The Skeleton Lake of Roopkund, India
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Right now, the forest officials are struggling to preserve the remains because tourist often like to take the skeletons back with them as souvenirs. Since the lake is far off and frozen for eight months in a year, it is difficult to guard the area. Most skeletons and bones have been stolen over the years with only a few skulls and bones remaining around the frozen lake.
I that's happening, it is surprising that tourists can pass through customs with human remains, undetected.
It seems intuitive that you protect your head with your hands and arms, as sudden as the hailstorm may have been, and once they collapsed to the ground their whole bodies should have been hit (although I guess their clothes could have protected them a bit) ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning
That would explain why there wasn’t any survivor able to come back later to bury her comrades (if you curl you up I’m not sure how a hailstorm could be lethal to everyone in a big group)
http://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-myste...
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4108
an excerpt:
"Here is my proposed explanation of what happened. It's wrong, of course, because it's done from my armchair 50 years after the fact and with no firsthand knowledge of the region, but it's completely reasonable and does adequately satisfy the facts as we know them. Nine skiers set up camp in an area with potential avalanche danger, but no more or less danger than would have been found if they set up anywhere else they could have reached before nightfall. Sometime during the night, a loud noise, either from a nearby avalanche, a jet aircraft, or military ordnance, convinced at least five members of the group that an avalanche was bearing down on them. They burst out of the tent wearing whatever they happened to be sleeping in and ran. At some point one of them fell and struck his head on a rock. They became lost in the dark and poor visibility, or simply found themselves stranded with their injured friend, and finally built a fire. They quickly got hypothermia and probably shouted themselves hoarse for their friends. Two of them lost consciousness and the others made a desperation decision: To take what little clothes their two unconscious buddies had and risk it all to try and make it back to camp. One made it 300 meters, the second made it 480, and the third a full 630 meters before all five were dead from hypothermia. Back at camp, the four who didn't panic and run away in the night got dressed, collected provisions, and began to search for their friends. They searched for hours, circling high and low, until at some point either through a slip or just bad luck, they were caught in a real avalanche. During the resulting turmoil one received a fatal skull fracture, one received twelve broken ribs, and one bit her tongue off, all perfectly plausible injuries during such a traumatic death. Their bodies remained buried until the spring thaw, as is so common with avalanche victims. At the open-casket funeral for the first five victims, relatives saw the combination of five days of winter sunburn in those days before sunscreen, and the mortician's effort to cover up frostbite and a full month of exposure to the elements, and described it as a strange orange color; though others described it simply as a deep tan, which is consistent with reasonable expectations. And who knows what hair would have looked like after all that exposure and who knows what kind of treatment done by the mortician, so I can't assign too much significance to what amounts to a few anecdotal reports from some funeral attendees, and not even all funeral attendees. Plus I'm quite certain that if UFOs had turned all of their hair really gray, don't you think the cold war Russian authorities would have had it colored back to normal for an open casket funeral? Their bodies had been exposed outdoors for weeks. Of course they looked terrible."
There are many other theories and possible explanations. The UFO theory is absurd of course, but, you know, people come up with such bizarre explanations because reasonable explanations are not very believable either. This is why many people are still trying to solve the mistery, they make expeditions in the area of Dyatlov Pass, trying to understand what could happen there in 1959. Probably, only new declassified documents, if there will be any, can shed some light on this mystery..
Btw, you can look at the photos taken by the group members (from the films found in their cameras): http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/aleksej-koskin/album/159799/
Guess this has something to do with the first knock-off itself.
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271147/Nine-people-...
The key challenge here would always be to inform the disconnected locals in millions within a small area or region. A lot of equations fail when you consider the population density and economics of an average or below average citizen in Asia.
After the storm and tornado had gone through and we were outside evaluating the damage a man staggered into the village. He had been out jogging (Shorts and T-Shirt) when the hail fell and it looked like someone had beaten him all over his body (loads of individual Bruises, bleeding etc.).
And this was only relatively small hail in the grand scheme of things. I can easily imagine hail being able to kill someone.
Not to, you know, encourage your imminent agoraphobia.
But why is this trending on HN?