An Unknown Compelling Force (2021) — "I think these theories are weird."

Weird way. HM, when you look at the wounds that were on the hikers, I'm just not buying the accidental thing. Why how came? Why would they die? I think all these theories are pretty weird.

In nineteen fifty nine, nine Russian students were found frozen to death in the Ural Mountains in an event now known as the Diatlov Pass incident, found a mile from their tent without their winter clothes or boots, each one suffering inexplicable injuries. Despite the clues and evidence of violence, the official cause of death was stated as hypothermia. This only fueled conspiracy theories from alien visitors to Russian yetties. Just what were the hikers fleeing from? Every diary entry in every photo seems to hide a clue.

There were rumors that they just killed each other. I don't believe that in any way, it could just be an accident. With so many conflicting stories, I've come to rush up to ask the question, what is the true story of the Diacle of Pass? Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Christasue, and I'm joined by well, someone who's never been on the show before.

She is a physicist with mountain experience. As she put it, Doctor Kate Mullen. Thank you for having me, Chris. And she came at the suggestion of someone who has been on the show before, and this film was his idea. He posed it to me.

So returning once again is my friend and yours all the way from Texas Tech, where he's a professor of Media and Communications. He likes to be referred to as hair professor. I don't know why, for the life of me, he doesn't have a lick of hair on his head. Your friend of mine, Doctor David. Pearlmutter, Thank you, Chris.

Always good to be here. I guess I misunderstood what hair meant. That's German, not it. Yeah, I'm joking. I'm purely kidding.

If you clicked on this episode and you have no idea what we're talking about. On this episode, we're going to be talking about a film from twenty twenty one called an Unknown Compelling Force. It is a documentary about the Dyatlov Past incident as it is known now because one of the people who died in that incident is why it is named for that person. So we're gonna be talking about the documentary we'll be talking probably more about the incident itself less the documentary, given that the documentary is just an opportunity to talk about the event as it were. But we'll also talk about the film and kind of the way it does what it does.

But before we talk about specifics, Kate, I think it's important for my audience to understand what does mountain experience mean and how does that translate into knowledge about this incident? And I guess more importantly, what is it that makes you so knowledgeable about the mountain and have mountain experience? What does that mean? So I currently reside in California and spend a good deal of time in the Sierra Nevada here, but I've also climbed around the world in Chemony and in other places that are glaciated or you know, have a significant snowpack. And what it means to have mountain experience in this case is that I'm familiar with the danger of avalanches, and I'm also familiar with some of the kind of you know, not full mountain slides, but like a wind slab letting loose when you dig a tent platform, which is unfortunately what the students did in the wrong place.

So I mean, I think that this podcast would be helped by some visuals. But I want everyone to think about a slope maybe thirty degrees, and how would you set up a tent on that slope? Okay, well, what you would want to do is cut a level platform for the tent, and when you do so, you're going to have the upslope side of the mountain kind of exposed, a horizontal aspect of that mountain side exposed. And because you're, you know, tired, and the snow is heavy, you're not going to dig a huge platform. The tent is going to be almost against this horizontal I'm sorry I'm saying horizontal, but I mean vertical, this vertical aspect of you know, where you dug out the side of the mountain.

And I think that if you read some of the literature, peer reviewed literature about what could have happened in this incident, there is a probable case to be made that there was a slab avalanche that filled in the tent platform hole and hurt the students. So I don't know if anybody listening doesn't know what happened, but nine people were killed in a disaster in the mountains and this disaster has been the subject of a lot of speculation and a lot of conspiracy theories. And my background both as a mountaineer and as a physicist who's somewhat familiar with, you know, friction and force, is that gravity brings to bear on snow. I look at this and I see something that can be explained with completely natural causes, and we can get into the exact hypothesis that I think has been credibly put forth about what happened.

But I just bring to bear basically a lot of time in the mountains, avalanches kill people every year. I live, you know, in Los Angeles, but that's close to Mammoth Mountain, where a bunch of people have died this year on engroomed ski trails. So you know, avalanches kill all the time. And I think it's a very likely hypothesis that an avalanche was involved a slab avalanche filling in this tent platform, so a small you know, slide of snow, right. Yeah, And so that's what I'd like to talk about today.

And what's crazy is, you know how uninteresting it would be for anyone to just accept that as the theory and move forward, because I means as David knows as the person who had pitched the pitch the film, like, we don't with this film, we don't start there, we don't start at that moment. And I think, what's really exciting for this episode of the show and for what you just did, is you more or less say, right up at the front here, what what you perceived to be what happened? And for someone like myself who used to spend a lot of time on paranormal, supernatural, true crime stuff like that, for a couple of years I did a show about that, like this is that kind of case For a lot of people, it's like this is aliens Bigfoot, and it's like, you know what, that's fine at all, But but why is it always have to be that?

That's what I always ask, because you know, it's it's great that there's all these weird idiosyncrasies about the case, and there are all these weird things and all they're in the ural mountains where there were Russian yetties, or it could be the indigenous people. But it's always way less exciting for it to just be something easily explained by a natural occurrence, because nature doesn't care. Right, As someone who spent a amount of time in Boy Scouts with over one hundred nights of camping under my belt. Yeah, I don't like camping intents in snow because it's very especially when it's just like what you're talking about, just snow. Well, a small mistake can snowball, and I mean the margins for error are extremely low in the conditions the students were in, which is very very cold temperatures.

So yeah, I mean, you can let me know if you want to go through what I think is the most likely story. But once they I mean, so I think that they thought a slab avalanche was happening, and that they didn't know the extent of the avalanche, and I think it just slid onto the platform that they had carved. It wasn't a mountain wide avalanche, right, But they were trained. These were members of the Explorers Club at their university. They were alpinists who had some knowledge of the dangers of avalanches, and their training would have told them, you know, get to the side of it, the slide is going to continue.

Once they did that in the night, you know, it was very difficult for them to find their way back to the tent and the. Tents would have been gone right. Well, the tent was I believe partially buried when it was discovered. But you know this snow wind pack. Snow can be one thousand pounds per square meter, so when this slides onto the tent, even partially, it causes a panic.

And even digging themselves out of the tent was I believe physically very hard. And you know they probably had some degree of injuries just from that aspect of, you know, the tragedy. So I'm going to pose it to David first and then U Kate, David, what did you think of the movie? So? Yeah, So Chris, we've talked before that we live in an era where you go on YouTube and especially sensational popular mysteries, and I'll put that in what my children call sarcastic finger bunnies.

You know, air quotes are covered and recovered over and over again. So if you go to YouTube and you enter a diathlov Pass or dead Mountain or one of the many monikers for this case, I think you're going to find thousands of videos. And I think there's at least twenty books in English, in Russian or translated from Russian, maybe some other languages to a lot has been talked about. I think I first heard about this case. I grew up in a certain central European country that's famous for its mountains and its avalanches and it's cheese.

And I think I heard about this case when I was like six or seven. And the facts that at that time were that this was this stupid, amazing mystery, right, that there was something super mysterious, that there was no explanation that covered all the observable fact I think even at that young age, I was hearing that there was probably some This was I believe it or not. I was still alive during the Cold War. Yes, I know that's very old. Hey a doctor indeed.

Yeah, Yeah, there was an assumption that anything that happened to the Soviet Union there was something suspicious and something connected with the government doing covering up. By the way, that's really important. You mentioned true crime. You can have a cover up without a mystery like government, especially the Soviet government at that time, had this instinct to cover up anything that they felt might make the Soviet Union look bad. If you've ever watched the Chernobyl movie, there's lots to talk about there to the charitable TV series which was terrific.

But so the Soviet Union probably did actually cover up aspects of this case. But that doesn't mean that there really isn't a mystery there, or that the mystery has probably been solved. But it's one of those things that his box office right, like you put the athlet pass, and especially if you say solved, and a lot of the YouTube videos are solved. So one of the reasons that attracted me to this movie was that I had heard from a friend who had watched it that they thought that it did a pretty good job of not first going towards ridiculous sensationalism. So let me just give one example.

First, you and I Christen I know K two appreciate good technical filmmaking, Like I have shown scenes from this film in a class where we talked about audio, Like they get good audio in the middle of the urals in fifty mile per hour wind where they have really clear audio where somebody is in a snowsuit of a snowcoat with their mouth covered is still talking very clearly. So like the technical part of this film, I would put a plus for documentary filmmaking. It is a beautiful film. They use drones they use different effects with still pictures. So just just watching this film, I personally enjoyed it watching from beginning to end.

Technically, I also appreciated that they took some of the more sensational theories because they had to fill up two hours. They took some of the more sensational theories and did I think reasonable debunk them. And let me give two examples. One was that if you go online and you enter radiation and the outlov past, you're going to hear over and over again that one of the mysteries is that one plus more of the hikers that the investigators found that they had high radiation levels. I mean, you will find entire videos about like does this mean that uf All abducted them, or like there was a secret Soviet nuclear test and they were And the filmmakers did something which I thought was like good journalism, which is they found that one of the hikers, at least one had worked at a Soviet nuclear plant for years.

So that is a much more plausible explanation for why he might have high radiation levels higher than the normal person because he worked at a nuclear plant and before he went hiking, it wasn't anything to do with the hiking is there, so I sort of I liked that part. And then the other part that I approved of journalistically was that one of the theories, which I I won't put I like to say non zero. Everything is non zero, right, like magic pixies are non zero, you know, alien UFOs are non zero. Like it's possible, but it's just not probable or plausible. One of the theories was that there was foul play, right, that they were murdered or you know, and different individuals from Soviet soldiers to one of two native peoples were blamed.

I like that the show went out of their way, although they did, I mean, you could argue back and forth. They did raise the theory which is not very substantiated, of their possibility of foul play, but they really went out of their way to do something which a lot of first world documentary filmmakers don't do, which is to bring up the long history of blaming local native people for violent that occurred. And they'd say, like, you know, let's not do that there. So you could say, well, they did bring it up, but then they they did go ahead and say, like, you know, unless you really have evidence, you shouldn't shouldn't blame them. So I appreciated this film and like, if I were telling people here, here's how you technically like sound audio, you know, cinematography, how to use a remote drone for photography, planning that went into this you as a filmmaker in terms of like production values, like, I appreciated all that, and then I liked some of the things that were done in the movie, and we can talk about that later.

So I liked it as filmmaking with some caveats, but it is so much better than the average YouTube, you know, Alien abduction, d'appo class video that I had to give it some points because it's so much better than what you normally see about DATO class. What about you, Kate, Well, I hate to be contrarian, and I respect Professor Pulmutter, of course, and I think he brings up some good points that you know, the film was beautiful. It's visually showing the ural mountains, which I'm not so familiar with, so, you know, as a virtual tourist, that was nice. But I would recommend it anyone who it's really interested in what happened in this incident to just forget the film. Okay, take that hour and forty three minutes out of your life and follow me to the following recommendation.

Go to your library or look it up online or whatever. Maybe you might subscribe and find the New Yorker from May twenty twenty one and read that piece. That piece, I think is a really sober breakdown of not only the conspiracy theories that the YouTube documentary does consider in some detail, but the more naturalistic explanation that I find very convincing, and it gives credit to the Russian prosecutor. So this incident, as you guys have already mentioned, has been a It's been the theme of swirling conspiracy theories ever since it happened in the fifties. So the families were never happy.

And Russian government finally opened up a new investigation in twenty nineteen. And I am not a proponent of the Russian government in any way, but they happened to have a prosecutor named Kiryakov, who I think did an admirable job at soberly analyzing this situation, and he discarded from the outset the conspiracy theories regarding aliens and missile tests and radioactivity. He just said all of that isn't plausible. Let's talk about what really happened, and he, as the article discusses, has a naturalistic explanation that doesn't involve murder. It doesn't involve you know, anything that there's no evidence for, and he really ties up all of the facts of the case.

And I'm happy to take you through that right now, or maybe we want to talk about something else. But I really I thought that, yes, Professor Pulmutter is correct. The film was visually striking. But I don't watch a lot of YouTube content. Maybe I'm just biased against you know, documentaries, and I prefer to read a scholarly analysis.

But the New Yorker article wasn't overly boring or anything, and it really touched I think the actual points better. Whereas the YouTube documentary spends a ton of time on these experts who think that there was a murder or that there was some sort of other wild situation, and just in terms of the avalanche theory and the rest, he doesn't spend any time. And maybe that's partially bad timing because I don't think that you know that certain articles had already appeared, but he really gives short shrift, in my view, to the most likely explanation and spends like an hour and a half of the viewer's time on things that are sensational. And so I kind of actually I split the difference, like I'm I agree with with you, doctor Pearl matter obviously like it's a well made film.

I read a review that said I wish to have seen what Worder Herzog could have done with the subject material, which one hundred percent like a Grizzy Man level kind of analysis, where it's less analyzing the event but more analyzing how, you know, how is the world so obsessed with something or doing whatever Werner Herzog would have done, which would be taking a step to the side of it and it being less about Diatlov itself and more about some social aspect of it, because that's what Grizzly Man was about. Grizzly Man was really not about the man at the middle of it. But how did you know whatever? If you've seen it, you know what I'm getting in. If you've seen Herzog, you know what his appeal is.

His appeal is his kind of unique take on things. I would prefer that to this because to your point, doctor Mellan, I think it is a little. It does fall a little flat for me because at times I felt like, oh, well, we're not gonna We're not going to even have an opinion on this at the end of it, which I had a real hard time walking away from this movie going well, I'm not even gonna come down on what I think. Like, you've presented plenty of theories, now why don't you pick one. I feel I find that a little unfair because as someone who sits here and has to have an opinion about things, that's part of your job as a filmmaker, at least as a documentarian in some respects, is to present what you think and at the end of it to go, oh, I don't know either.

I mean, I appreciate that. I mean there, I respect that in some capacity to say it's too it's too deep and complex of a case for me to even understand or comprehend. But doctor Mellon, I think you would agree in doctor Permutter or some extent, I don't think that this is that, Like, I don't think that this case is that. I think, to doctor Permutter's point, there's a lot of fluff surrounding this that can be cut through very easily if you know where to look. I just think that getting caught in the fluff is very easy in any kind of thing, especially a true crime thing.

And it's very easy to get bogged down in the well there was a a radioactive shirt, or they took a picture on their phone where they're their camera and it looked like an ali And it's like man looking at you can look at one piece of evidence over and over again. Like the guy in Dealey Plaza with the umbrella. He was just a guy with an umbrella. That's it. That's it.

They interviewed him, and he was just a guy with an umbrella of Aerol interviewed him in a short documentary. He's just a dude with an umbrella. That's it. That's it. Yeah, Chris, that's a really great example.

In fact, I think you're referring to The New York Times did a short documentary on umbrella man like and just yeah, sometimes I do feel like we need to not everybody is like an expert on this case or like knows about the John F. Kennedy assassination, but like one of the and again I put my sarcastic fingerbodies, my air quotes, mysteries of that has been talked about in six thousand YouTube videos and ten five hundred books of John F. Kennedy is there was a man at dely Plositave there as the motorcade went by, who opened an umbrella, right. And so you if you go on YouTube today or really any other social media, you will see a lot of people saying like, well, why did he do that? It must have been a signal or something like that.

Then New York Times actually did a little mini documentary, and what was funny was that the moment they interviewed him, I suddenly understood a cultural reference which I'm old enough to remember, in that it was one generation before me. But then I realized that nobody who was growing up later than that would have understood that cultural reference. He was making a cultural reference to Neville Chamberlain and Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany. Neville Chamberlain the Prime Minister of England who famously, I mean, I like to think of myself with historians. So there's like a whole other three hour discussion.

But Nevill Chamberlain was the prime minister who allowed Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia and was the architect of what has been come to know through history as appeasement. There's a lot of discussion there. I'm not saying an opinion, but he famously always carried around or was visible with an umbrella. So this man was making a statement that he thought John F. Kennedy was appeasing the Soviet Union.

But that explanation is so pedantic, you know, or or so buried within like historical references that that it got. So it was funny how it's become something else, But when you look it up, it has a perfectly rational explanation. So that but that's that's an important point about whenever we see an image, and we have examples every day. I just spent a seminar where there was a there was an image there is there is a massacre, horrible human tragedy going on in the Sudan right now, where like thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are being killed. Well, there was a picture that was posted like three months ago that purportedly was from Google Ears showing lots of dead bodies, and it was it was everywhere you can find five hundred thousand iterations Google Earth shows massacre victim.

It wasn't I mean Yale Laboratories did a study. New York Times did a study. It was actually cows lined up at a solar powered watering station. That was, you know, and so well, here's the problem. When people make a claim that like, oh, this is evidence of genocide and and the evidence turns out to be no, it's not evans at all.

People begin to dealt the very facticity of pictures. And that's why, you know, when I when I'm teaching, I'm telling students be careful to get the facts right right. So, like, if you think somebody's opening an umbrella at the signal assassins, how about you go find the person and interview them before you make that claim. So that's a great example, Chris, that. Is that that that umbrella opening.

Man made it all the way to the X Files. I mean that was in the episode. I mean like that's and it's to that point where I mean, you know, like with the with the with the explanation and again you know, doctor Mullen, I watched the documentary like you did. I also read several years back the Donnie Eiker book, which I don't know again good bad it. I want to say it walks away with the wind being the explanation that they had some sort of wind event that was happening that caused Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I've read a little bit about that. And Professor Pearlmutter was raising it to me because I was saying, look, let's just listen to peer reviewed scientists who say that this slab, you know, avalanche is completely plausible and they've done a careful study. And Professor Peerlmutter said, well, you know, there's also this paper about common vortex effects, and so a common vortex effect is a turbulent flow. You know that. I guess a couple of scientists hypothesized, I haven't read the paper, I must have it hypothesized could have emerged from windflow around the mountains and agitated the inner ear of the nine victims and driven them crazy, and that could have been the instigation for them to flee the tent site and you know, then subsequently freeze to death.

So I have to say I will draw on my mountain experience. I'm not saying it's bullshit. I'm not saying it's completely bullshit. I'm saying it's ninety nine point nine nine percent bullshit. It sounds like bullsh well, I don't know.

I mean, look, every single year and every single mountain, you know area, people die of hypothermia, they die of avalanche. I've never heard of anyone driven crazy by a vortex in the wind. I just don't know. That's well, that's the problem is like like you, like you just alluded to there, It's it's not like these nine people were in a room talking to one another and then all of a sudden the room combusted, and and where did the fire come from? They were in the mountains, in the middle of winter, in where like you've already alluded to, things can go very wrong, very quickly, at a moment's notice, based on something that you did not take into account.

And sometimes, I'm sure you will tell me could not have even taken into account. All the planning in the world can't take everything into account when you're out in nature. And I haven't been in as highest stakes as nature as I'm sure you have, but I've been in high stakes nature enough to know that when you hear a bear jumping at the bear bag out hung up on the tree fifteen feet from your tent, you don't move and you just stay calm, you know, like. You're in a situation where a small, you know, a small deviation from safety can really snowball, and I believe that that's what happened once their tent was buried. So so I want a really important point.

I guess I've watched too many of these lost hiker videos, and there's some really good people, like like their Mountain Guides, and they do videos about cases in the United States. I think the part of the argument I'm making is that, and this is because I spend every semester with two hundred to four hundred eighteen year olds, so I sort of find out what's current in popular culture, you know, what they've been watching, as opposed to maybe scientists, you know, who've gone through peer review or people. First, I learn a lot from my students because they're discovering things that I just haven't heard of before, because they're on social media much more than I am scoring corners. But I also sort of hear what they have come to believe because of what the evidence they've been shown.

And typically when I was growing up, my parents watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and they were relatively they were both university professors. They subscribed to five newspapers and four magazines, so like for nineteen eighty five, we were pretty well informed about current events and things like that. But of course today none of my students are watching the evening news, even if I could completely trust the National Evening News, which I as a journals and professor, have some questions about that. But they're getting their sources of information from TikTok, videos from Instagram, from five minutes shorts on YouTube, and so I'm willing to give a lot more points to somebody who is better than the average in sort of educating people on how to ask questions correctly and look things up.

And so that's why I guess I'm more fond of this documentary because it's better than the average, and I think it's a model for what a direction you could go as opposed to the average. The word the scientific category you used doctor Mullen twice to categorize videos of that, we're just full of errors. So I just documentary is very difficult because you're suppos I mean fiction films you can say based on a true story, but Chris, you know, based on a true story you can make everything up. Still, we got to have some drama and there for dramatic effect. I mean, you know, life has to be there's got to be some drama to it.

And that's the thing. I mean, I think we would all agree. Look, this makes a good story regardless of the explanation. You have nine hikers, they all go out together, and they all die and it's all very sad. I guess for me, I don't understand why that's not enough, Like, why is that not enough?

Like nine people lost their lives in a hiking acts. Why does it have to be aliens? Why does it have to be Bigfoot? Why any of that? Because again, like I feel, part of it is also a societal kind of expectation and a societal way of thinking that like, by deflecting to a conspiracy theory, it doesn't really force us to, uh, look at it as just like seven people when or nine people went out there and died because they weren't necessarily doing everything that they should have been doing in terms of keeping track of the elements and things, and like that's harder to accept than there was a nuclear test and they were irradiated and they were killed by the Soviets.

Like I mean, it's a fun story, makes for a good script, but that's all it is. It makes for a fun story. But in reality, you know, it's not anything other than just like you said, doctor Mullen, there's a reasonable explanation, and people die from avalanches in the mountains all the time. Why is that not enough? Why is that even not enough?

I mean, I think it's I think it's a very sad answer, and that's that the government in the Soviet Union was lying to its citizens for so long. And I mean I also think that maybe it's important to acknowledge that, you know, twenty years before this accident happened, Stalin and his goons were shoveling Jews, intellectuals, and anyone who they perceived to be an enemy of the state into the gulag. Okay, so eighteen million people were imprisoned in Russia. The Russian people were not trusting their government. Even after Stalin's death, you know, but which was a few years before this accident happened, there was still a system of secret police.

People were informing on each other. Everyone trusted no one, okay, for very good reason. And so the sad background to these wild stories is that the Russian people were, you know, willing to believe anything and everything because they were in this atmosphere of untruth. Like Hannah arent once said, the philosopher, the German philosopher, you know, you bring people to believe that there is no truth, that truth and false are just non categories because nobody knows anything. Evidence is always manipulatable, somebody's always trying to lie to you.

And I mean, that's a terrible background if anyone is interested. I also read a twenty twenty Atlantic article, So the Atlantic is a magazine that I thought was very interesting. It was by Russian or a journalist in Russia at the time who just said, you know what, a majority of people in Russia don't believe that the Apollo moon landing happened. Okay, this is a citizen's tree that is completely over, you know, over truth. They have no idea, they have no bearing in the world.

They'll believe any fantastic story because really truth has been undermined by their own government for so long. What's funny is I used to say that we as Americans are living in a post truth society, and I think we are only now living in it. In the last like five to ten years, maybe fifteen twenty and depending on how far back you want to go, because I only have frame of reference for my own life. But then I again, like doctor Prometter said, I am a student of history as well. Like the Russian people have been living in the world that they've been living in for so long.

They're like post post truth. They're in a world that I think few societies would ever want to be in, which is, like you said, doctor mollen Wort's like, what do we believe at this Well, whatever we whatever we want is a bad way of putting it. But it's almost like whatever you can stomach or whatever seems within your scope and scheme of worldview that doesn't upset your worldview too much. I mean, again, there were people in Russia. You know, I've talked about my family history on this podcast before my dad's dad came over from Ukraine.

He wrote on the back, he wrote on the back of Nazi tanks to escape the Russians. So, oh my. God, what a family history for you to be doing this podcast. Yeah, I know, doctor Probutter is just like, hey, let's talk about Russia, everybody. I'm just kidding.

It doesn't bother me one bit. But I think people fail to forget. And now it's been like obviously, I think in the last like five years or four years, three years, now more people are aware of the Russian treatment of people in Europe and the surrounding country and Ukraine being one of them. And I think people in this country really fail to understand how bad people in Russia truly have it, because there are people in Russia that truly believe that the invasion of Ukraine was acceptable, believable and understandable because there were Nazis in Ukraine, apparently according to. The Russian president.

Yeah, right, right, makes sense to me anyways. But yeah, like I think our people in our country for a long time were desensitized to Russia and what Russia means as a country and what the Russian government as a body of people has done to its own people. But yeah, they are living in post post truth at this point, because I mean, yeah, if you're willing to believe Bigfoot killed nine hikers, I mean yeah, I guess they're willing to believe damn near anything. Yeah, And part of it is the phenomenon that like I mean, psychologies observe this for one hundred years, is that human beings form beliefs, and then new data is incorporated to support those beliefs. So like we like to say seeing is believing, but actually what I argue to my students is that for most people, believing is seen.

That is, if you present them with anything, they will reinterpret it to fit into especially if they have a very hard held belief like it might be a belief that they need to just they've grown up with. And so prejudices are that way that if you hate people from some kind of religion or some kind of country, no matter what evidence you get about those people will reinterpret it into your hatred. It's very, very hard to move people from a position of hardcore belief in whatever it is, no matter how ridiculous it might appear to others. And then you're also and really interesting to be getting you two together because you do have very different backgrounds in your professions, but you're agreeing. I think all three of us agree on a very important point, which is that I mean I used to I would say, maybe twenty years ago, I used to study conspiracy theories in the media, and I was a little bit of a scoff tick as the majority of goes in the sense that I would just go like, how could anybody believe that?

But then, after twenty years of seeing the general incompetence of institutions, government corporations in dealing with complex information and explaining it, I sort of understand now why people don't trust necessarily big anything, you know, big farming, big farm out whatever. I mean. Just I was on another true crime podcast recently. We were talking about the Mit Brown shooting case, where a number of the officials came out real early and said there's no connection between the two cases. Now, as somebody who wrote a book on police and the media and somebody who teaches at a college where we teach chrisis communication, I would highly advise people in authority never to say there is no connection between two things unless you've one hundred percent proved to exhaustion.

Don't say it to one day and to the incident, especially because what happens then is a lot of people online go aha, you see, the police are lying to us. The government is lying to us because and and by the way, in those cases, I don't think they were intentionally lined. They were just and all authorities try to do this. They want to reassure the public, but in the methods they used to reassure the public, they create more confusion and less trust in the public. So the Soviet Union, as both of you have pointed out, this was true exponentially, and so yeah, you raised several generations of people through the present day.

I mean, Russia had a free press. For about three months in nineteen seventeen. They had a press that was unfettered. I mean it was party located, you know, I mean the sense that, like you know, it would probably speak for certain interests, but like you could hear, you could go in Saint Petersburg for about three months in nineteen seventeen you could go buy newspapers that disagreed with each other. That's the only time in the history of Russia that you could get different points of view.

Right now, Russia just closed access to the telegram channel, which is very interesting because that used to be and still is like a lot of pro put in pro Russian government channels were there, but they still closed access to it. That's how restrictive they've gotten about people getting information. So it just this case, this documentary of this case is just a good example of I can understand why people go to crazy the explanations because they've been lied to so often that maybe they just don't trust the system, the scientific system, the government system, the press system anymore, even though I do trust parts of those. And I think when you introduce those kind of fantastical I think theories into it, because again I'm and I'm not one to not believe in those things, like I believe in Bigfoot and ghosts and aliens, like I believe in them with the best of them.

I really do, genuinely, Hand to God I do or yahweih whoever you believe. I believe in all that stuff. It's just you can't apply it. And this is the thing that always bugs me. You can't apply it to every single thing every single time.

Anytime there's a weird thing that happens to people in the woods, it just sounds like a bunch of people who have never been out into the woods saying, well, they're out in the woods and weird things happen. Have you been out in the woods? Weird things happen? All that's like, go sit in a tent out in the dark at night. Any noise it's made outside of your tent, you can ascribe to anything.

And I don't know why it needs to be any scarier than that. If you're walking down a trail and your flashlight goes out and there's no lights around you and you're nowhere near your camp, why does there need to be anything scarier than that? And then all of a sudden we introduced bigfoot all sorts of Again, it gets to a point where it's like we've already alluded to, like where do we stop here, because at some point we just have to say, look, it was this or this or this, and that's what it is. We need to take a rational explanation and go with that, not ignore what the people who are trying to do their due diligence we're doing now. To doctor Pearl Mutter's point and your point, doctor Mellen, they weren't doing that then, So that's hard to really accept because the Russian government wasn't doing it.

If they had been, maybe this would be different and people wouldn't be talking about it in twenty twenty six. But I feel like that we'd still be having this conversation now because I think nine people dying in the middle of the Ural Mountains in the time that they died is always going to make for a good story, just like took Goos always makes for a good story. Like That's the other thing I think of when I think of diatlov As, I think of to Gusco, which also seemingly may have a rather innocuous explanation as well. I would also say that, you know, people are pushed out of windows in Russia every day practically, and I mean, it's not convenient for the government for people to focus on that, and so there's an aspect of this.

It's kind of like it's a harmless thing to focus on because the government won't, you know, be threatened by us asking questions. And I don't know if it's timely, but I could just run through what I think is the most naturalistic explanation. Yeah, please, I would like. I am so very curious because I came into this believing it was aliens. I'm just kidding.

I am just kidding. I'm so disappointed. In the documentary someone did not say the aliens dropped them from high up, and that's why it looks like they were hurt as much as they were. I was hoping we're going in. That direction with that light theory, Okay.

I was waiting and I was like, they're gonna say they were dropped from alien spaceships. Here we go, like I'm waiting for it. Yeah. So, anyway, these these nine people were taking this massive cross country ski voyage and they were on the side of a mountain after several days out and cut, as I said before, a platform for their tent, and they cut it on a slope that you know, was somewhere in the vicinity of thirty degrees, which snow scientists have published pey reviewed papers studying whether or not this could happen on the given terrain where the tent platform was, and they've concluded that it could. So basically, they dug a platform, they put their tent there, and nine hours later, after you know, the snow had settled, it let rip.

Okay, So basically that little pocket where they had dug out partially buried them and they were forced and so they had stripped down for the night. They had no more parkas, and they had their boots off. They were a sleep and so all of this. Hey, I'm sorry to interrupt, but there's a really important point you just made there, which people who are not familiar with the case, is that the temperature was like fifty for thirty five fifty sixty. We don't know exactly, but like, well, it just unbelievable cold, like un American cold.

Yes, these were tough students. They were top of the NNLS. They were in a tent and the tent was but the tent was heated. That's that's that's right, Like there was a stove. I'm not sure if they had in this tent move.

Because I wasn't clear on like how they you said they stripped down like most people would imagine, like, oh gosh, she's if it's minus fifty outside, how are they keeping warm? And did that have anything? Because does this comes the reason I interrupt you because this comes up a lot about injuries in the tent before they got out. Sorry, but just I'm not. Sure about the technicalities of their of their winter kit, like whether or not they had sleeping bags or exactly how they were outfitted.

But I mean, people I'm in the same period period of time were making Himalayan expeditions, so it's not like they couldn't stay warm without a stove. I don't know if there was a stove in the tent, but nine people packed together, you know, under reasonable blankets and with some thermal underwear. Isn't you know, necessarily requiring a stove even in deep winter. But in any case, I believe that as a slab let loose onto their tent, and this caused them great panic. They believed, I think that the entire slope was going to let loose at any moment, and so this caused them to flee without digging out their boots and their other winter gear.

So they fled like one hundred and fifty feet or something to the side of their tent in pitch black darkness. And you know, after they made that move, it was very hard for them to find the tent again. And what they ended up doing is all nine of them went together about a little less than a mile away to the forest, to the edge of the forest were there was a cedar tree. Then they climbed the cedar tree and got down branches. This is known because the branches were broken, but there were also bits of human skin on the tree.

So they basically had none of their winter gear, no boots. I mean, they were basically dead at that point, but they valiantly tried to, you know, save themselves. They built a fire and two of them died right then and there. So the ones who were you know, probably less well dressed, died. The others took their clothes off, cut the clothes off the body or whatever, just put the dead people's clothes on in a desperate attempt to save themselves.

Now there were only seven left, and three of the seven made a desperate attempt to find the tent again in order to They realized that they were going to die without their warm gear. So those three were eventually found frozen to death, you know, facing uphill. The other four decided, okay, guys, we're going to get through this building a snow cave, I mean, which is, you know, normally that's how like you know, huskies spend the night. They dig a little hollow in the snow, and I mean a snow cave would under normal circumstances possibly have saved them, but it was simply too cold. So they basically went into a ravine where the snow was deeper, and they started to excavate.

Unfortunately, in the bottom of the ravine was a running stream and at some point with an icy shell over the running water. At some point they're digging disturbed that icy shell, they broke through. They had catastrophic injuries, as you know, they fell into this stream bed, and eventually this entire area became completely covered in snow, so that when four months or something later they were found they I think actually they weren't found until the spring, until the snow melted, but when that happened, their bodies were in terrible condition and largely decomposed. So anyway, I think that that explanation has basically no outlandish bits to it. Unfortunately, they they you know, after they left their tent, they were sitting ducks in this cold weather.

And I think that the tragedy is that you know, these nine lost their lives, and that there's been such speculation around it since. But I do find that this explanation really ties up all of the evidence that's known to to the you know, to as far as I am aware. So I want to I want to ask you then, because you you you're you're telling is h it's very sad obviously, Uh, you know, there's nothing about it that's remotely fun. If you've been like you have clearly, and doctor pro Mutter, I don't want to assume if you've gone out and camped at all but I would assume at some point in your life you may have gone out and camped, like having gone out and been places where you're far enough away where you know, if something goes wrong, you're in deep trouble.

They were like to the furthest extent beyond that, Like they were beyond that in a way that like, if something bad happened, this is exactly what would happen in your mind, as someone who has been out in the in mountains, not these mountains, not the Urals, but other mountains, what would have saved them in that moment? Or was there I mean obviously or was there anything they could have done? Did they doom themselves by by cutting that tent platform out? And was that already you know, too late by that point. I mean, obviously in retrospect, they could have camped in the forest instead of on the exposed slope where this was likely to happen.

But I think that in retrospect the New Yorker article pointed out, and I agree that their experience in the mountains might have doomed them because they had been trained in avalanche safety, and when you know, when this slab avalanche buried their tent platform, they immediately evacuated, whereas less experienced mountaineers would have just stayed there and dug out their winter kit. And you know, it was buried on a lot of snow that that wouldn't have been easy by any means, and they could have still all died. So I'm not going to say that I know that it would make a difference, right, or that they could have saved themselves given the really harsh winter conditions. But I think, you know, given everything, to separate themselves from their warm clothes and boots was a death sentence.

You've reached a really interesting point. I want to circle back, I guess cinematically, and this is a hypothesis that like you both to address about a sort of wider issue. Again. You go on YouTube and you see videos, some really well done about like a missing hiker was found dead and like three yards from the trail. You know, and I have I don't have the experience of either of you.

I skied hit Switzerland when I was in my single digits, and that was pretty scary. Back then, they didn't have any bunny slopes, you know, every slope was a black head slope or something like that. But at whiskey gear of the time. But human beings like to imagine that we're in control, right, and we also, most of us, especially in the First world, even in so called wilderness. And I think ecologists argue about whether there's anything on planet Earth that is still true wilderness, that everything has been shaped by man's humans presence, either indirectly or directly.

You know, It's like North America, we see trees which are all post colonial trees and so on. So is there an issue here that the expertise of these hikers added to the mystery because we keep thinking like, oh, they were so experienced, you know, I understand that they were going for their certification, like there was a top level of certified like wilderness hiker, a mountain climber in the Soviet Union that you get there. Some of them much less experienced than others, but there were definitely people who had been in those situations before. And there's an essential resistance we have as humans to think that nature can overpower our technology, our preparedness, and our expertise, and so we tend to impose mysteries on things that maybe you know, the margin, as you said, doctor Mouln, the margin of error was really low when it's fifty degrees in pitch dark, right, and I have been I'm sure a lot of people.

Like I was hiking in Colorado and I went off the trail. This is a trail where I swear there was like fifty people behind me and fifty people in front of me. I went off the trail because I saw a bird, and I immediately stopped and looked back and realized I could not see the trail. But because I'd seen all these YouTube videos of people who had gotten lost, like one minute from the trail, I immediately I recognized the rock and I got back on the trail. But if I'd followed that bird in this park where there were thousands of people, I would have been lost.

Now, I probably I would have found my way back. I think, isn't there a resistance to the idea that human technology and human expertise can be defeated by this thing called nature? Yeah? I think that that's absolutely right. And I really think that anyone who goes into the mountains needs to assume the risk and that there are certain unmitigatable risks.

And what you raised made me think about how when there's a mountain accident, like unfortunately, a friend I knew when I was in high school just died in Colorado this past year. And he was a very experienced climber on steep terrain and was going to pick up like a water bottle, that's not a water bottle, but like a discarded piece of litter, like a can or something that somebody had littered on the trail. And he did that and lost his footing and unfortunately fell, cracked his skull open, and died. And I think in that example there's a lot of people who look at what happened and try to say, well, that couldn't have been me. I would have not made such a silly mistake, and to always think that things are somewhat under our control if only we do X and Y Wright, Whereas the truth is that probabilities add up, and at any given moment, when you're in an unforgiving terrain, you know things could happen that are basically out of your control, and that when you put yourself in those environments and these beautiful natural places, there is some unmitigatable risk that you just must accept that it won't be your fault if something happens, but you know, the rocks underneath your feet could give way, or lots of unforseeeable things could happen.

And when we're backseat or you know, when we're looking in the rear view mirror of an accident, I would urge people to really don't always blame the victim. Sometimes you're just in an unforgiving atmosphere and you know, somebody acting reasonably could simply die for chance. Or I was gonna say, first off, obviously that's horrible about your friend. Sorry to hear that. That's awful, and you said it yourself, like the idea that it's like, well, I would never make that mistake.

Well, it's with hindsight, it's always easy to say that. And also, like you said, like I have as I'm sure plenty of people have gone to do something and something else happens that you could not have anticipated. And it's like, you know what, even in those minor instances, and like you said, even in this instance where the environment is already statistically working against you, because it feels like you're rolling a dice that's maybe not loaded per se, but only half of the time, like there's only half of the faces are gonna come up on that dice and you're hoping it's not one of the three because it can't be any of the other ones. That just can't. In this scenario, half of the fucking dice is just blurred out because you on a mountain side on a normal time.

It's a problem. Let alone with snow, the negative degrees, the isolated nature of where they were. It's like, how much more risk does one need to take to prove control over oneself, control over nature. They were probably not even concerned with any of that. They were just there to go do what they did best, which was go hike, and things happen.

Like you said, people go climb Everest all the time. Successfully, people die on Everest all the time too, all the time, and we're living in twenty twenty six and people still die on Everest. You know why, because it's Mount Everest and it's nature, and it's the most short of going underwater in a carbon fiber tube to the Titanic, there's nothing you can do above ground that's as dangerous. Yeah, the inherent risk of the activity is simply I believe that one should accept it or not go into these places. And by the way, there's an inherent risk of sitting on your couch and never doing anything either.

We're all not getting out of this alive, right right. Well, and that's the other thing I always tell my mom. This, my mom who's criminally afraid of a lot of things. Like you get in your car every day, you turn it on and. You drive around.

That is unfathomable to many people outside of this country, let alone plenty of people in this country who do not drive. But getting behind the wheel of an automobile is much more dangerous than sitting and watching a movie on TV. That may cause a level of fear within me. But I mean my parents go and do all kinds of genuinely dangerous things, like traveling and doing dangerous things. And it always surprises me that my mother is willing to go in pet whales in Baja California but can't watch a horror movie.

It's that. But there's that disconnect with people because again, I mean, people think that they can just go out into the woods and they'll be fine. And like you said, David, you can go into a relatively crowded place and disappear. You can disappear in Yellowstone that is a national park in the contiguous United States. You know, the d'atlav pass is scary in a way, but the thing that always scares me more.

And doctor Mullen, I don't know if you have heard of this Missing four one one, a series of books all about hikers and people that have just gone missing in our national parks. That's much scarier than the Dyatlav because, like, these people are literally just disappearing, And to doctor Pearlmudder's point, it's probably some level of accidental complacency in one's own disappearance, but some of it is also someone was in front of me on a trail, walked around to bend and they were gone. So that's much scarier than you know, people in the Diatlov past. It's very sad what happened to people Diallov. That's for me to take away, Like you with the story you were telling, your explanation, like that's just sad.

A bunch of people freezing to death in the woods is just sad, really really sad, because it's not like the Donner Party where it's like, well they made a choice to do the unthinkable, Like nope, these people just knew because, like you have said, doctor Pearl, mutter. They knew they were gonna die. That's actually way worse, Like if it was someone who doesn't understand the ramifications of that temperature and how quickly you'll die out there, they're just essentially ignorant to their own death. These people knew that they were gonna die within a couple hours out in that cold. That's why they tried to build a fire.

That's right, they tried to build snow den. Like these things are just overwhelmingly sad and depressing, which I think think it's more a society unwilling to confront the sad, horrifying truth of you go into the woods with your friends sometimes sometimes nobody comes back, Like it's not gonna happen very often, but it does happen. I do one is I'm sorry. I just want to say, going back to the film for a moment, that I do give the film points for actually expressing what you both have said. Like there's a scene in the film where the filmmakers are out in because they went to the location right they went.

They tried to go to the exact spot where this occurred, and it was in relatively good weather conditions. It was sunny, and things like that, and I think at some point the filmmaker says, oh my god, it's so cold, it's so miserable here, and like, I have no interest in going and investigating the location myself. Chris and Kate, you go there and you know, report back what you find. I'll watch from my living room. But it gave an impression of how brave these people were because they were going there to prove themselves.

You would go back to Sir Edmund Hillary. Sir Edmund Hillary and ten Sing Norgay, the Sherpa, were the two men who conquered Everet who first. I mean again, there's a theory that there were two Englishmen who disappeared going up, ever, as one of their bodies had been found, and there's a you know, non zero chance they may have made it to the top. But the people who made it to the top and got back out again. Sir Edmund Hillary, he actually said mountain climbing consisted of getting to the top of the mountain and then down again safely.

It was a very famous quote about black people climbing, which I approved. Right. You know, if you go to the mountain and die at the top of the mountain, it's not a successful climb, you know. There, But these people were doing something within their margin of safety. They weren't doing something ridiculously foolish.

They weren't taking some wild risk that people had warned them against. This was within there. They just had this low mo origin of aeror. And it goes back to you know, I mean, it's almost like a joke. They died doing what they loved, and they died horribly, and they were young people.

I mean, I think the oldest one was a early forties or something. But and it's a tragedy. But you know, human beings have advanced, like to the moon, because we really have gone to the moon. We I think the three of us may agree on that, like humans. Regardless of what the Russian government says or the Russian people what they may believe.

Well, then that's what's funny is that one of the arguments against the many arguments against the moon hoax theory, the idea that the United States made it up, was that we were in this Cold War and like if the Russians could have found any evidence that the Americans had not gone to the moon, they would have like got run with it. Oh wait and yeah, Instead they congratulate us and said, you know, good job. You know, we wish we'd made it there first. So it sort of works both ways. But the key being that, yeah, we just maybe there's a just like there's a control instinct we like to think we're control, there's a blame instinct.

Yeah, you know, it makes us feel better if we think somebody died doing something that maybe we couldn't do or something we could do, and say, well, they it was their fault. But sometimes it's it's just circumstance, right, Like you were standing on the beach and a wave came, yeah, and you were the one person in the history of the world who's been taken away by a wave at that one point, right, Or our ancestors, you know, one of our ants, somebody who somebody whose gene x did not survive, was just walking along when when when a saber too tiger happened to be there and so their genes were not passed on, they were not It wasn't survival of the fittest, it was survival of the luckiest, you know, So, uh, I think that's a that's a takeaway lesson from the film was that, oh my god, how miserable and tough.

The conditions were out there, and these people were heroic in conquering that. They just had one, really according to the science, one really really bad stroke of luck. Yeah. Yeah, I'd very much agree with that. And I wanted to mention, just following up on Chris, what you were saying about this four to one one series.

I've never heard of that one, but the the American Mountaineering Association puts a series every year called Accidents in North American Mountaineering, and it sounds very similar. It is like a case report of all of these things that happen and then they do an accident analysis. Sometimes it's just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or you know, you're you're doing everything right. But yeah, the four one one series is bigfoot. Uh, I'm not making guys, it's I mean, but that.

But the problem is, I mean, the problem with the missing four one one series is and doctor Mullen, I mean we've you've already alluded to this with the at Love Like when there is an e when there is no explanation that will suffice mind start to wander, and with some people there will be no explanation that will suffice and with missing four one one, there are some things in those cases where yeah, like doctor Promoter said, there sometimes they say aliens or Bigfoot and like again, like you know, hypothesizing is just hypothesizing. But you know again, when you have with some of these missing form one ones, they have less I mean the dat love they have so much with this, Like it's in my mind. It's like, if there's plenty of people willing to do scientifical analysis, which there have been plenty of studies, both contemporary and ones at the time that people were doing, and there's been answers that people like yourself learned people that are scientists can't agree on that.

People within the mountain X exploring or X, you know, kind of like the people that are in that world can agree on. I don't see why the conversation needs to continue unless people like doctor Permutter put it, want to just keep making documentaries sensationalizing it. There are plenty of other things out there that have less evidence behind them that people could throw themselves at that maybe could get some ground swell behind that, similar to the diat love past thing could get scientists or people in academia to get involved with because to be fair, you know, the reason a lot of these things haven't had any sort of real, i would say conclusive evidence behind them is And you guys both know this as people in academia.

People in academia have reputations to uphold, and they don't want to be seen as people that are associated with bigfoot research in a serious capacity, alien research and a serious capacity. And I think that's unfair, but I think it's also completely understood because as someone who's in academia and has a reputation uphold, you don't want it soured by things that some people think are unsavory or you know, fantastical in some of these cases, and diat love is one of those things where I know that's not why you're not wanting to talk about it, doctor Mullen, but because I know that there's a genuine, real explanation that I agree with you with, Like I think it was just an avalanche. I think the fantasticalization or the kind of the like turning everything that's happened into hyperbole is much more interesting than like, not that what happened.

But like then talking about how is it bigfoot or how is it aliens? Because like it's not it's just not any of those things. Yes, yeah, just to clarify. So, David Palids, I think is his name, has has built quite an empire from Missing four one one. I think there's like dozens of books.

Yeah, there's a lot of uh, I know how many documentaries. The one documentary I saw was called Missing for one one the hunted And as to what you both were saying, they had some Really I would use the word interesting in its actual meaning, like like, oh, that's interesting, like people who went missing where there was at least in the described circumstances. There's a great podcast out there, Skeptoid. Brian Dunning is the host of that, and he often points out, like when we hear in the sensational descriptions, the descriptions aren't correct, Like if you go back and look at the original sources, some of the things which are so called mysterious never happened. They were just made up by drillists the time or somebody at the time.

But in the Missing four one one, the documentary which I recommend watching for fun, there are some cases which are that that's interesting. But then in the middle of them he has a group of people who describe how they go into the a secret spot to listen to bigfoot, big feet, bigfoot, squirrel talk to them. I mean, can you imagine, like there's a documentary about normal missing things and then just in the middle of it is a reference to big flippity. He's not being facetious, doctor Mullen. It is.

It is that stark of a contrast. It's like people missing and here's this recording of bigfoots that we have in the woods. And then I think, is this the one with predators in the trees as well? Is this the one with the invisible predator in the trees? Is that this documentary?

Yeah, okay, that's if you. Doctor bull is like, I have to leave now. My professional credibility isn't. Yeah no, they like here, yeah, that that you can have. You can have crazy stuff that wu, as the famous Amazing Randy called it WU.

You know, sensational probably ninety a million to one unlikely stuff happening adjacent to reasonable stuff. And it's incumbent upon people who do documentaries because I believe in the documentary format, even whether you're doing a five minute video on YouTube or this which was a high grade you know, Hollywood cinematic, you know, top top of the line professional documentary, to distinguish between the two and not confuse them. And I think that that's one of the takeaways I think for whether it's for my students who want to create their own videos and tell stories, or for us as professional you know, journalists or scientists, is that we have to be careful about mixing our sources where they don't belong mixed there.

So yeah, that's one of my take well, and. That's and for me it's again, you know, the the datlov past incident and all of the kind of ground swell and kind of discussion around it, it should be focused on the nine people who passed away and honestly doing more to inform people about how to better be better campers and hikers, and how to set up a tent better honestly and be more mindful of your surroundings when you're out in the woods. Just going out into the woods unprepared is a genuinely bad idea. Like I had mentioned that I was in Boy Scouts. I am an Eagle Scout.

I had been out of Boy Scouts for the fifteen years. The last time I went camping, and I was woefully underprepared then, and I will not be the next time I go, and that was three years ago. I mean, it's one of those things where if you're not in a mindset and a headspace to relinquish all of your belongings and surroundings and go out into nature and be in nature for a while, it's not for the faint of heart. And I think as we kind of bring this episode to a I think the thing that's probably the most important is as we are in the times we're in now, where we're able to sit the three of us, none of us in the same state having a conversation about something that happened in the sixty as interconnected as we are now, to go out into nature is such a stark contrast from the world we live in now.

And it didn't used to be. People used to go to bed at eight o'clock because there was no electricity and the sun was down, and that's it. We're not staying up doing anything. It's time for bed and you wake up when the sun comes up. That's the way things used to be before electricity.

So, you know, us people in the last one hundred and fifty years, or you know, one hundred twenty years taking advantage of electricity and public you know, transit and toilets and all kinds of things. Don't appreciate what it would have to be like to walk outside of your house to go to the bathroom at night, which people didn't like to do. And that's what people used to have to do before indoor plumbing. So to go out into nature and remove yourself from everything is not for the faint of heart. And like doctor Pearlmutter said, the fact that the documentarian could not get to where they were himself is telling it and it should be telling for anyone watching the documentary.

That and doctor Mullin, I'm sure you can speak more to this about having gone into the mountains, because I've not gone into the mountains to camp I was, you know, the most I ever did was going to film on for Boy Scouts, which is mountainous, but it's not it's not what you're talking about. The margin of error is low when you're out in nature as it is, but when you go to places like that, it's so much lower than you can even comprehend, I'm assuming. And he hauled himself in there using snowmobiles. So these students were under their own power. And you're absolutely right.

Like today we have satellite communication SOS devices and a range of other things that can help. But they were out on a wild limb. They were very brave. They were you know, they were the best of Russia. They were really vanguards of a venture.

And I respect them for that, and I wish they, you know, lived to tell the tale. Yeah, me too, because again I think they would be very sad to know that they kind of died rather ignominiously. I mean, you know, freezing to death in the Russian mountains is a pretty awful way to go, and then having your body found, you know, six months later in the springtime, it's just that's awful. I mean, but you hear about to go back to the twenty twenty six of it all. You hear about people climbing Everest and after a certain point on Everest, if you die, you're not coming back down.

Your body's left on Everest. And that's right, Like that's it, Like they leave you, and what do you do? I mean, like that still happens now. I'm sure it happens with a lot less regularity than it used to, but it still happens. So you can't mitigate away all the risk just because and just because you think you can.

And that's the thing like this documentary I think is very like should be very sobering for anyone wanting to go out and do anything like this, because even if you're well prepared, you still might not be able to do. And I will say, I mean, I have a lot of Eastern European friends just because I was a you know, a science student in the US, or a lot of foreign students study and my friends from the Eastern Bloc, they do sing the praises of the Soviet government in one sense, and that's it. The Soviet government did support a lot of mountaineering clubs, a lot of out doors clubs, a lot of explorers clubs. So you know, we've bashed the government in Russia quite a bit, but one of the things that they did was allow students like this real chances for adventure.

So maybe one of the things that we could say that's positive about the student's sad end was that they did get the chance to take this adventure. It ended tragically, but they did have the chance and that was thanks to you know, government support of these adventure programs. And to your point, I think that's it's important because you know, like you said, you can't get into this kind of situation if you don't leave your house and you you know you if you're you know, kicking around in nineteen fifty nine in Soviet Russia, unless the government is giving you some ability to do this or offering something to you in the opportunity of this, Like this is not something you can just go out and do. And so to your point, like, yes, it is.

It is a positive that they're they were able to go out and do this. It's just yeah, it's it's sad and it's unfortunate, and it wasn't Bigfoot and it wasn't aliens. So when can we just stop? Like, look, if you want to tell a fictional story about that, go for it. There's a I think there's like even a video game on PC that has Sean Bean narrating it that's set in the dat love past.

Like that's you know that they already want to do that. Le's just go do that. Don't don't have to make the real story any more fantastical than it needs to. We can we can keep that to fiction and it can be it can be more more fun that way. I counted.

By the way, Chris, if you want to do shows on them, I counted. There are two fiction movies with time, one with time travel and one with space aliens about diaf love class, so we can move on to those. One with time travel. Boy, that's they went back in time. I murdered them out.

Day. If I could describe the plot of that movie, I mean, everybody wow, and there's extreme violets. So it's the Soviet version of groundhog Day. But I mean it's like anything else. It's one of those things that's captured the public imagination, and it probably won't uncapture the public imagination no matter what reasonable explanation the scientists give us, which I think is the harder to confront one, but it's the reasonable one that I like to believe.

It's sad, but it's it's sad, and that's all you can say. So anything else we want to talk about with this or the movie or anything, any musings or monologues anyone wants to have, Doctor Perlmutter. I know you prepared several monologues. I don't know if you've gotten to them yet or not No. I just want to say I appreciate being here, and it's good to have these discussions where we talk not just about like an individual piece of cultural content, which I think all three of us can agree, for example, that is very technically well done, but also the issues that are raised about like us as the audience.

You know, I always tell my students you have to be an active audience. You can't just let anything whether it's a fiction television series you know, set in the Star Wars universe, or the evening news flow over you without asking some questions about how it's affecting you, what you appreciate, and also the truth value, either implied or directly claimed. Yeah, I agree, anything else we have Nope, Okay, we'll get this. We'll get this out the doors. So thank you both so much for joining me.

I had a great time. Doctor Mullen, thank you for joining for the first time. Doctor Promutter, thank you for joining me again and for picking the film, and for inviting doctor Ollen as well. It was a lot of fun. Like rate and review the show wherever you get it, more than likely on iTunes, Patreon, dot com.

Slash culture cast is where you can go to support the show we do a weekly show or a monthly show about James Bond that's only for Patreon supporters at the five and ten dollars level. Thank you both again so much for joining me, and make sure to check us out on the next episode.