Lost Cosmonauts


The Lost Cosmonauts or Phantom Cosmonauts are subjects of a conspiracy theory alleging that Soviet cosmonauts went to outer space before Yuri Gagarin, but their existence has never been publicly acknowledged by either the Soviet or Russian space authorities. Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory argue that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more human spaceflights before Gagarin's, and that at least two cosmonauts died in those attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin, is believed to have landed off course and been held by the Chinese government. The Government of the Soviet Union supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War.
The evidence cited to support Lost Cosmonaut theories is generally regarded as inconclusive, and several cases have been confirmed as hoaxes. In the 1980s, American journalist James Oberg researched space-related disasters in the Soviet Union, but found no evidence of these Lost Cosmonauts. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, much previously restricted information has been made available, including information on Valentin Bondarenko, a would-be cosmonaut, whose death during training on Earth was covered up by the Soviet government. Even with the availability of published Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no evidence has emerged to support the Lost Cosmonaut theories.

Allegations

Purported Czech information leak

In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czech Communist leaked information about many purported unofficial space shots. Alexei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a converted R-5A rocket. Three more names of alleged cosmonauts claimed to have perished under similar circumstances were Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Maria Gromova.
Also in 1959, pioneering space theoretician Hermann Oberth claimed that a pilot had been killed on a sub-orbital ballistic flight from Kapustin Yar in early 1958. He provided no source for the story. In December 1959, the Italian news agency Continentale repeated the claims that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czech communist. Continentale identified the cosmonauts as Alexei Ledowsky, Serenty Schriborin, Andreij Mitkow, and Mirija Gromov. No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital crewed flights ever came to light.

High-altitude equipment tests

A 1959 edition of Ogoniok published an article and photos of three high-altitude parachutists: Colonel Pyotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur, and Alexey Grachov. Official records state that Dolgov was killed on November 1, 1962, while carrying out a high-altitude parachute jump from a Volga balloon gondola. Dolgov jumped at an altitude of. The helmet visor of Dolgov's Sokol space suit hit part of the gondola as he exited, depressurizing the suit and killing him. Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time; his name has become linked to this equipment. Grachov is thought to have been involved, with Dolgov and Kachur, in testing the high-altitude equipment. Russian journalist Yaroslav Golovanov suggested that high-altitude testing was exaggerated into a story that those parachutists died on a space flight. In late 1959, Ogoniok carried pictures of a man identified as Gennady Zavadovsky testing high-altitude equipment. Zavadovsky would later appear on lists of dead cosmonauts, without a date of death or accident description.
Golovanov, who researched the lost cosmonaut claims in his book, "Cosmonaut #1", found and interviewed the real Alexey Timofeyevich Belokonov, a retired high-altitude parachutist. In this interview, Belokonov revealed more about his colleagues Dolgov, Kachur, Mikhailov, Grachov, Zavodovsky and Ilyushin, and confirmed they never flew to space. According to Belokonov, in 1963, after New York Journal American published an article on lost cosmonauts, listing the parachutists among them, Soviet newspapers Izvestia and Krasnaya Zvezda published a refutation that included testimonies and photographs of the actual parachutists Belokonov, Kachur, Grachov and Zavodovsky. The parachutists also wrote an angry letter to New York Journal American editor William Randolph Hearst, Jr., which he ignored.

Robert Heinlein

In 1960, science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote in his article Pravda means 'Truth that on May 15, 1960, while traveling in Vilnius, in the Soviet Lithuania, he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a human into orbit that day, but later the same day, it was denied by officials. Heinlein speculated that Korabl-Sputnik 1 was an orbital launch, later said to be uncrewed, and that the retro-rockets had fired in the wrong attitude, making recovery efforts unsuccessful.
According to Gagarin's biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies and human voice tape recordings that were made just prior to Gagarin's flight.
In a U.S. press conference on February 23, 1962, colonel Barney Oldfield revealed that an uncrewed space capsule had indeed been orbiting the Earth since 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960. It was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok launch vehicles. The onboard TDU had ordered the retrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of the attitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heat shield as there were no plans to recover it. Engineers had planned to use the vessel's telemetry data to determine if the guidance system had functioned correctly, so recovery was unnecessary.

The Torre Bert recordings

The Judica-Cordiglia brothers are two former amateur radio operators who made audio recordings at Torre Bert that allegedly support the conspiracy theory that the Soviet space program covered up cosmonaut deaths in the 1960s. The pair claimed to have recorded audio of several secret Soviet space missions that ended in calamity and mystery. This has generated public interest for more than 50 years, despite a considerable number of detailed rebuttals of the brothers' claims.

Vladimir Ilyushin

, son of Soviet airplane designer Sergey Ilyushin, was a Soviet pilot and is purported to have been a cosmonaut, alleged by some to have actually been the first man in space on 7 April 1961, an honor generally attributed to Yuri Gagarin on 12 April 1961.
Two days before Gagarin's launch, Dennis Ogden wrote in the Western Communist newspaper the Daily Worker that the Soviet Union's announcement that Ilyushin had been involved in a serious car crash was really a cover story for an 7 April 1961 orbital spaceflight gone wrong. A similar story was told by French broadcaster Eduard Bobrovsky, but his version had the launch occurring in March, resulting in Ilyushin slipping into a coma. NORAD tracking stations, however, had no record of any such launch. Later that year, U.S. News & World Report transmitted the rumor by claiming that Gagarin had never flown, and was merely a stand-in for the sickened Ilyushin. The 1999 film The Cosmonaut Cover-Up takes the position that Ilyushin was the first man in space and discusses the alleged cover-up in detail. They claim, "ccording to recently declassified documents, Ilyushin was placed in a capsule named Rossiya, and the secret flight took place in the early hours of the morning, on Friday April 7th 1961". After a guidance malfunction, the cosmonaut is reported to have made an unguided crash landing in China, too critically injured to announce the mission a complete success. The 2009 film Fallen Idol: The Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy also takes the same position and further discusses US efforts to continue the allegation, even citing national security not to release information under the Freedom of Information Act. The data sought was from the CIA tracking station at Tern Island that supposedly covered and recorded Iluyshin's failed mission.

Moon-shot allegations

The Soviet Union lost the crewed Moon-landing phase of the space race to the United States. However, some sources claim that just before the historic Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, the Soviets undertook an adventurous attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new Soviet N1 rocket on 20 January 1969, it is alleged that a decision was made to send a crewed Soyuz 7K-L3 craft to the Moon using an N1. This attempt is alleged to have occurred on 3 July 1969, when it ended in an explosion, destroying the launch pad and killing the cosmonauts on board. Official sources state that the L3 was not ready for crewed missions. Its lunar lander, the LK, had been tested a few times but its orbiter, the 7K-LOK, had not been successfully tested by the closing of the Moon-landing program at the end of 1974. The closing of the program was officially denied and maintained top secret until 1990 when the government allowed them to be published under the policy of glasnost.
This claim correlates with the late hoax about the unsuccessful Moon-shot flight of Andrei Mikoyan. However, in reality, the second launch, like the first, was a test of the booster and was therefore uncrewed. Even if cosmonauts had been on board, they would have been rescued by its launch escape system, which carried the dummy payload to safety from the pad. One mission in the Soyuz program, Soyuz T-10-1, did see the spacecraft and cosmonauts rescued safely from a failed booster rocket by its launch escape system; it was the only documented case of such a system in use with a crewed spacecraft, until the 11 October 2018 Soyuz launch mishap.
There are also rumors, which appeared later in Omon Ra, a novel by Russian fiction writer Pelevin, that the Soviet automatic sample-return craft Luna and remote-controlled automatic Moon rover Lunokhod, were, due to failures in automation, crewed by cosmonauts who had agreed to take part in suicide missions. However, there is not enough space in either the Luna or Lunokhod for a single cosmonaut, even excluding any life support systems. There had been a plan to develop modified Lunokhods with additional controls for use as a transport in crewed Moon-landing missions but this plan ended with the Soviet crewed lunar programs.

Confirmed hoaxes

A number of claims have been confirmed as hoaxes:

Ivan Istochnikov

Officially Soyuz 2 was an uncrewed spacecraft that was the docking target for Soyuz 3. However, Mike Arena, an American journalist, allegedly found in 1993 that an 'Ivan Istochnikov' and his dog 'Kloka', who were manning Soyuz 2, disappeared on October 26, 1968, with signs of having been hit by a meteorite. They had been "erased" from history by the Soviet authorities, who could not tolerate such a failure.
The entire story was found to be a hoax perpetrated by Joan Fontcuberta as a 'modern art exercise' that included falsified mission artifacts, various digitally manipulated images, and immensely detailed feature-length biographies that turned out to be riddled with hundreds of historical as well as technical errors. The exhibit was shown in Madrid in 1997 and the National Museum of Catalan Art in 1998. Brown University later purchased several articles, and put them on display themselves.
Mexico's Luna Cornea magazine however, failed to notice this, and ran issue number 14 with photos, and a story explaining the "truth".
The name "Ivan Istochnikov" is a Russian translation of Joan Fontcuberta's name; in specific, "Joan" and "Ivan" both translate to "John" and "Fontcuberta" and "Istochnikov" both mean "source"/"of the source" and "hidden fountain."
On June 11, 2006, Cuarto Milenio, a mysteries program led by Iker Jiménez on the Spanish TV channel Cuatro, presented the story as possibly true. There is an entry in the Spanish skeptical blog Magonia by the journalist Luis Alfonso Gámez. An excerpt from Cuarto Milenio is included.

Andrei Mikoyan

Andrei Mikoyan was reportedly killed together with a second crew member in an attempt to reach the Moon ahead of the Americans in early 1969. Due to system malfunction, they failed to get into lunar orbit and shot past the Moon.
This story, which circulated in 2000, may have been based on the plot of an episode of the television series The Cape. The episode "Buried in Peace" first aired on October 28, 1996. In it, a Space Shuttle crew on a mission to repair a communications satellite encounters a derelict Soviet spacecraft with a dead crew—the result of a secret attempt to beat the United States to the Moon in the 1960s. Tom Nowicki played Major Andrei Mikoyan, a Russian member of the Space Shuttle crew in the story.

In popular culture

General references