd be cool to do a cold open, but we never did a cold open. Maybe we should try that someday. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle. All right, Michelle, So if I were to ask you, what is the most common mystery out there in the world that we always hear about? Oh, I would say the most common mystery, I'd go Amelia Earhart. For me, it's Bigfoot, the moth Man, little Creek creatures, cryptids. So there's this incident that has been requested a thousand times. This thing is everywhere, right, Like a quick search is going to lead you to like four hundred and twenty three podcasts and seventy eight thousand Google searches, and these are just rough estimates, but that's a lot. It's insane. It's insane, and that's because the actual incident was really freaky. I have the best version of this tale retold one thousand times right here, mainly because I am going to ruin it. A tale is old as chime, and you're going to ruin it for us. I am going to ruin it. When I read, I was like, oh no, this was such a cool story, just like the other story that you ruined with Winchester, you know, but there's a reason why this is. This is a theory that I have, you know, the Winchester mystery house idea that you ruined. It was like, why didn't I want to go? I didn't want to visit that place. I really didn't. And this behind the scenes and for real, doing this case was just like, Nah, by the way, guys, I just completely failed at an episode because I was trying to avoid this one. I really didn't want to do it. Covin clean from behind the scenes because it was just re told and retold and every other podcast that has similar themes to us has done this. I have done this on another podcast. It's just it's everywhere. I mean, it's interesting. It's just been told so much that we're like, you know, what's too mainstream. But I found a way to mess it up because we actually have some ideas of what actually happened. Woo, this is exciting and you haven't even told us what it is yet. So tell me what it is, all right, Well, i'll tell you so without spoiling anything, I'll tell you that this is a about people who went out into the mountains and died. Ooh, my favorite kind of story. People go into the mountains and die all the time. So it's it's true. As being from the Northwest, I can vouch. I can vouch for that. Yeah, it just it happens, right, and it's accidents, running out of water, out of food, bear attacks, extreme temperature. I would say it's probably extreme temperature more than bear attacks, bigfoot, cougar attacks, wolf attack, eating poisoned something, berries, whatever, bad water, shit yourself to death, that happens, I can vouch. Yeah, Okay, just get it. But this one is different. This one is different. Okay, So have you ready? We're gonna begin his name was Igor diet Love, and he loved playing around with things. Right, this is his story. Basically, he liked inventing things, fixing stuff, and he loved the wilderness. Wide smile Russian. So he was overall Michelle's perfect man. Ooh, are you writing my tender profile? Yep. He studied engineering, built his own equipment. Oh. In nineteen fifty eight he was like, Hey, I want to go on a winter expedition, so let's go. So he was going to do a cross country ski trip in the mountain range that runs north south between Europe and Asia. It's called the Urals or Urals. It's you are Als. This is important because no Russian or I guess I don't know if it was another country, but you know, it has a confusing name. So in my ignorance here, I'm just going to say Russian because that's what I wrote. But they might be US Saurians. I think you could say the Soviet Union, the Soviets. Yeah, Soviets. You could go Soviets on there. So none of them from that country or the federation or area had gone that far before. By the way, Michelle, these mountains aren't all spiky and like cool looking like the one at Disneyland or whatever. These are like rounded Super Mario Brothers mountains. So what made these dangerous? It was actually the temperature, right, So the temperatures of these they could be extreme, obviously mountains your high up, high winds, snow, all these things, right, so you could freeze to death. He submitted the igor right submitted this idea to the association of crazies who liked doing that kind of thing. It was called the UPI Sports Club. There's a club for everything. There's a club for everything there is if it we're in England, you could hear them going, oh, yes, goal all curio, Yes we'll spend millions climbing a mountain. But it's in Russia, and I don't know if I could do a Russian accent. Oh I'm pretty sure, you're kind of sure. You're pretty good at this stuff. I'm not even gonna try, though, with accents, they always come out Mexican. Whatever. What time I was telling somebody that mister like Sweeney Todd, I didn't like how it was a musical. I thought it would have been better without the musical part. And it was a big argument, and people didn't like me for it, but I try to do that accent of mister t wow. So just went incredibly Mexican. So I haven't tried accents since I'm not even gonna try. Just don't do it anymore anyway. So he got his group. He got a group of I think was ten friends, and they were ready to take on an awesome winter adventure. I keep trying to find an examp full of a Russian accent. I can't get it in my brain and I kick it. Wow. The one accent I can't do is Russian. Wow. Made history. Oh wait, you know, I got it. I got It's like birthing a newborn baby. Here is me trying out a new accent. Okay, push Rocky, Nope, Rocky and squirrel. Squirrel, that's it, the squirrel part, vuling gel and squirrel. Okay. So it's like Natasha from bow Winkle. So that's there. You go, okay, And so we are going to climb this mountain. That's what they said. We're going to climb this mountain. Who's with me? And then ten friends were like actually nine more. They were super excited for it. This was like the trip kind of like a euro trip or like a going to Vegas when you're just like your first trip out of high school or whatever you want to go. And they were excited. So they were walking around taking buses, trains like to try to get to where they're going to start from. Right from some of the articles that I read. By the way, a lot of this is based on an article that I found on the New Yorker and another one from National Geographic dot com, and they said it's one of them mentioned, I think it was a New Yorker. One mentioned that they would hide under the seats of the train. They were just having fun. They were just trying to like mess around like some of them like they got in trouble for asking for money, like panhandling up, trying to play music in the bus station or train station. They were just having fun. Plus they had cameras and in the pictures they actually look happy. What was supposed to happen is that they were going to start their expedition. Part of their plan was to arrive at this village called Vzi it's v I z h Ai, and that's when they were supposed to arrive on February twelve, and they were supposed to telegram the club to let them know that they were fine, but sadly that was not the case. People were freaking out by this time. You know, there was a snowstorm. Maybe they just decided to stay a little bit longer in some other area. Typical, right, because you don't know, you don't have phones, you have GPS phones. It's a whole different world back then to actually going with compasses and is it compasses or COMPI I think it's compasses. Don't quote me on that if I don't know, if I've never heard COMPI compises. You know they're getting there. They just telegram people that hey, we're okay, but again never came and people were getting scared about it. They were trying to figure out what had happened because of what there had been a documented storm. There were volunteers from the sports club. There were also authorities people from there, and on February twenty fifth, volunteers actually from the sports club that were helping search they actually found something. They were tracks, oh from skis aka ski tracks. The next day they found their tents on a remote mountain also known as Dead Mountain by the way, it had other names to it too, but Dead Mountain stood out to me. The tents were completely empty. But the creepy part is that the tent was partially collapsed, snow on top of it and had to be dug out. But everything inside was neatly organized. So imagine that, right, So you go into a tent and you see food there on the stove about to get eaten. Everything was neatly organized, right. The boots, the clothes were ready to be worn. But there's nobody there. So the people that found the tents, they started searching around for clues and they found footprints of a group of people that had been walking. The next day they found bodies near a cedar tree, and as a snow thawed over the span of couple of months, several months, he started finding more bodies, all nine of them. By the way. One of them had a medical condition that flared up before the incident and turned back on January twenty eighth, So that's why they were First there were ten and then there were nine. Woo, So they survived, right, yep? Oh I didn't know there was a survivor. That's cool. Yeah, I was like, what kind of medical thing saved your life? Man? And then I actually have found it. Let me pull up the article. It says his name was Udi. You didn't and he had a flare up of sciatica that forced him to pull out of the trip. Oh shit, if you're skiing and you're having ssiatica, Oh my god, what saiatica your skiatic nerve, it's in you, It's in your hip, so it's like kind of like your butt cheek. Oh I've gotten that butt cheek pain when I'm biking. Fuck if that acted up while you were having to ski, Oh my god. Oh yeah, you want to go home immediately. Anyway, these bodies that they found were found in bizarre conditions, not just frozen in place like at Mount Everest where it looks like they'll be preserved forever. In this case, some of them were not wearing all of their clothes. Some had their skulls smashed, like completely just crushed. Others had their chests burst open like just crushed. Geez. Others had missing eyes, and one of them was missing their tongue. That's so freaky. That's so freaky. You know, I actually saw a tongue for the first time in a jar. The tongue is huge. Wait was this the doctor's office? No, no, this is like doctor Edwin. Oh this is at one of those shops that had weird things. I don't know. Oh yeah, was it a human tongue or was it supposedly it's pretty nasty, pretty gross. It looked like a giant slug or it's like a monster like a Yeah, think about that being missing from a body. That's a really random part of a body to be missing. Suspicious, Some suspicious stuff went on. So what would you do, like to try to figure this out. You're back in nineteen fifty eight or nineteen fifty nine. I'd probably think my first assumption would be foul play because of the damage to the tents and like the way they're all scattered all over. I think that would be my first Yeah, I think me too assumption And the damage yeah yeah, the damage to the bodies. Okay, so if I were to find that, I would also think foul play. I would think that they killed each other. That's what I would assume, just because yeah, someone went a little nuts, like maybe there was like a just the ultimate snowball fight. So they called the experts, and you know those people who can see a person and be like, yep, this person died of being choked, or this guy had too much fun the medical examiner. Yes, then the proper way to you know, to call them, that guy died of having too much fun. So the criminal investigators came up with a very unusual cause of death. Their deaths were from quote, an unknown natural force. Fuck, that's a confusing thing to put on a death certificate. Yeah, and then they did it in the most soviet way possible. They're just like, let's not talk about it anymore. And then that's it. So you know what we get when we don't say the truth or when people hold back something from going out into the media, Well, we get a lot of conspiracies, don't we Conspiracies That's what we get at that time. Yep. And this is how we end up with things like how Mark Zuckerberg being an actual lizard and not just someone who happens to resemble a lizard. If you told me he was a lizard tomorrow, it wouldn't be like the biggest stretch because he does look like a lizard. Or if he was in an accident and revealed to just be robot parts, oh man, nowadays, we don't know what if he ends up like in a hospital on the doctor's Yeah, I treated him. He's actually circuitry. Well, I mean he does look like data from Star Trek the next generation, I guess. Yeah, So it's not exactly the biggest stretch, those blank, dead eyes just staring off into space. There was a lot of these conspiracies. By the way, it probably still popping up now that we actually might have real reason why. But they said that this tragedy was a military test. This is a theory. Another one, which is one that I like, is that it was a Yeti that had attacked them out in the snow. I get it. A Yeti thrives in the snow and can manage going through storms and stuff. Yeah, it might be a mean creature, but it's also very careful when it comes to being discovered. If a Yetti was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna kill these people just for fun, it wouldn't do something that obvious slash a tent out of the snow, smash a skull. He'd make those bodies disappear. Yeah, put them up in the trees, let them dry up, you know, in the sun, or something so that you don't know that this is a Yetti. So that's why exactly what it's not. This is why I'm going fully against that. So the case about the date love pass was reviewed thanks to all these conspiracy theories out there, and they actually did a thorough supposedly thorough review that ended in twenty nineteen, and today I have some results. It said that it was caused by an avalanche. How does an avalanche rip your tongue out? That's the thing. And by the way, people get really passionate about this stuff, Michelle, just like with everything, right, they get really passionate. Yeah, of course, So it started an argument in the scientific community. Just like Zuck being a lizard. Some can literally see his tail and they'll be like, he's a lizard. And then somebody else will be like, actually, that's part of an extended spine something they would argue about it. Yeah, it's a new biohacking treatment where they extend your spine with a green lizard like crocodile tail, you know they Actually that reminds me. There was this case recently in Mexico there was a little girl born with a tail. Huh what kind of tail? Like a little pigtail or like a little like what was it curly. It looked like a pigtail. I saw a photograph when it was already severed, like it was already chopped off. But when I first heard it, the person that told me, they were like, yeah, did you hear that? In Mexico a little girl was born with a tail six meters long? And the whole time I was trying to imagine, how does that happen six meters? That's six yards almost or sort of or else in the US. Was that wrong? Was it not six meters? No, it was six centimeters. Oh god, okay, that makes a lot morese I'm just as confused as you are, because that's that's longer than the little little girl could be. Like when we first heard it, we were around like the dinner table, where like everybody was just like lost, like six meters. Oh god. What time I was at a bar and there was a woman there who had this. She was like, I was born with a tail, and she proceeded to show us the scar what it was like right above her butt crack, and she showed everybody there was a scar there. And I don't know if she'd really had a tail or why she just wanted to show everybody her butt crack or what was going on. She was flirting. Maybe she was flirting. I don't know, but it was definitely a thing, and maybe it's more common than we think people being born with tails. Yeah. I don't think people that were born with tails will always want to share that with anything. Yeah, I want to keep it private. Yeah, understandable unless you're drunk in a bar and you need to flirt with a bunch of people. I guess you just show him your tail stub. You know. When I first read this about the avalanche, Michelle, I was like, I was disappointed. I was like, wow, an avalanche really? But then I started seeing the arguments and I got excited about it because I was like, yeah, there's no way. First off, right, remember these mountains, Yeah, they're rounded off, but also the incline where they were found was not that steep. Oh well, this isn't even a good convincing lie that the government's trying to tell with the actual reports to that an avalanche for people who don't know, obviously, it's snow landing on top of you and people die because they can't breathe. Oh, I guess yeah, because it's pretty heavy in that area. Though, like I said, like the angle wasn't that steep Anyway. This one guy who's a hero of mine now, his name is Alexander Puzzrin. He's a geotechnical engineer. He wrote a paper about it. He was analyzing the snowfall from the records, the weight of the snow, how it was simply not possible for the timing be right. So the angle wasn't right for the avalanche. There was a lot of things the timing was off. It was just things that couldn't were impossible. So scientists obviously started to argue snow mass numbers, weights, simulations, like they went all out. I love it when a random case makes people this mad. What happened? And can they have to do like scientific studies and oh, you're gonna love this then, Michelle, this is what they did. So, according to this National Geographic article, one of the scientists was some one of the people that are analyzing they're watching Frozen. The wait, the movie Frozen, Like the yeah, the movie let it Go, Let it Go. That's not only part of I know it sounds right. He was watching that, you're just singing along whatever, and then he's this snow looks interesting. This is real, very realistic, right, people that are nerdy like that they do that this CGI snow looks really realistic. Because like for me, when I see someone on stage and I their microphone, I'm like, oh, that's an SM fifty state or whatever. It's like a thing. So for him, he was like, this looks so realistic. So he actually contacted the animators from Frozen to find out how they got it to look so real. By the way, they were working on simulations for how this might have happened of this accident. So they combined this with another really cool experiment that was done by General Motors when they were testing their safety ratings. It took one hundred cadavers and they broke the ribs to see what would happen during a car crash, so like they would just put them in a car crash the car. Oh fuck, how did they get it? I mean I get that people like donate their body to science, but did people donate their body to safety checks? Yeah, that's actually what happens. By the way, there was this case where like somebody was really mad because he donated his mother's body to science or whatever, and they blew her up. Everyone just assumes you're gonna just be cut up in doctors. Cool. Nobody expects to be blown up or they're gonna try bullets and sticking things into you and throwing you out of a building. Oh wow, I didn't even think about that. They might burn you. They might. Yeah, they're just trying to find stuff, just science. So yeah, they took it just I try to imagine being one of those engineers. You know they have to buckle them up. Yeah, buckling in a cadaver and the crashing the car and then but that's why we have seatbelts. So thanks cadavers, thank you for your service. From there and started doing all these tests and scientists I finally figured out or they think, because we're never gonna know, right, but they think that if anything, it might have been a slab of ice. It does have that power. Something freezes, slides down, crushes in your dead and obviously ice can be sharp. It can tear through your tent, it can do that. It might not be all just in one piece, It might be several pieces. Is just sliding down proof there you go, you're dead, And yeah, it might have stapped your eye. Plus you know that one joke about not a joke. But it's like a riddle where a man hangs himself in a locked room with only a puddle of water beneath him. How did that happen with the ice block or whatever? Correct, the water was a block of ice that he stood up on and he put the rope around his neck, and then the block of ice melted and the water could no longer support himself and he got hot. I think there's another thing where the icicle death too. Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking, the icicle death. But what is that? That's not like a I don't know what is that? I don't know why we know what that is? What is that? Like? Is no idea either, It's just one of those things a theory. Is it just something we saw on TV? But somebody getting stabbed with an icicle and then there's no murder weapon, but there's a bunch of water around. Technically the water could evaporated and there could be nothing around, just a hole, and that's it. That's true dead perfect murder perfect figured it out anyway, So he suspects that it was a block of snow that it would have had to be incredibly stiff. According to this article, and it had to be moving on a certain speed. There's been people that are also talking about that that are like this one guy, Freddie Wilkinson, who's a professional mounting climber and a guide, who says that, yeah, it's reasonable, like he's seen ice like that. It can result in blunt trauma. Wind ice can do that, and yeah, you can lose your eyes, you can lose your tongue. That's say you have your mouth open, you bite on it, float there you go, it flies out, it's gone, oh crazy. It could also be like you get hit, so you can get cut. It has a certain level of probability to it, which is what they say interesting. I never even thought about ice for this. I was always like the government dropped a bomb on them and they're keeping it a secret, or there was a murderer out there or all the other series. The other theory that's also one of those probable ones that are by scientists is that they got scared, obviously from the avalanche or whatever, but they started running away from their tent. They're like, oh, a panic, they're panicking. They might have torn it open, run out, and then they try to find shelter by the trees, which is where they found some of the bodies, and then you know, some of them were like, oh no, you're dying, let's go back towards tent and they try to survive. It might have been more like that, like a survival thing, like somebody's trying to help. But then they also die. And there is a couple of weird things though, so it's not completely solved. One of them is why were some of them with their shirts off or like part of their pants missing, and why like why would they do that? And some of them, some of the scientists think that this might have been paradoxical undressing. Explain that it says that sometimes people they think when it's really cold, they think it's really hot and they start taking off their clothes. I think it's one of the stages of Hypothermia's one of the final stages. Is you get really you feel like you're hot, you're ye ain't yep. And it happens in some of those places that are really cold. People have seen it in Sweden, for example, where it's just ah and you just start taking out your clothes. By the way, another part of the mystery here is that some of the bodies had traces of radioactivity. See that's my whole thing about the government doing a thing like a surprise test of a weapon. Yeah, but scientists they looked into lanterns they were using and they're like thorium as president camping lanterns. Wow, so it might have been all right, that sounds like a stretch. But okay, Yeah, and the missing eyes, the missing what is it, the missing tongue or some of the victims. According to National Geographic which ruins this for US, this says may have simply been a result of scavenging animals pecking at the dead. Look, it makes sense, but is it. Maybe the Yetti might have been But if he did, tess irresponsible because you're giving it away that you're real. Maybe that Yetti was really young and made a mistake. Yeah, let that be your warning, guy, don't do that again. You're supposed to be incognito. Yeah, you're supposed to be mysterious, scaring people away, making bodies disappear if you kill them, that's the responsible thing. Grown up? Yetty does come on now, seriously, never liked Yetti's I always imagine that they scream a lot. But they say that Bigfoot scream a lot too. They're just like, ah, they're just in the woods going stuff like that. Actually it sound one like bears. Like that would make more sense if they sounded like bears, because if they just were in the wood screaming like that screaming goat thing on the internet. But they're always in the woods screaming. I don't think they could be in Cogno. I just imagine they're just hanging out screaming. Just I think we'd figured it out the thing existed pretty quickly if they did that. What happened obviously was a huge tragedy. It kind of it sucks, right. You go, you want it's like a vacation, you go, you want to have fun, and then this happened. They were outdoors people, they knew what they were doing, so it's pretty sad. But the answer people were giving, which is, oh, yeah, there's an avalanche and that's it, left a lot of questions unanswered. Now when they really look at it and they're like you know what, Yeah, snow can get into this can turn into you can really get stiff and can kill you. People when they think they're freezing or when they think the hypothermia, they think they're actually really hot, take off their clothes in panic, you run, and the you just die from the cold. When I first read it, tho old Michelle. When I first read this a long time ago, I don't know how old I was, but I thought it was really creepy. Oh they were found without their eyes, and they were found with a crushed skull, And I know it is creepy. And then you're like, you know what, stuff like this can happen in the mountains. Want it to be one big thing, but it sounds like it's a bunch of small things that led to their death. An ice, predators, hypothermia, government's trying to run tests on you, Like, we think that those are some of the theories. But no, you mean, though it is possible, I'm not going to cross that out. Honestly, I think it is still possible that they who knows the Soviet Union was so sketchy anyways, who knows what they did? Yeah, and I'm spraying the word. Maybe I'm one of their agents now in spreading the word. We don't know. Let's see if I can bring my Russian accent back. No, okay, moose and squirrel moos okay, there it is. I always have to do moose and squirrel, and then it's squirrelp Nope, did I lose it? Squirrel squirrel. Edwin is double agent for Russian on the US government. There we go. That sounds pretty Russian. That's pretty good. It takes a second. It's not natural the show. I have to go through an airport security and through they're gonna flag you because we said something on a podcast. If they do, I'm sorry. Oh I like how National Geographic They got this quote from Wilkinson that said people love to invent implausible scenarios about death in the wilderness because we will never know one what happened. And that's true. We're not going to know. So therefore it's the YETI I'm firmly planted on. It was the government. You're going YETI I'm going government. I'm waiting for the next theories. That's see when in newel say and I want to know what a psychic has to say about this? Just cheerious. Yeah, where's all the psychic theories? Where did they get? When you ta get some psychics, aliens are yetti the psychics chiming in and that will be the definite answer. So that was a dial of past story. So what do you got going on for next week, Michelle, I don't know. I think it would be a surprise to Day all right, Bye, bye guys,