3. The Abandoned Russian Cosmonauts
Yuri Gagarin was not only the subject of an excellent single by the rock band Public Service Broadcasting, he was a legend in the Soviet Union, hailed as the first man to walk in space. But was he really? The Soviets were infamously secretive about their failures during their Cold War rivalry with the US and purposely created an atmosphere of confusion regarding their space race exploits. A Czech agent claimed that the Soviets sent a manned flight into space as early as 1959. If this is true, what became of the pilots?
There could well be proof that Gagarin was only the first successful Russian attempt to orbit the Earth. Two months before he orbited the planet, Italian listening stations picked up a transmission by Russian voices stating, “everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the Earth”. A few days later, the same post picked up a garbled scream of terror followed by silence. Later recordings were made of people sobbing and asking why they had been abandoned, before saying “Why don’t you answer? Conditions are growing worse…the world will never know about us”. The recordings may prove that Russia doomed cosmonauts to float along in space forever to hide their failure, but such was the climate of secrecy at the time, we will never know one way or the other.
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