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TheLost Cosmonauts orPhantom Cosmonauts are subjects of aconspiracy theory, which alleges thatSoviet andRussian space authorities have concealed the deaths of somecosmonauts inouter space. Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts theory argue that the Soviet Union attempted to launchhuman spaceflights beforeYuri Gagarin's first spaceflight (Vostok 1, 1961), and that cosmonauts onboard died in those attempts. Soviet military pilotVladimir Ilyushin was alleged to have landed off course and been held by theChinese government. TheGovernment of the Soviet Union supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of theCold 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 journalistJames Oberg researched space-related disasters in the Soviet Union, but found no evidence of these Lost Cosmonauts.[1] Since thefall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, much previously restricted information has been made available, including information onValentin Bondarenko, a would-be cosmonaut, whose death during training on Earth wascovered 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. Ilyushin, who died in 2010, also never gave any support to conspiracy theories.
In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czechoslovakian Communist leaked information about many purported unofficial space shots. Alexei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a convertedR-5A rocket. Three more names of alleged cosmonauts claimed to have perished under similar circumstances were Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Maria Gromova.[2] 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 Czechoslovakian communist. Continentale identified the cosmonauts as Alexei Ledowsky, Serenty Schriborin, Andrei Mitkow, and Maria Gromova.[3] No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital crewed flights ever came to light.[2]
A 1959 edition ofOgoniok published an article and photos of three high-altitude parachutists: ColonelPyotr 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 28,640 metres (93,960 ft). The helmet visor of Dolgov'sSokol space suit hit part of the gondola as he exited, depressurizing the suit and killing him.[4] Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time; his name has become linked to this equipment.[4] 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.[4] In late 1959,Ogoniok carried pictures of a man identified as 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.[4]
Yaroslav 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,[specify] Grachov, Zavadovsky and Ilyushin, and confirmed they never flew to space. According to Belokonov, in 1963, afterNew York Journal American published an article on lost cosmonauts, listing the parachutists among them, Soviet newspapersIzvestia andKrasnaya Zvezda published a refutation that included testimonies and photographs of the actual parachutists Belokonov, Kachur, Grachov and Zavadovsky. The parachutists also wrote an angry letter toNew York Journal American editorWilliam Randolph Hearst, Jr., which he ignored.[4]
In 1960, the science fiction authorRobert A. Heinlein wrote in his articlePravda means 'Truth' (reprinted inExpanded Universe) that on May 15, 1960, while traveling inVilnius, inSoviet 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 thatKorabl-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.[5]
According to Gagarin's biography, these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions equipped with dummies (including a mannequin known asIvan Ivanovich) and human voice tape recordings (to test if the radio worked) that were made just prior to Gagarin's flight.[6]
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.[7] According to theNASANSSDC Master Catalog,Korabl Sputnik 1, designated at the time 1KP or Vostok 1P, did launch on May 15, 1960 (one year before Gagarin).[8] It was a prototype of the laterZenit andVostoklaunch vehicles. The onboard TDU (Braking Engine Unit) had ordered theretrorockets to fire to recover, but due to a malfunction of theattitude control system, the spacecraft was oriented upside-down, and the firing put the craft into a higher orbit. There-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.[9]
Two days before Gagarin's launch on 12 April 1961, Dennis Ogden wrote in the Western Communist newspaper theDaily Worker that the Soviet Union's announcement that Ilyushin had been involved in a serious car crash was really a cover story for a 7 April 1961orbital spaceflight gone wrong.[15] A similar story was told by French broadcaster Eduard Bobrovsky, but his version had the launch occurring in March, resulting in Ilyushin slipping into acoma.[15]NORAD tracking stations, however, had no record of any such launch.[15] 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.[16] The 1999 filmThe Cosmonaut Cover-Up takes the position that Ilyushin was the first man in space and discusses the alleged cover-up in detail. They claim, "According 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.[17] The 2009 filmFallen 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 theFreedom of Information Act. The data sought was from theCIA tracking station atTern Island that supposedly covered and recorded Iluyshin's failed mission.
According to Mark Wade, editor of the space history web siteEncyclopedia Astronautica, "The entire early history of the Soviet manned space program has been declassified and we have piles of memoirs of cosmonauts, engineers, etc., who participated. We know who was in the original cosmonaut team, who never flew, was dismissed, or was killed in ground tests. Ilyushin is not one of them."[18]The Soviet Union lost the crewed Moon-landing phase of theSpace Race to the United States. However, some sources claim that just before the historicApollo 11 flight to the Moon, the Soviets undertook a hasty attempt to beat the Americans. Despite the unsuccessful first test launch of the new SovietN1 rocket on 21 February 1969, it is alleged that a decision was made to send a crewedSoyuz 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.[citation needed] Official sources state that the L3 was not ready for crewed missions. Its lunar lander, theLK, had been tested a few times but its orbiter, the7K-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 ofglasnost.
This claim correlates with the late hoax about the unsuccessful Moon-shot flight of Andrei Mikoyan. 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 itslaunch escape system, which carried the dummy payload to safety 2 km (1.2 mi) from the pad.[19]
In 1959, pioneering space theoreticianHermann Oberth claimed that a pilot had been killed on asub-orbital ballistic flight fromKapustin Yar in early 1958. He provided no source for the story.[3]
OfficiallySoyuz 2 was an uncrewed spacecraft that was the docking target forSoyuz 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.[20]
The entire story was found to be a hoax perpetrated byJoan Fontcuberta[21] as a 'modern art exercise' that included falsified mission artifacts, variousdigitally 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 theNational Museum of Catalan Art in 1998.Brown University later purchased several articles, and put them on display themselves.
Mexico'sLuna Cornea magazine however, failed to notice this, and ran issue number 14 (January/April 1998) with photos, and a story explaining the "truth".[22]
Several lines of evidence available since the first exhibition of "Sputnik" in 1997 inMadrid suggested that the story and artifacts form an elaborate hoax:
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.[29]
This story, which circulated in 2000, may have been based on the plot of an episode of the television seriesThe 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 Sovietspacecraft 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.[29]
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