Unfortunately, we learn about the world through the foggy windows of our senses. We reflect on it with the imperfect instrument of our reason. And we rely on the accounts of others, which we are so poorly equipped to evaluate. Other minds have their own motives and agendas, and they make honest mistakes as well as concoct outrageous lies. Even the best and most reliable witnesses have their stories distorted in the retelling. So what CAN we really know about the world? The answer: very little. An what we do know is subject to constant revision and questioning.

We try to come up with formal systems, or procedures, to minimize the possibility of error. We have the rules of legal evidence as they are applied in the law, scientific method and experiment, logic, peer-reviewed publication in learned journals, consensus of the leading practitioners, but any of us can come up with multiple examples of how all of these mechanisms has failed at one time or another. And those failures aren’t always the malicious lies of villains, very often we just miss something, or misinterpret something. Or we are innocently biased by the invisible or the unknowable.

We are limited, not only by the crudity of our bodies and minds, but by the fact we are restricted in both space and time. We are part of the universe, a subset of it. How can we possibly understand it? We exist only briefly in a very tiny piece of it, we directly experience neither the subatomic realm of the particle physicist, nor the cosmic overview of the cosmologist. And at right angles to those axes of space and time there is the spectrum of complexity: what really concerns us is not the building blocks of the universe. We deal instead with human concerns, with relationships and connections, historical events, spatial arrangements. How can a knowledge of Newton’s Laws or Maxwell’s equations teach you how to raise your children, or live in a community, or conduct yourself in your profession?

You can stare at the chess pieces all you want but they can’t tell you how to play the game. If they are properly placed on the board you still don’t know the rules. If you learn how they move and under what circumstances, you still know nothing about tactics or strategy–how to win or at least force a stalemate. And there are deeper levels still, a chess scholar can study the record of a past game he has never seen and still recognize the style of the play; “this is a young Lasker playing Botvinnik in his prime. Lasker was White.”. Sometimes we know things and we don’t even know how. Even our own intelligence sometimes operates in ways we can’t begin to understand or predict.

So does this mean there is no truth, or that there is no point in seeking it out? Of course not. Its our job to try. Just don’t believe anyone who tells you he’s got it all figured out. He’s either lying to you, or he’s just plain wrong.

It wasn’t ufos or Bigfoot. My first thought it was one of them.

I read a couple of sources and the time frame isn’t clear. And some say they scattered and another said they all grouped at the tree and some tried to return to the tent. If they were hiding, why build a fire 1600 feet from the tent? If they were found one month or two months after the event, could the weight of “12 feet” of snow crush decomposing bodies.

Still, the evidence we have to examine is all from one source; if not the article you posted, then whatever source(s) its author consulted before writing it, which we have no access to so we are not in a position to confirm or evaluate it critically. Basically, we have only one account available to us. Does this mean its all a pack of lies? Not necessarily, just that we don’t know how much of it is true and how much of it has been added later (and dutifully repeated and embellished) to the original story since it was first told. There is all sorts of detail, but we have no corroboration of any of it, except for vague references to alleged classified Soviet reports and secret panels and investigations. In other words, all dead ends. All we really know is what you posted.

I have no idea what happened to these hikers (indeed, if they ever existed at all) but I suspect they were the victims of a crime and that the story has grown and been elaborated to the point where the original events have been spun out to exaggerated proportions. We must remember that the Russian press, even in the Soviet era, has always been eager to report all sorts of conspiracy theories, supernatural mysteries, UFO stories, and the like. Russians love this shit as much as we do.

The whole story shares a lot in common with the recent chupacabra craze, a lot of somber descriptions attributed to anonymous sources. If you want to follow it up, they lead nowhere.

What do I think happened? I don’t know any more than you do, but my guess is that these people were attacked, either by a member of their own party, or by others (tribesmen, mutinous soldiers, suspicious security forces, gangsters, bandits?) and in the resulting confusion (and perhaps in an effort to cover up evidence) the victims scattered and dispersed. The resulting crime scene, examined later, leaves lots of unanswered questions and contradictions, as do most crime scenes. The rest is all the speculations and interpretations that the story has gathered along the way, dutifully passed and elaborated from each teller to each listener, until truth and fiction have become inextricably tangled together. Can we rule out Bigfoot, UFOs, secret weapons testing, tribal massacres? No we can’t, but we can’t rule them in, either. It’s all like the Gospels, Area 51, the Jersey Devil, the Kennedy Assassination or the Benghazi embassy attack. The story evolves over the years, as it adapts to the needs of those who repeat it.

As the Rabbis tell us; “First there is the Torah. Then there is the Commentaries. Then there is the Commentary on the Commentaries.”