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The Yuba County Five: 'An American Dyatlov Pass' Incident (1978)

stuneville said:
It would - but I'm well aware that Discovery made a fake-umentary about Dyatlov that implicated the Menk (the local Almasty / Manbeast) so treading carefully ;).

That said, as ever, just because a) is fake it doesn't mean that b) is. The old skeptic's syllogism writ large.
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You lobbed a very interesting hand grenade into the discussion!
 
stuneville said:
*starts taxi-style MS Word meter*

I'm on it.
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Perhaps you might use the tag-line "The American 'Dyatlov Pass' Incident; Was it Sasquatch??!!"

This will attract plenty of readers, while also letting some of us know what to expect.
 
Coal said:
Perhaps you might use the tag-line "The American 'Dyatlov Pass' Incident; Was it Sasquatch??!!"

This will attract plenty of readers, while also letting some of us know what to expect.
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Indeed. For the online version, it'd be:

The American 'Dyatlov Pass' Incident; Was it Sasquatch? Paragraph 7 will shock you!!
 
CuriousIdent said:
Another article here (source not given) from June 1978 available here:

https://imgur.com/a/dlyQS

You know it's oddly jarring to see the term 'mentally retarded' being used quite so freely. But it most certainly is being used there.
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Depends on when it was written. These days, people are more careful.
 
Not Easy to explain != Supernatural. But still interesting. Probably we just don't know the actual event that set the whole thing in to motion.

Equally 'not very bright' does not necessarily usually or even frequently mean 'unable to make rational decisions'. Especially in a simple situation like 'light a fire with the materials provided' or 'open a can with the tin opener' .

I knew a not very bright lad, nickname 'Brain' - we hadn't even heard of politically correct back then - who could start a fire with wet sticks in a storm.
 
Cochise said:
I knew a not very bright lad, nickname 'Brain' - we hadn't even heard of politically correct back then - who could start a fire with wet sticks in a storm.
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That's more than most people could do.
 
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stuneville said:
Hate to lob this in here (actually, no I don't..) - that area is prime Bigfoot country, whistling and indistinct speech ("Samurai chatter") is often reported as is travelling in groups in hostile conditions or if they're (theoretically) migrating. I'm not trying to implicate 'squatches in the main incident, just giving an alternative view for this particular adjunct, as a good Fortean should.
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Exactly my thoughts too. And that again ties in with some Missing 411 cases. Not that I have any idea of what any of this really means.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Yes, it's been mentioned before ... Most recently (Sept. 2017) someone posted about this in the Strange Deaths thread, but it didn't ignite any discussion.
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surely youve got an angle on this, no
 
henry said:
surely youve got an angle on this, no
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I have mixed feelings about this case. On the one hand I find some of its features considerably less mysterious than the Dyatlov Pass incident, but on the other handI find some aspects more mysterious than what happened with the Russian ski party.

Both cases share the following features:

- There's no specific reason to assume the deaths were the result of anything other than exposure / hypothermia.
- The real mystery concerns the chain of events that led to the deaths occurring where and when they did (as opposed to why the individual parties died in medical terms).
- The main impediment to analysis is the issue of whether the group acted all together on the decisive night, versus acting as separate sub-groups (at one or another point in the chain of events).
- The anomalous behaviors the evidence might suggest are consistent with the effects of hypothermia.

The Yuba County 5 case adds the following weird factors / features:

- There was an alleged witness-on-the-scene at the point the guys abandoned their car.
- At least some of the victims survived long after their disappearance had been noticed and a search had been initiated.
- Unlike the Dyatlov party, the Yuba County guys were nowhere anyone expected them to be, so the mystery extends farther back in the storyline.
- There's much more of a timespan during which the mystery chain of events could have played out.
- The mental / emotional issues attributed to all 5 guys add a further dimension of possible panic, misunderstanding, discord, disorientation, etc., prior to any hypothermia effects setting in.
- Three of the four bodies eventually found had been ravaged by animals, and at least one of them consisted of no more than scattered bones.
- One of the 5 guys remains missing, but IMHO it's more a matter of his remains being missing / missed to date.
 
I think the most basic mystery in the Yuba County 5 case is why the 5 guys drove to the location where the still-functional and non-stuck car was abandoned.

The 5 guys were from Yuba City and Marysville. At the time, these were two adjacent towns on the east / west sides of a river.

The most direct highway routing from Chico would have been to take route 99 all the way into Yuba City (on the west side of the river). Otherwise, they could have not borne right / southward and continued via route 149 to north / south route 70 and traveled parallel to the river on the east side, ending up in Marysville.

They would have necessarily taken the latter route to end up where they did.

This routing would have required them to skirt or drive through Oroville. At or in Oroville, they departed from the route home and headed east - toward the mountains.

I therefore suspect Oroville was the general area where things went wrong - particularly if they went wrong in some fashion involving contact with one or more third parties.
 
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On the other hand ...

There's a possible explanation for why the 5 guys headed east out of Oroville and ended up on that mountain road. Gary Dale Mathias had friends who lived in Forbestown - a small community east of Oroville and accessed via the same road leading up into the mountains that was the sole path leading to their eventual stopping place. To go to Forbestown one had to turn right off the main road coming out of Oroville. The 5 guys obviously didn't turn right, but kept moving onward into the mountains.

The authorities checked with Mathias' Forbestown acquaintances, but they claimed they hadn't seen Gary in about a year.

It doesn't make much sense that Mathias would lead the party to his friends' place late at night. However, he may have recognized the road after they'd already become disoriented and helped motivate them to continue heading out of Oroville and into the mountains.
 
There's an incongruity regarding Mathias' medications. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and he was prescribed:

- Stelazine* (Trifluoperazine) for the schizophrenia *(sometimes cited as Stellazine)
- Cogentin (Benzatropine) as a precaution against the motor side effects (tremors, odd movements, etc.) that could be caused by the Trifluoperazine

According to the accounts mentioning details of Mathias' medications he was taking these drugs weekly, and he had taken doses earlier on Friday (the day they drove to the basketball game in Chico). One account (I forget which one ...) cited Mathias' stepfather as saying Gary had taken his doses that morning.

Now here's the odd bit ...

According to online drug reference sites, both Stelazine and Cogentin are taken daily - sometimes multiple times per day. Benzatropine has a pharmacological half-life of 12 - 24 hours; Trifluoperazine has a half-life of 10 - 20 hours.

My point is that if Gary Mathias had taken his meds no later than midday Friday, one would think they were wearing off by midnight. If nothing else, the exertion and time expended in hiking another 19 miles in snow should have left him with little of the drugs in his system. In any case, he was missing for more than a week, so he was eventually overdue for his meds no matter how one interprets his requirements.
 
EnolaGaia said:
Now here's the odd bit ...

According to online drug reference sites, both Stelazine and Cogentin are taken daily - sometimes multiple times per day. Benzatropine has a pharmacological half-life of 12 - 24 hours; Trifluoperazine has a half-life of 10 - 20 hours.
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I like the thinking here, but is it possible that dose and regimen have changed since the 70s?

It has with other medicines.
 
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Yithian said:
I like the thinking here, but is it possible that dose and regime have changed since the 70s? ...
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I don't know. I haven't been able to confirm what the prescription / dosage regimen was 40 years ago.

Edit to Add:

The half-life specs for the medications wouldn't have changed.
 
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Apparently my phone doesn't like the word 'regimen'.
 
About the car the Yuba City 5 were riding in ...

The '69 Mercury Montego (a mid-sized sedan of the period) belonged to Jack Madruga (characterized as 'slow'; an Army vet and licensed driver like Mathias). Some accounts mention the car was Madruga's pride and joy, and he took good care of it. The five men would have been a full passenger load for that vehicle.

When discovered, the car was in the middle of the road (a gravel Forest Service road). It still held a quarter-tank of gasoline, and it started up immediately when police hot-wired it (the key(s) were missing).

I've had extensive experience with driving equivalent late '60's American sedans (and VW Beetles like the witness Joseph Shones / Schons drove) in similar terrain and conditions. I can assure you the VW was by far the superior choice for that terrain and snow, but the Mercury was capable of making it to the snow line with a full load and slow careful driving.

I don't find it surprising the Montego seemed 'clean' when found. Madruga drove it carefully that night.

I do find it surprising that Shones / Schons couldn't extricate his VW from the snow, unless he'd slipped off the gravel road bed or run the Bug aground.
 
It's not uncommon to find references to this story indexed / cited under Mathias' name. He was the only one of the five not considered 'slow' and the only one still technically listed as missing.

I get the impression from some accounts that Mathias may have been relatively dominant (or at least most respected) among the five, but it's not clear to me whether this was 'real' or simply an artificial gloss on Mathias' status deriving from having focused on him.

On the other hand ... Mathias was the only one about whom a history of violence has been mentioned.

My point is that to the extent any overall explanation hinges on either (a) following an extemporaneous leader or (b) someone flying off the handle, Mathias would seem to be the obvious candidate for scrutiny.
 
I did notice that arrests of two men from Yuba Coubtry were made fairly recently for historical murder cases of young women in the (general) area in the 70s--before this incident IIRC.

You would assume that the police woukd have exhaustively examined other local cases of the era, of course.
 
The relative prominence of Mathias in the published accounts may be misleading.

As far as I can see, there's only indirect evidence for Mathias' presence at the cabin-styled trailer (circa 19 miles farther up the mountain track) where Weiher's body was found:

(1) Some of the C-ration cans stockpiled at the trailer site had been opened (one account - I forget which one - specifies 36 in number). They were opened with the provided P-38 US Army can opener - a gizmo as deceptively simple yet tricky to understand as a Chinese puzzle. Only 2 of the guys had been in the Army and were guaranteed to be familiar with the opener - Mathias and Madruga. Madruga was found dead beside the road circa 11 miles from the car-stoppage site and circa 8 miles short of the trailer.

(2) The closest thing to 'hard' evidence of Mathias' presence is the fact that Weiher had Mathias' tennis shoes on his feet when his body was discovered. Weiher's own footwear - leather boots - were missing. The standard interpretation is that Mathias swapped his shoes for Weiher's at the trailer. Weiher's feet were larger, so it's presumed Mathias needed larger and more substantial footwear for venturing out into the snow with frostbite-swollen feet. However, this presumes rather than proves Mathias was there.
 
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