It is one of the great mysteries of our times. They would be found with missing eyes, even a missing tongue, crushed bones, and stripped of their clothes in minus 50 degree temperatures . Theories range from their being being murdered by the CIA to space aliens, to "Abominable Snowmen". This book explores this famous incident using a technique known as "Higher criticism" to explain their terrifying deaths. It provides hitherto unexplored answers and is now the leading source on the incident, debunking all previous explanations while pointing to eleven points of overwhelming evidence that tell us what really happened on this tragic night of horror.

    Nobody knows the truth. Nine wholesome University students mountaineering in the Urals go missing, and are later uncovered from the snows of a bleak forest’s edge in the Siberian Taiga, in a series of grisly discoveries. Why were the climbers wearing no boots? Why were stout branches of the forest pines singed to a height of thirty feet? What were the mysterious markings in the bark of nearby trees? What was so-called “overwhelming force” that was capable of breaking eight ribs in a single blow without bruises? Why the KGB infiltrated all the search parties and attended the funerals? Why the clothes were tested for radiation? The authoritative book - by international author and investigative journalist: Svetlana Oss (Osadchuk) who has been the leading commentator of this profound mystery since Moscow Times first sponsored her 2007-2008 investigation. The savage events of 1st February 1959, which took nine lives and left a trail of smashed and semi-naked bodies across the slopes of Mount Ortoten, have confounded every credible explanation. Wild and convincing theories abound. All of them are flawed by the facts. Was it sex? Was it hypothermia? Was it robbers? In the first reportage to be published in the English language, The Moscow Times' meticulous coverage presented the existing versions that have proliferated over fifty years, carefully sifting each idea, from mad guesses by superstitious nuts, to reasoned findings of the official investigation. Now Svetlana Oss formulates the true answer. 'Don't go there' explains for the first time how this odyssey by nine seasoned climbers, nine experienced members of the Ekaterinburg University Climbing Society came to end in disaster. New information, new analysis, new brains - the answer will astound you. "I am sure that nothing else that I have written has ever made such a noise in the world, and no wonder. This mystery has an invariable and puzzling quirk: at least one circumstance is inevitably contradicted by some other. Not a single explanation out of the many is able to conquer the riddle – there is always at least one fact that completely ruins whatever theory one prefers. This excites people. It excites me."

    While one of the skiers fell ill and returned, the remaining nine lost their way and ended up on another mountain slope known as Kholat Syakhl (or 'Mountain of the Dead').On the night of 1 February, something or someone caused the skiers to flee their tent in such terror that they used knives to slash their way out. Search parties were sent out and their bodies were found, some with massive internal injuries but no external marks on them. The autopsy stated the violent injuries were caused by 'an unknown elemental force'. The area was sealed off for years by the authorities and the full events of that night remained unexplained.Using original research carried out in Russia and photographs from the skiers' cameras, Keith McCloskey attempts to explain what happened to the nine young people who lost their lives in the mysterious 'Dyatlov Pass Incident'.

    Eerie aspects of the incident—unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really happened. This gripping work of literary nonfiction delves into the mystery through unprecedented access to the hikers' own journals and photographs, rarely seen government records, dozens of interviews, and the author's retracing of the hikers' fateful journey in the Russian winter. A fascinating portrait of the young hikers in the Soviet era, and a skillful interweaving of the hikers narrative, the investigators' efforts, and the author's investigations, here for the first time is the real story of what happened that night on Dead Mountain

    A month later their corpses were found, maimed and broken by eldritch forces. This incident has provoked wild speculation among even the most skeptical crowds, stimulated discussion among every conspiracy theorist in Russia, and haunted the imagination of many a hiker for half a century. Recently, the mystery of so-called "Dyatlov Pass" has undergone a renaissance of interest and has gained international publicity and coverage in the news, Hollywood, and literature. This book provides, in an easy-to-read format, comprehensive, bias-free coverage of the incident--complete with medical autopsy reports, excerpts from legal proceedings connected with the deaths of the hikers, and testimonies from the first responders who found the bodies. In short, this book contains everything one needs to join the ranks of thousands of people trying to uncover the secrets of the Dyatlov Pass.

    The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—at the time equivalent to $18 billion—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies. The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of Reactor No.4 of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told—until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.

    Dozens died of radiation poisoning, fallout contaminated half the continent, and thousands fell ill.In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy draws on new sources to tell the dramatic stories of the firefighters, scientists, and soldiers who heroically extinguished the nuclear inferno. He lays bare the flaws of the Soviet nuclear industry, tracing the disaster to the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over scientific information, and its emphasis on economic development over all else.Today, the risk of another Chernobyl looms in the mismanagement of nuclear power in the developing world. A moving and definitive account, Chernobyl is also an urgent call to action.

    I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That's who I am.He became famous through his academy award-winning performance as Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields, but the key to Haing Ngor's screen success was the terrible truth of his own experiences in the rice paddies and labour camps of revolutionary Cambodia.Here, in a gripping memoir of life under the communist Khmer Rouge regime, he reveals the country's descent into a hell beyond our imaginings: a world of war slaves and senseless brutality, where family life simply ceases to be. But with the pain he also gives us hope and an illuminating example of how the best sort of love can actually be strengthened through the shared experience of a life-threatening ordeal. An eyewitness account of the real killing fields by an extraordinary survivor, this book is both a reminder of the horrors of war and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

    He was a charismatic preacher with idealistic beliefs, and he quickly filled his pews with an audience eager to hear his sermons on social justice. After Jones moved his church to Northern California in 1965, he became a major player in Northern California politics; he provided vital support in electing friendly political candidates to office, and they in turn offered him a protective shield that kept stories of abuse and fraud out of the papers. Even as Jones’s behavior became erratic and his message more ominous, his followers found it increasingly difficult to pull away from the church. By the time Jones relocated the Peoples Temple a final time to a remote jungle in Guyana and the U.S. Government decided to investigate allegations of abuse and false imprisonment in Jonestown, it was too late.      A Thousand Lives follows the experiences of five People's Temple members who went to Jonestown: a middle-class English teacher from Colorado, an elderly African American woman raised in Jim Crow Alabama, a troubled young black man from Oakland, and a working-class father and his teenage son. These people joined the church for vastly different reasons. Some, such as eighteen-year-old Stanley Clayton, appreciated Jones’s message of racial equality and empowering the dispossessed. Others, like Hyacinth Thrash and her sister Zipporah, were dazzled by his claims of being a faith healer — Hyacinth believed Jones had healed a cancerous tumor in her breast. Edith Roller, a well-educated white progressive, joined Peoples Temple because she wanted to help the less fortunate. Tommy Bogue, a teen, hated Jones’s church, but was forced to attend services—and move to Jonestown — because his parents were members.       A Thousand Lives is the story of Jonestown as it has never been told before. New York Times bestselling author Julia Scheeres drew from thousands of recently declassified FBI documents and audiotapes, as well as rare videos and interviews, to piece together an unprecedented and compelling history of the doomed camp, focusing on the people who lived there. Her own experiences at an oppressive reform school in the Dominican Republic, detailed in her unforgettable debut memoir Jesus Land, gave her unusual insight into this story.       The people who built Jonestown wanted to forge a better life for themselves and their children. They sought to create a truly egalitarian society. In South America, however, they found themselves trapped in Jonestown and cut off from the outside world as their leader goaded them toward committing “revolutionary suicide” and deprived them of food, sleep, and hope. Yet even as Jones resorted to lies and psychological warfare, Jonestown residents fought for their community, struggling to maintain their gardens, their school, their families, and their grip on reality.      Vividly written and impossible to forget, A Thousand Lives is a story of blind loyalty and daring escapes, of corrupted ideals and senseless, haunting loss.

    Elena, born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, finds her passion in the complexity of the English language - but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s, such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena's home is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars. Instead, it is a nation humiliated by its first faltering steps after World War II, putting up appearances for the sake of its regime and fighting to retain its pride. In this deeply affecting memoir, Elena re-creates the world that both oppressed and inspired her. She recounts stories passed down to her about the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution and probes the daily deprivations and small joys of her family's bunkerlike existence. Through Elena's captivating voice, we learn not only the personal story of Russia in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose love of a foreign language finally transports her to a new world. 'This moving memoir made me cry' The New York Times

    In his grey suit and tie, he looked like any other Soviet citizen. The bag alone was mildly conspicuous, printed with the red logo of Safeway, the British supermarket.The man was a spy for MI6. A senior KGB officer, for more than a decade he had supplied his British spymasters with a stream of priceless secrets from deep within the Soviet intelligence machine. No spy had done more to damage the KGB. The Safeway bag was a signal: to activate his escape plan to be smuggled out of Soviet Russia. So began one of the boldest and most extraordinary episodes in the history of spying. Ben Macintyre reveals a tale of espionage, betrayal and raw courage that changed the course of the Cold War forever...

    Wilson's thorough tome covers the tried-and-true methods from the beginning of the 20th century to the cutting-edge, innovative processes now featured on shows such as CSI. The illustrated book includes 15 black-and-white images of victims, killers, and crime scenes. This is an exceptional book for a society morbidly fascinated by this unsettling topic.

    The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July sixteenth to seventeenth, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. The Last Days of the Romanovs reveals in exceptional detail how the conspiracy to kill them unfolded. In the vivid style of a TV documentary, Helen Rappaport reveals both the atmosphere inside the family's claustrophobic prison and the political maneuverings of those who wished to save--or destroy--them. With the watching world and European monarchies proving incapable of saving the Romanovs, the narrative brings this tragic story to life in a compellingly new and dramatic way, culminating in a bloody night of horror in a cramped basement room.

    A young, highly intelligent man named Christian Longo, on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for killing his entire family, has recently been captured in Mexico, where he'd taken on a new identity -- Michael Finkel of the New York Times.The next day, on page A-3 of the Times, comes another bit of troubling news: a note, written by the paper's editors, explaining that Finkel has falsified parts of an investigative article and has been fired. This unlikely confluence sets the stage for a bizarre and intense relationship. After Longo's arrest, the only journalist the accused murderer will speak with is the real Michael Finkel. And as the months until Longo's trial tick away, the two men talk for dozens of hours on the telephone, meet in the jailhouse visiting room, and exchange nearly a thousand pages of handwritten letters.With Longo insisting he can prove his innocence, Finkel strives to uncover what really happened to Longo's family, and his quest becomes less a reporting job than a psychological cat-and-mouse game -- sometimes redemptively honest, other times slyly manipulative. Finkel's pursuit pays off only at the end, when Longo, after a lifetime of deception, finally says what he wouldn't even admit in court -- the whole, true story. Or so it seems.

    Not a sign of struggle, not a shred of damage, no ransacked cargo—and not a trace of the captain, his wife and daughter, or the crew. What happened on board the ghost ship Mary Celeste has baffled and tantalized the world for 130 years. In his stunning new book, award-winning journalist Brian Hicks plumbs the depths of this fabled nautical mystery and finally uncovers the truth. The Mary Celeste was cursed as soon as she was launched on the Bay of Fundy in the spring of 1861. Her first captain died before completing the maiden voyage. In London she accidentally rammed and sank an English brig. Later she was abandoned after a storm drove her ashore at Cape Breton. But somehow the ship was recovered and refitted, and in the autumn of 1872 she fell to the reluctant command of a seasoned mariner named Benjamin Spooner Briggs. It was Briggs who was at the helm when the Mary Celeste sailed into history. In Brian Hicks’s skilled hands, the story of the Mary Celeste becomes the quintessential tale of men lost at sea. Hicks vividly recreates the events leading up to the crew’s disappearance and then unfolds the complicated and bizarre aftermath—the dark suspicions that fell on the officers of the ship that intercepted her; the farcical Admiralty Court salvage hearing in Gibraltar; the wild myths that circulated after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a thinly disguised short story sensationalizing the mystery. Everything from a voodoo curse to an alien abduction has been hauled out to explain the fate of the Mary Celeste. But, as Brian Hicks reveals, the truth is actually grounded in the combined tragedies of human error and bad luck. The story of the Mary Celeste acquired yet another twist in 2001, when a team of divers funded by novelist Clive Cussler located the wreck in a coral reef off Haiti.Written with the suspense of a thriller and the vivid accuracy of the best popular history, Ghost Ship tells the unforgettable true story of the most famous and most fascinating maritime mystery of all time.From the Hardcover edition.