What About Those Missing & Lost Russian Cosmonauts?

The Soviet Union's space program, active from 1955 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, was notable for setting many records in space exploration. The first human spaceflight program for the Soviet Union was the Vostok program, which began with the historic flight of Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. This program consisted of single-occupant flights and accomplished a number of firsts for human spaceflight.

However, there have been allegations, often referred to as the "Lost Cosmonauts" or "Phantom Cosmonauts" theory, which suggest that the Soviet Union attempted to launch human spaceflights before Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight, and that some cosmonauts died in those attempts. These theories allege that Soviet and Russian space authorities concealed the deaths of some cosmonauts in outer space. One such case is that of Soviet military pilot Vladimir Ilyushin, who was alleged to have landed off course and been held by the Chinese government.

These victories in the Space Race sent the U.S. into a panic as they feared they might actually lose the contest to the Soviets. But the apparent success of the Soviet program was hiding a few dark secrets.

In 1960, a Soviet rocket ignited on the launching pad, killing at least 78 of the ground crew. In 1961, just before Gagarin’s space flight, a Soviet cosmonaut was killed when a devastating fire erupted inside an oxygen-rich training capsule.

In 1967, another cosmonaut was killed when the parachute on his space capsule failed to open. Gagarin himself would die a year later while training in a fighter jet, adding another name to the long list of fatalities associated with the Soviet space program.

In 1960, science-fiction author Robert Heinlein reported that while traveling in the USSR, he met Red Army cadets who told him that there had recently been a manned space launch. This launch capsule, the Korabl-Sputnik 1, experienced a mechanical failure when the guidance system steered it in the wrong direction. This made retrieval of the capsule impossible, and the Korabl-Sputnik 1 was stranded in orbit around the Earth.

The Soviets officially claimed the launch was an unmanned test flight, but according to Heinlein, there might have been a cosmonaut inside. To lend some evidence to Heinlein’s theory, two Italian amateur radio operators allegedly picked up a number of radio transmissions that they claimed were from doomed Soviet space launches.

Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, a pair of brothers from Turin, claimed that they began monitoring Soviet space program transmissions in 1957, and that these transmissions prove Yuri Gagarin wasn’t actually the first man in space.

In November of 1960, the brothers claimed to pick up an S.O.S. transmission in Morse code coming from a Soviet spacecraft. Based on the transmissions, they determined that the craft was moving away from Earth instead of orbiting it, which meant that the Soviets had accidentally launched their cosmonauts deep into space. The brothers eventually made nine such recordings they claimed were emergency transmissions from Soviet cosmonauts being launched away from Earth.

In one of the recordings, a woman’s voice can be heard saying in Russian that she can see flames and asking mission control if her ship is about to explode. If the recordings are real, then it means that the first woman in Space was actually launched by the Soviets, and apparently died there. And if you believe other rumors, then Soviet cosmonauts were also technically the first on the Moon after a group of cosmonauts volunteered to be launched directly into it in the Soviet Luna Probe.

The Soviets denied all of these allegations, and while they were always eager to cover up any embarrassing incidents behind the Iron Curtain, there are a few good reasons to believe them in this case. For instance, the Luna Probes had no room to fit the cosmonauts who supposedly asked to be fired into the Moon’s surface. The Korabl-Sputnik 1 had no re-entry shield, which suggests that there were never any plans for the capsule to survive the trip.

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