Lost Cosmonauts

The Lost Cosmonauts, or Phantom Cosmonauts, are cosmonauts who allegedly entered outer space, but whose existence has never been acknowledged by either the Soviet or Russian space authorities.

Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory concede that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive space travel, but claim that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more manned space flights prior to Gagarin's, and that at least two cosmonauts died in the attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin, is believed to have landed off-course and been held by the Chinese government. The Soviet government 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 not regarded as conclusive, 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 collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, much previously restricted information is now available. Even with the availability of published Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no hard evidence has emerged to support the Lost Cosmonaut stories.

Supposed incidents in space

An article published in the English language edition of Pravda in April 2001, forty years after Gagarin's successful orbit, gave some details about the three cosmonauts reputed to have been lost in earlier missions.

Aleksei Ledovsky (late 1957)

In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czech Communist leaked information about many purported unofficial space shots. Aleksei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a converted R-5A rocket.

Sergey Shiborin (February 1958)

Pioneering space theoretician Hermann Oberth claimed in 1959 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 reported that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czech communist. Among these were Sergey Shiborin, said to have perished in 1958. No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital manned flights ever came to light.

Andrei Mitkov (January 1959)

In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czech communist leaked much information about many of these apparently unofficial launches. Andrei Mitkov was, like Ledovsky, mentioned as being launched inside of an R-5A conversion.

Marya Gromova (1959)

In December 1959, again an alleged high-ranking Czech communist leaked information about many of these apparently unofficial launches, including that of Marya Gromova, a woman who purportedly flew "some sort of 'space aeroplane' into oblivion", never to be seen or heard from again. If the story of Gromova is true, her craft most likely disintegrated upon re-entry from a sub-orbital flight. The "space aeroplane" would likely be a Cosmonaut training vehicle, intended for high-altitude operation.

Unknown man (May 15, 1960)

Robert A. Heinlein wrote in his 1960 article Pravda means 'Truth' (reprinted in Expanded Universe) that on May 15, 1960, while traveling in Vilnius, in the Soviet Union, he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit that day, but that later the same day it was denied by officials. Apparently, no issues of Pravda could be found in Vilnius or, reportedly, other Soviet cities for that date. Throughout the article, Vilnius is called by its Polish name "Wilno." Vilnius is far away from Soviet rocket launch sites.

Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch, later said to be unmanned, on that day, but that the retro-rockets had fired at the wrong altitude, 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, to check if the radio worked, that were made just prior to Gagarin's flight.

In a US press conference on February 23, 1962, Col. Barney Oldfield revealed that a space cabin 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 (one year before Gagarin). It was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok manned launchers. The onboard TDU had ordered the retro rockets to fire, but due to a malfunction, the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule lacked a heatshield 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.

Ivan Kachur (September 27, 1960)

A 1959 edition of Ogonyok carried images of three men, Pyotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur and Alexey Grachov, testing high-altitude equipment. Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time; his name has become linked to this equipment.

Pyotr Dolgov (October 11, 1960)

Pyotr Dolgov was a colonel in the Soviet Air Force. Over the years there have been false reports that Dolgov was actually killed on October 11, 1960, in a failed flight of a Vostok spacecraft. Such a flight would have occurred six months prior to the historic Vostok 1 flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. These reports would make Dolgov a phantom cosmonaut, one of a few whose identity is documented, although he was not a member of the cosmonaut team.

Officially he 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 28,640 meters (93,970 feet). The helmet visor of Dolgov's Sokol space suit hit part of the gondola as he exited, de-pressurizing the suit and killing him.

Alexey Grachov (December 1960)

Grachov is thought to have been involved, with Dolgov, in testing high-altitude equipment. As with Dolgov, it can be presumed that his work on high-altitude testing was exaggerated into a story that he died on a space flight.

Gennady Zavadovsky (1960)

In late 1959, Ogonyok carried pictures of a man identified as Comrade Gennady Zavadovsky testing high-altitude equipment (perhaps with Grachov and others). Zavadovsky would later appear on lists of dead cosmonauts, without a date of death or accident description .

Ludmila and Nikolay/Anatoly Tokov (1961)

A supposed married couple, Ludmila Tokov and Nikolay or Anatoly Tokov, reputedly disappeared. TASS later reported that an unmanned satellite roughly the size of a London bus had been launched, but had disintegrated during reentry.

The Torre Bert Recordings

Regardless of the existence of either Nikolay/Anatoly Tokov, the Torre Bert listening station in northern Italy purportedly picked up a transmission of a woman's voice, sounding confused and frightened as her craft began to break up upon reentry. Presumably the voice was Ludmila's, though no one knows how or why this name has become attached to the voice on the tape. The interpretation of the tape can be found at the Website.

Gennady Mikhailov (February 2, 1961)

Alleged first human in orbit, Gennady Mikhailov may have died in orbit due to heart failure. This rumor may have been derived from reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7 (launched 4 February, not 2) was a manned mission. According to the TASS news agency it was a failed Venus probe. This is believed to be the source of the Torre Bert recording of both heartbeats and breathing. Both files can be found at the Lost Cosmonauts Web site.

Unknown couple (February 24, 1961)

There were reports of a couple launched on February 17, 1961 aboard a Lunik spacecraft orbiting the earth, reporting "Everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the earth." at regular intervals.

On February 24, 1961, there were some garbled verbal transmissions about something the couple could see outside their ship, that they urgently had to communicate to Earth. What happened is unclear, but communication was lost. Around the same time the listening station at Torre Bert reportedly picked up an SOS signal from a craft in space. As the signal got weaker, it was assumed whatever craft it was disappeared into deep space.

Valentin Bondarenko (March 23, 1961)

Valentin Bondarenko, a member of the original cosmonaut program, died in a training accident on the ground when a high-oxygen pressurised chamber he was in caught fire on March 23, 1961. He was erased from official Soviet pictures and descriptive materials of the cosmonaut program, leading to all manner of speculation about him and about other cosmonauts whose histories were less than perfectly known. The true nature of his accident was not revealed until the 1980s.

Vladimir Ilyushin (April 7, 1961)

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 April 7, 1961—an honor generally attributed to Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961.

The theories surrounding this alleged orbital flight are that a failure aboard the spacecraft caused controllers to bring the descending capsule down several orbits earlier than intended, resulting in its landing in the People's Republic of China. The pilot was then held by Chinese authorities for a year before being returned to the Soviet Union. The international embarrassment that would have resulted from such an incident is cited as the Soviets' reason for not publicizing this flight—they reportedly focused their publicizing efforts on the subsequent successful flight of Yuri Gagarin instead.

However, there are reasons to disbelieve this allegation. Although both were Communist governments, relations between the Soviet Union and China were strained. The propaganda value of a Soviet pilot captured flying over Chinese territory would have given little reason for Chinese authorities to cooperate in a cover-up. Also, "bringing the capsule down several orbits earlier than intended" does not make sense, considering that the Vostok mission involved a single orbit.

This theory originated on April 10, 1961, with Dennis Ogden, the Moscow correspondent of the British Communist newspaper Daily Worker, and was actually based on Ilyushin's medical treatment and care in China. According to many Soviet sources, including the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda dated July 11, 2005, Ilyushin was a famous test pilot but he was never involved in the space program. On June 5, 1960, his legs were seriously injured in a car accident. Ilyushin underwent medical treatment for a year in Moscow, then was sent to Hangzhou, China, for rehabilitation under specialists in oriental medicine. This explanation was also confirmed by the Soviet defector Leonid Vladimirov, an engineer who had personal contacts with Ilyushin in 1960, in his 1973 book "The Russian Space Bluff", published in Frankfurt (Russian translation of the book).

The theory gained some credibility in 1999 due to a documentary on the subject titled called Cosmonaut Cover-Up. Interviewed in English, Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, said that it was true and that Vladimir Ilyushin was actually held in China for over a year as a "guest" of the People's Republic of China. He was later returned to the Soviet Union, but by then the Gagarin legend was in place and the bizarre incident was covered up. The main reason for concealment was to not let the West see the schism between China and the USSR.

Vladimir Ilyushin never confirmed this theory, dying in 2010.

Alexey Belokonev (November 1962)

Alexey Belokonev is reportedly one of three (two men and a woman) cosmonauts aboard a November, 1962 flight. The Torre Bert tower in Italy allegedly picked up a frantic set of messages relayed by the three occupants. 'Conditions growing worse why don't you answer? ... we are going slower... the world will never know about us . . '

Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Seryogin (March 27, 1968)

Some sources claims that first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin with second test-pilot Vladimir Seryogin did not die in the crash of their Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 fighter during a training flight on March 27, 1968.

At this time Soviet Union and United States were in a race to the moon. In its the first phase of its manned moon-flyby phase, the Soviets conducted unmanned tests of the L1/Zond spacecraft for flights around the Moon. According to rumors, on March 2, 1968 the Soviets launched a manned Zond 4 with Gagarin and Seryogin aboard. After a successful flight around the moon, Zond 4 crashed on March 7, 1968 during its return to Earth. Official announcements say that this Zond 4 was an unmanned, automatic test flight which ended with its intentional destruction because its recovery trajectory positioned it over the Atlantic Ocean instead of over the USSR.

In 1963-1967, Yuri Gagarin was head of a team of cosmonauts slated for two Soviet flyby and landing manned moon missions. The first open announcement about this was made by Tereshkova during her visit to Cuba. After the declassifying of Soviet manned moon program files in 1989, it was officially reported that he was present at the Baykonur cosmodrome on March 27, 1968 with Valery Bykovsky to observe a launch, not to take part in one.

It was also officially reported that the crew for the first manned L1/Zond spacecraft included Alexey Leonov and Valery Bykovsky. Vladimir Seryogin was not a member of any team of cosmonauts. At the time, the L1/Zond spacecraft was not yet ready for manned missions, after 5 unsuccessful and partially successful unmanned test launches: Cosmos 146 on March 10, 1967, Cosmos 154 on April 8, 1967, undesignated Zond 1967A September 27, 1967, undesignated Zond 1967B on November 22, 1967 and L1/Zond on April 23, 1968. The March mission was the first flight under the designation "Zond." It seems unlikely that the April 23, 1968 attempt would have occurred so soon after a failed, manned mission. Later L1/Zond spacecraft made only unmanned flights, including one suspected by the US as being manned.

Unknown crew of two (July 3, 1969)

The Soviet Union lost the manned moon-landing phase of the Moon race to the United States. However, some sources claim that just before the historic Apollo 11 flight to the moon, the Soviets undertook an adventuresome attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new Soviet N1 rocket on January 20, 1969, it is alleged that a decision was made to send a manned Soyuz 7K-L3 craft to the moon using an N1. This attempt is alleged to have occurred on July 3, 1969, when it ended in explosion destroying the launch pad and killing cosmonauts on board. Official sources state that the L3 was not ready for manned missions. Its moon-landing module 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 at the end of 1974. The closing of the program was officially denied and maintained top secret until 1989.

This claim correlates with the late hoax about unsuccessful moon-shot flight of Andrei Mikoyan.

Unknown pilots of Luna zonds and Lunokhod moon-rovers (1969–1973)

There are rumors that Soviet automatic sample-return craft, Luna, and remote-controlled automatic moon rover, Lunokhods, were, due to failures in automation, manned by cosmonauts who had agreed to take part in suicide missions. However, there is not enough space in either the Luna or Lunokhod for even one cosmonaut, never mind many days of life support systems. There had been a plan to develop modified Lunokhods with additional controls for use as a transport in manned moon-landing missions but this plan ended with the moon-landing program.

Among the Lunas, a June 14, 1969 failed to launch, a July 13, 1969 test, Luna 15 launched but failed to land on the moon. Among the rovers, there was a failed launch on February 19, 1969 and two successful launches on November 10, 1970 and January 8, 1973.

Confirmed hoaxes

A number of claims have been confirmed as hoaxes:

Ivan Istochnikov

Officially Soyuz 2 was an unmanned spacecraft that was the docking target for Soyuz 3. However, Mike Arena, an American journalist, found in 1993 that Ivan Istochnikov and his dog Kloka were manning Soyuz 2, and 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 which 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 (January/April 1998) with photos, and a story explaining the tragic and as-yet-untold truth.

The name Ivan Istochnikov is a Russian translation of Joan Fontcuberta's name; translated to English from Russian reads "John of the Source".

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.

Japanese singer Akino Arai wrote a song about Istochnikov and Kloka, titled "Sputnik" on her Furu Platinum album.

Pavel Popovich and Vitali Sevastyanov

NASA radio monitoring service intercepted conversations between Pavel Popovich and Vitali Sevastyanov and a control center. The conversations appeared to originate from a Soviet Zond 6 spacecraft that was launched on November 10, 1968 and successfully flew for 7 days around the Moon. This was at a time of intense competition during the moon flyby phase of the Moon race between the USSR and the US. The Soviet L1/Zond spacecraft was almost ready for manned missions, although testing was not yet complete, and it was not unimaginable that the USSR might undertake a manned flyby using the L1/Zond spacecraft in order to beat the Americans.

It was soon clear, however, that these were test transmissions between two ground control centers with the Zond 6 intercepting and relaying the transmissions.

After the successful US Apollo 8 manned flight around the Moon, the Soviet manned flyby missions lost political urgency. The first manned flight of L1/Zond spacecraft with Alexey Leonov and Valery Bykovsky planned for the end of 1968 was cancelled and Zond spacecraft made only a few unmanned, automatic flights after that.

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.

The source of this story was undoubtedly the television series The Cape. The episode Buried in Peace first aired on October 28, 1996. In it, a 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 send a manned mission to the moon 30 years earlier, before the United States. Tom Nowicki played Major Andrei Mikoyan in the story.

This story correlates with another claim about the unsuccessful second manned test flight of the N1 rocket.

Igor Fedrov

A 1998 American urban legend held that during the fall of the Soviet Union, one of their cosmonauts was stranded on the Mir space station. The Soyuz ferry spacecraft had a nominal on-orbit storage life of 180 days. It was reported that financial and technical problems, related to the political uncertainty, delayed the launch of replacement crews.

On several occasions, the Soyuz craft remained docked to the station longer than its six-month-rated life. Every time this happened, alleged experts would state on television news reports that the crew was 'stranded'. This first happened on the Soyuz TM-15 flight of 1992.

This legend became the basis for the Norwegian short film 'Kosmonaut', directed by Stefan Faldbakken. In the movie, during a long duration mission aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, fictional cosmonaut Igor Fedrov is unable to contact ground control during the chaotic period after Gorbachev's overthrow in 1991. Stranded in his Soyuz capsule, unable to receive instructions or update his guidance system, his life support supplies dwindling, he finally attempts a manually guided reentry and dies in the attempt.

In popular culture

The lost cosmonauts are referred to in popular culture including art, science fiction and film.

• A 2005 Russian mockumentary movie First on the Moon (Первые на Луне) features the fictional story of a 1938 Soviet landing on the Moon.
• The track "Nostalgia" from Cracker's 1993 album "Kerosene Hat" references this urban legend.
• A 1989 installment of Philip Bond's "Wired World", published in the UK comics anthology Deadline magazine, features a cosmonaut who crash lands in a London park where the main characters are picnicking. He goes drinking with them then phones his mother, and is later grabbed by men in black, presumably KGB officers.
• In Michael Cassutt's book Red Moon, one of the secondary characters is a cosmonaut named Shiborin, likely as a tribute to the lost cosmonaut. This Shiborin, however, served at the height of the Space Race, about a decade after the lost cosmonaut's supposed death, made two successful space flights, and eventually headed the cosmonaut facility as a lieutenant general.
• The upcoming Spanish science fiction feature film The Cosmonaut is inspired by accounts of lost cosmonauts and the Joan Fontcuberta referenced above.
• Victor Pelevin's anti-soviet novel "Omon Ra" is based on depiction of Soviet space flights as a planned homicide. Some of these "flights" are also not really flights, but fakes in the sake of Soviet propaganda.
• Daniel Kalder's account of anti-tourism in the unknown ex-Soviet satellite states is titled Lost Cosmonaut.
• In Metal Gear Solid 3 one of the game's bosses: The Fury is lost cosmonaut who was badly burned upon re-entry and served as a secret elite combat operative in Soviet jungles.

See also

• Space accidents and incidents
• Apollo moon landing hoax accusations
• Soviet Moonshot
• Kwangmyŏngsŏng
• Soyuz 1
• Laika
• Judica Cordiglia brothers
• List of fictional astronauts

References

Notes

• Encyclopedia Astronautica: Phantom cosmonauts
• James Oberg (1988). Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost, Random House, ISBN 0-394-56095-7
• Pavel Toufar, 2002/2003, Kruty vesmir, Akcent, ISBN 80-7268-245-8, 58-258
• Pavel Toufar, 2001, Vzestup a pad Jurije Gagarina, Regia, ISBN 80-86367-11-8
• Alexander Zheleznyakov, Gagarin was still the first (same in Russian)
• "Komsomolskaya pravda" newspaper (in Russian)
• A.Pervushin "Terrible secret" of soviet space (in Russian)
• Uchitelskaya gazeta (in Russian)
• Ren-TV story (in Russian)

External links

• Lost Cosmonauts
• Encyclopedia Astronautica: Phantom cosmonauts
• Straight Dope on "lost" cosmonauts
• Oberg chapter on Dead Cosmonauts