Twenty-eight documented facts, each with its source, are scored below against the eight published explanations and against this finding. The eight are: A, the delayed wind slab of Gaume and Puzrin (2021); B, the prosecutors' review of 2019–20, which ended with a slab at about 21:00 and a collapse of the ravine bank; C, the version of Evgeny Buyanov, a St Petersburg engineer and mountaineer (2011), a snow slab at the tent that crushed three of them there; D, a katabatic wind, a violent fall wind off the mountain, proposed by the Swedish archaeologist Richard Holmgren (2019); E, infrasound, low-frequency sound off the summit inducing panic, from the American writer Donnie Eichar's 2013 book Dead Mountain; F, a military test, rocket or toxic release; G, an attack by Mansi hunters or a sacred-mountain retribution; H, a KGB operation or a criminal attack, from the pseudonymous Russian author Alexei Rakitin (2013). A green cell means the explanation requires or accounts for the fact; grey means it does not address it; amber means it accounts for the fact only by assumption, or leaves it unmodelled; red means the fact contradicts it, with the reason given under the table. The three slab versions are kept apart because they put the fatal injuries in different places.

Columns: A Gaume–Puzrin 2021: delayed wind slab at the tent; B Prosecutors' check 2020: slab at ~21:00, ravine bank collapse; C Buyanov 2011: snow board at the tent, the three crushed there; D Katabatic wind, Holmgren 2019; E Infrasound, Eichar 2013; F Military, rocket or toxic release; G Mansi attack or sacred-mountain retribution; H KGB or criminal, Rakitin 2013; V This finding: snow on the tent, cold, ravine collapse.

Why the red cells are red

• Standing tent against the fall wind (2·D). Holmgren's mechanism requires a wind that "would have blown away or into pieces" any tent. The tent stood on its skis with the entrance pole and most guy lines intact, and spare skis and poles stood upright beside it (sheets 298–299, 214, 365).
• Calm tracks against wind and panic (5·D, 5·E). Tempalov: «люди шли нормальным шагом», the people walked at a normal pace (312). Chernyshov: the wind "did not roll them over the snow", or no tracks would have remained (91). Atmanaki: "with any wind you can stay on the slope and go back" (215). Slobodin died with his cap still on his head (316–329). Infrasound panic predicts scattered flight; the file shows a line of people walking together and then hours of organised work at the cedar and in the ravine (341–343).
• No strangers' tracks (7·G, 7·H). On a slope where sock prints stood up for three weeks, no track of any other person or animal but one dog was found by the searchers or by their Mansi guides (386–387, 91, 71, 177).
• Injuries without skin damage (14·C, 14·E, 14·G, 14·H). Buyanov puts the crushing injuries at the tent, 1.5 km from the bodies, but the examiner stated that Thibeaux-Brignolle could only have been carried, would have been unconscious, and that Dubinina died 10 to 20 minutes after her injury (382–383). Falls in a panic do not give symmetric bilateral rib fractures on two lines. Asked whether Thibeaux could have been struck with a stone held in a hand, Vozrozhdenny answered «В этом случае были бы повреждены мягкие ткани, а этого не обнаружено», in that case the soft tissues would have been damaged, and this was not found (382).
• No launch (20·F). A rocket or weapon on the night of 1–2 February needs a launch that does not exist in the record. The General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects, the launch list kept by the astronomer Jonathan McDowell, has for 1959 only short-range and sounding shots at the Kapustin Yar test range on the Volga on 29–30 January and 2 February, 1,700 km away; the fireballs the file does contain match the test flights of the R-7, the Soviet intercontinental missile that had launched Sputnik, on 17 February at 01:46 UTC and 30 March at 22:53 UTC to the minute.
• Nothing taken (21·H). Killers who had come for a contaminated "sample", for photographs or for the cameras left all of them behind with the money and documents: «наличие всех ценностей группы» (387).
• The 2018 bones (28·E, 28·F, 28·G, 28·H). Infrasound supplies no mass. The blast-wave sub-variant of the military theory is excluded by the fracture types (flexion laterally, extension at the sternum), which are those of compression rather than of a pressure wave; the toxic sub-variant is untouched, hence amber. A beating with a narrow object is contradicted on the ribs by a contact surface wider than the ribcage; the scapula, on which the three readings differ, does not support it.
• The Mansi record (26·G). The only Mansi in the area, the Anyamov family, hunting on the Auspiya river, saw only ski tracks (230–231, 261–262); Stepan Kurikov, a Mansi who guided the searchers: the sacred place is in the upper Vizhay, unguarded and open to Russians (232); the Mansi searched with the Russians (262, 300).

Amber cells: the flashlight on top of the snow (3·A–C, V) is consistent with a slab but shows very little net deposition at the tent in 25 days, a difficulty for the heavy wind transport the model needs; the missing debris (4·A–C, V) is explained by wind reworking, which the 2022 observation of a trace erased within an hour makes plausible but cannot confirm for 1959; the den layout (13·V) has never been modelled by anyone; the ravine injuries under A are produced at the tent but the authors "do not insist" on that place, under D the collapsing bivouac is asserted without any force calculation, and under this finding the rib fractures are accounted for but the skull fracture needs a hard object whose position is unknown; the nuclear sub-variant of F is contradicted by clean organs and clean books; Rakitin's key prediction, photographs of the strangers on Zolotaryov's camera, is untestable because that film is ruined.

The rivals, one by one

The prosecutors' check of 2019–20. It was a supervisory check rather than a criminal investigation, run inside the Sverdlovsk regional prosecutor's office from September 2018 by Andrei Kuryakov, a department head there, on the application of one relative. Its expeditions in March 2019 fixed the tent site by comparing 1959 and 2019 photographs, measured the slope there at 21 degrees against the 30 written in the 1959 protocol, and commissioned a microclimate reconstruction (north-west wind of 8 m/s gusting to 30, wind chill −30 at 21:00 falling to −46 by 03:00) and eight other expert reports. On 11 July 2020 Kuryakov announced that a small slab forced the group out at about 21:00, that they walked 50 m to a stone ridge, could not see the tent in a visibility of 6 to 16 m, went down to the forest and froze, and that the four in the ravine were crushed when the snow bank they had undercut collapsed. That location of the injuries is the part of his account this finding adopts; his slope, his timing and his 50 m stand in the blizzard are not needed by it and are contested. On 10 August 2020 the Prosecutor General issued him a formal warning of incomplete official compliance, the last step before dismissal, for acting "outside his official duties and without instruction from management, for personal purposes connected with preparing his dissertation"; he left the service in October 2020. The written conclusions were never published, most relatives were refused access to them, and no court has ever ruled on them. The resolution of 28 May 1959 remains the only decision with legal force.

Gaume and Puzrin 2021. The model is tested in full above. It replaces the prosecutors' undated "slab" with a mechanism and a clock, and its follow-up field work established that the steps above the candidate tent positions are steeper than 28 degrees and that small slabs occur nearby and vanish within an hour. Whether a weak layer lay on the step in the 1959 snow is unmeasured, its delay is fitted, and its injury simulation does not distinguish the tent from the ravine. It is the leading single candidate for the trigger, at 45 per cent.

Buyanov 2011. Evgeny Buyanov's version is the same wind slab with the three crushed on the downhill edge of the tent and an organised retreat carrying them. It is the only slab version that accounts for the tracks starting in two groups, and it is contradicted by the examiner's mobility findings, which it dismisses as "urban experience". A 1.5 km night walk carrying a man with a crushed skull and two people with crushed chests, one of whom had minutes to live, is the reason this finding puts the injuries in the ravine.

Katabatic wind, Holmgren 2019. Holmgren's version is built on the Anaris accident in the Swedish mountains in February 1978, in which a fall wind of 25 m/s killed eight of nine skiers who had their sleeping bags in their packs. It is a real mechanism for abandoning shelter and is compatible with the hypothermia sequence. It is contradicted by the tent, which was still standing, and by the tracks, which show people walking at a normal pace. Kholat Syakhl is a rounded dome without the plateau that pools cold air. It survives as the wind-only trigger inside the 35 per cent of the trigger not assigned to snow.

Infrasound, Eichar 2013. Eichar proposes that a vortex street off the summit produced panic. It predicts nothing that can be checked in the file, is contradicted by the orderly tracks and the hours of rational work that followed, supplies no force for the ravine injuries, and has no documented human victim anywhere.

Military, rocket, fireballs. Every first-hand light sighting in the file is dated 17 February or 31 March and matches an R-7 launch from Tyuratam, the range in Kazakhstan later known as Baikonur. Nothing reached the northern Urals on 1–2 February. No debris, crater, scorch or blast damage was found in three months on the slope, in the forest or in the Lozva valley; the tent was cut from inside; the radiation is three washable beta spots on cloth at one to two times the sanitary norm for radiation workers, with organs at the natural potassium-40 level and the group's books clean; Kolevatov was uninjured and six people spent hours making fire and shelter. The only variant not contradicted is a non-lethal toxic exposure that merely frightened them, and it survives only because the 1959 chemical analyses are missing from the file. That is a gap in the file, and it is the largest single item in the 10 per cent residual.

Mansi. This was the 1959 investigation's first working version, which is why the file holds a block of Mansi interrogations. Against it stand the alibis, the Mansi's own knowledge of every household within 100 km, the fact that nothing was stolen, the absence of weapon or beating injuries, a sacred place that is elsewhere and open to Russians, and the Mansi guides in the search party. The closing resolution of May 1959 rejected it; the "nine Mansi who once died on the mountain" appear in no 1959 testimony.

Rakitin's KGB "controlled delivery". Rakitin has three members of the group as operatives carrying contaminated clothing to foreign agents, who detected the trap and killed the group with blows that leave no marks. The version is internally coherent but supported by no document, and it is contradicted by the absence of strangers' tracks, by the examiner's statement that blows would have damaged the soft tissue, and by the "sample" being left on the bodies.

The minor theories. Each is contradicted by a single sheet of the file: carbon monoxide on the stove packed in its case with the pipes inside (314); a fight on the absence of any signs of struggle and on the shared work afterwards (386, 341–343); alcohol or methanol on «наличие алкоголя не обнаружено» in every March autopsy (103, 111, 119, 125, 132); the Yeti on the absence of any animal track and any bite or claw injury (91, 177); paradoxical undressing, the stripping off of clothes by people dying of cold, as a cause on the fact that they were already undressed when they left and that the least dressed had their clothes cut off after death by the others (386); ball lightning on the absence of electrical marks; a fall into the stream on the intact flooring with clothes laid on it 6 m from the bodies and on the examiner's "great force" (341–343, 382).

Where the case stands in September 2026. Yuri Kuntsevich, who led the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation, died in August 2021. On 2 June 2026 the relatives' counsel Evgeny Chernousov announced that they would seek a new criminal case under the murder article, on the ground that the nine autopsy acts lack the mandatory chemical and histological examinations, to be followed by exhumation of all nine bodies. The next day Evgeny Buyanov restated the slab-at-the-tent version. Neither Russia's Investigative Committee nor the prosecutor's office had answered by the date of this report. The two things the relatives ask for, the missing analyses and the exhumation, are also two of the measurements that would move this finding.