Every secretive government organization is followed by a void of unanswered questions, almost inevitably filled by conspiracy theories. Some folks will never believe the US landed a man on the Moon, but that it was carried out on a soundstage. Alternatively, it was directed by Stanley Kubrick who’s such a perfectionist he demanded it be filmed on the Moon.
Then there’s the theory that Yuri Gagarin was not the first person the Soviets sent to space, just the first one to come back alive.
Today’s Moment of Science… The Lost Cosmonauts.
After WWII ended, the US and the USSR went from frenemies who fought Nazis together to passive aggressive enemies. The entire Cold War wasn’t a dick waving contest, but showing off who had the biggest rocket was… pretty on the nose for the Johnson administration, actually.
However, the US was losing the space race from the word ‘go.’ As soon as Sputnik beep-beep’ed its way across the night sky, America responded by saying “uuuh we should probably make a NASA now.” The USSR’s campaign of utter pwnage continued for a while. You name it, they did it first. First dog in space (RIP Laika). First man in space. First woman in space by twenty years, but to be just a little fair, they only did that because they heard the Americans were doing it and went all “nyet today motherfuckers.” Joke’s on them because… wait.
Then JFK gave a riveting speech about how we’re going to the Moon because he had a boner I mean because it’s hard. And lo, less than seven years later in a spaceship with less computing power than the shittiest smartphone, the US scored our first space race victory.
Throughout all of this, both space programs worked in secrecy for good reason. They had shit to protect and a space race to win and/or catch up on. So when a couple of radio enthusiasts from Italy released the transmissions they’d recorded of cosmonauts in terrible distress, the void of questions grew larger.
Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia set up their listening post in Turin at a former German bunker called Torre-Bert. They heard Sputnik’s beeps. Years later, they would pick up much more fleshy bits of audio. From 1960 until 1964, they picked up and released nine recordings that they concluded were from the Soviet space program.
A morse code ‘SOS’ that faded as it apparently drifted out into space.
Labored breathing of a dying cosmonaut. Within days of this recording, the USSR announced that a large uncrewed craft burned up on re-entry.
A woman asking “Isn’t this dangerous? Talk to me! (…) I feel hot. I can see a flame. Am I going to crash? Yes. I feel hot, I will re-enter,” before trailing off.
If all of these are real, someone orbited and successfully returned to Earth before Yuri Gagarin. The recordings also present the possibility of at least half a dozen fatalities in space.
I know we have our secrets in the US too, but the USSR had a special knack for untruth. They kept whole towns off the map for decades. They altered photos of the cosmonauts, wiping trainees out of pictures when they were kicked out of the space program due to being unsuitable for the image of Soviet heroes. Some were even wiped out of their records. Some had “accidental” falls from windows afterwards, I’m sure. The death of Valentin Bondarenko in training was covered up for years, and Vladimir Komarov’s completely preventable death on the Soyuz 1 mission was falsely blamed on a fucking parachute malfunction.
The USSR’s relationship with transparency was a tenuous one.
Before we get too far into entertaining this, everything from those early days of USSR’s space program has been declassified now (fucking allegedly) and nobody will admit to there being a second, even-more-super-top-secret space program. And I mean nobody. Not on their deathbed, not after defecting and right before joining witness protection, absofuckinglutely nobody.
Running a second space program shrouded in secrecy, evading detection from the world except these two brothers in Turin, strains credulity. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were, by all accounts, highly skilled with hacking into encrypted radio transmissions. They almost certainly did manage to pick up signals from satellites from both the US and the USSR.
But if a couple of talented amateurs could do it, don’t you think a few governments could too? Don’t you think… fucking anybody else did and would have confirmed it by now?
It’s been sixty years, and nobody, absofuckinglutely nobody, has come forward with corroborative evidence to back up the idea that these recordings were from dying cosmonauts. There are also critiques of the spoken Russian on the recordings from people who speak significantly better Russian than me; the grammar is broken and the terminology doesn’t track with standard Soviet military communication.
There are a lot of technical details pointing towards the high unlikelihood that these recordings are legitimate, but even I can’t rule out the possibility entirely. The brothers’ never deviated from their claims.
Americans may have readily bought the idea for a simple reason; we knew their program was initially far more advanced. It would have given some folks a little comfort in this oddest of dick waving contests to think it involved more sacrifice than just one Laika.
Achille went on to be a cardiologist, while Giovanni continued his technical work in forensics.
This has been your Moment of Science, eternally pissed about Laika.
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