John Ballen
speaker
344 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
John Ballen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's just like the tundra. It's like ice and snow and mountains. And they come across this mountain off in the distance and they see on the windswept side of the mountain, basically halfway up, are these tents that are just these like canvas tents. They barely see them, but they're situated right in the middle of the slope.
which is like strategically one of the worst places you can place these tents. So immediately they're thinking, one, it has to be the hikers because who else is out here right now? But two, why in the world would these incredibly talented hikers or mountaineers, why would they ever pitch their tent there? This is the most hazardous part. The wind can whip you off.
You either go to the top and over or you stay to the bottom. Let's say you've begun hiking up that mountain. You get halfway and you're like, I can't make it. You better go back down and make your camp down there. So they see these tents. They're in the wrong spot. They go up to the tents, and the hikers aren't there. They're not in there. There's pictures of this too.
The tents inside had stacks of clothing neatly folded and placed in the corners, like as if they hadn't – they left their clothes behind. And the tents themselves were cut open like with a knife, but somehow they deduced that they had been cut open but from the inside. So presumably one or multiple of the mountaineers chose to cut open these tents in like negative 50-degree weather.
And then there were all these prints in the snow that led down the mountain. And some of the prints were bare feet. Some had one shoe and one bare foot. And it's all nine of the hikers. They spotted these prints. And they follow the prints down the hill or the mountains, a big space. And they find this little crops of trees.
There's only a few areas in the Ural Mountains, in this part of the Ural Mountains that have trees. And There's this little group of trees. And when they get to the trees, they find three of the hikers. And they're all deceased. And there's one who's basically almost naked, wrapped up on the ground. There's pictures of this.
There's one who I believe was draped over one of the branches up in one of the trees. And then another one that was also on the ground as well. And there's these deep scratch marks in the tree, like gouges on the tree as if some animal had been scratching at this tree. And all three of these hikers are deceased. And it looks like exposure.
But they're not really wearing the right clothing or they're missing pieces of clothing, but they're all deceased. There's more footprints that lead away from those three about a mile kind of back in the direction the search party had come from. And there's this big snow drift that created sort of like a snow cave underneath it.
And the footprints lead into the snow cave where the other six hikers were. And they're all deceased as well. Except in there, the hikers had seemingly exchanged clothing. And they know this because the women were wearing men's clothing and vice versa. Some of their clothes had trace levels of radiation. And some of them had parts of their face removed, it looked like. lips, nose, ears.
It almost looked like surgical precision removal. They're all deceased. And one of the injuries, there was a person in there who their chest had basically been caved in. And it was deduced that the impact it would have taken, there was no lacerations, just their chest was caved in. The impact would have been equivalent to like a speeding car smashing into you at full speed.
But there's no sign of anything that could have done this damage. And so they're all deceased. And so the Soviet government, they launch an investigation. And during this investigation, they discover that there was a huge military exercise, a Russian military exercise taking place in the Ural Mountains who had no idea about these hikers.
They have no clue that the level three mountaineering test is going on. That's not even on their radar. And they're, you know, 15, 20 miles away.
And one of their senior commanders on the same night that it's believed the hikers all died and whatever happened to them happened, he began noticing all these strange lights in the sky over the Ural Mountains going up and down and moving all around to the point where he actually thought it was another country, a foreign country. Are they invading us?
And he literally thought it was like an invasion of Russia. And he sent out messages to say, hey, what's happening over there? Having no idea that he was pointing to the one spot where these hikers were. So during this investigation, they discover that families are clamoring for information about their lost loved ones. Nobody has any idea what's going on.
And suddenly the Soviet government says, oh, we're going to shut this investigation down. All we know is that the nine hikers who died, died from an unknown, unnatural force. Sealed. Sealed.
And to date, even though there was actually a recent – a reinvestigation done in 2020, it's remained like one of the great unsolved mysteries in part because it's got this like, oh, the Russian government sealed it and there's more information. What do they mean unknown, unnatural force? But there's pictures of the tent, of the bodies, of all this stuff. And so I –
I always thought that was a fascinating story. And I love stories like that. And I was at this water park in Pennsylvania with my family, an indoor water park. And at this point, I've exhausted the one list. Nothing's worked on social media. And this new thing, TikTok, had sort of begun to happen. I didn't really even know what it was.
But I was like, maybe I'll try posting on there because it's a new platform. Maybe that'll work. And I was like, but I bet I want to try something else, you know, because these ideas haven't worked. And so like in my hotel room, I tell my wife and three kids, like, go down the water park. I'll meet you down there in a minute. And I just pull out the phone and I do a 60-second rendition of that.
And I was like, hey, you know, at the end of this, you're going to Google two words. And I tell this brief story about this crazy mystery. And I'm like, that's called the Dyatlov Pass mystery. That's the name of the pass they were in when they were found. And I post this video to my account that has no followers. It's like the Mr. Ballin account. There's a story behind that.
But it's a nothing account. Post it and really no expectation that this is going to amount to anything. I leave my phone in the room because I'm going down to the water park. I can't waterproof my phone. I'll be with my kids. And when I came back up a few hours later and I picked up my phone, I couldn't even get it to turn on. Like it was like – I was like, oh, is it power dead? Yeah.
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