We all know that the first man and woman in space were Soviet. Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova are names that humanity will not easily forget, but as with many other things done behind the curtain, some people doubt the official account. One of the many questions is whether Gagarin and Tereshkova were truly the first, giving rise to the theory of the "lost cosmonauts", who would have traveled to space (and lost their lives in the process) before and after Vostok 1...
I bet some of our readers remember the web series Pioneer One. The project barely had six episodes, but beyond its limitations, the idea of a team trying to solve the mystery of a young man who claims to be the son of cosmonauts living on Mars was quite striking. A different path is taken by the horror film Apollo 18 (which the world did not hesitate to pan), whose story essentially begins with a dead cosmonaut on the Moon.
Soviet Space Secrecy
So, what is the underlying reason? Why do some writers decide to place cosmonauts in unusual places? One of the most popular answers is that the Soviet Union had no qualms about hiding negative details about its space program. Not to go too far, the authorities hid for ten years the fact that Gagarin had ejected and landed separately from the Vostok module to claim the world record of the FAI. However, there was an even more serious case: Valentin Bondarenko, a selected pilot who died in March 1961 during the development of an experiment on the ground. Bondarenko was "erased" from the records for almost twenty years, in an attempt to hide that failure.
If they managed to deny the existence of a dead cosmonaut for two decades, what prevented Moscow from doing the same with other envoys to space? That is the basis that sustains the conspiracy theory of the lost cosmonauts. In other words, Yuri Gagarin may not have been the first cosmonaut to go to space, and his predecessors lost their lives in different accidents, floating forever in the eternal cold.
The Prague Leak
One of the first news items dates back to December 1959, with an alleged high-ranking communist official in Prague who allegedly leaked information about four dead cosmonauts (Aleksei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin, and Maria Gromova) on unofficial space flights. This news was recorded by the Italian agency Continentale, and involved the physicist Hermann Oberth, who believed in those launches.
Another story involves none other than science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (the same one from Starship Troopers), who in May 1960 had visited the city of Vilna. There, a group of Red Army cadets told Heinlein that the Soviet Union had placed a man in orbit, news that his guide denied a few hours later.
Heinlein's hypothesis was that Korabl-Sputnik 1 (15-05-1960) had been an orbital launch, and according to Yuri Gagarin's biography, two of the Vostok missions were equipped with mannequins and audio recordings to evaluate their systems. Korabl-Sputnik 1 suffered a technical failure and returned to Earth in two phases, one in September 1962 (descent module) and another in October 1965 (equipment module).
The Judica-Cordiglia Brothers
And Korabl-Sputnik 1 inevitably leads us to the brothers Giovanni Battista and Achille Judica-Cordiglia. For years, the brothers said they had intercepted different signals from Soviet missions, including the heartbeat of Laika in Sputnik 2. In November 1960, the Judica-Cordiglia presented recordings of a supposed SOS signal in Morse code coming from a capsule that was moving away from Earth, not in orbit.
Six months later they announced a new recording of a woman's voice speaking in Russian, indicating that she "could see flames" and that it "was very hot", also asking if her ship was going to be destroyed. In total, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers presented nine recordings, ending their activities in 1965. Radio Moscow declared the recordings false, as well as any information about "lost cosmonauts", and over time, others also criticized their validity.
Despite the new information available, subsequent analyses and the very fall of the Soviet Union, it was never proven beyond all doubt that any of the lost cosmonauts was real. In any case, conspiracy theories did not disappear completely. At the end of the day, the question is: "Who knows?" Perhaps future explorers will find a tin can in orbit with a skeleton inside...
