The Lost Cosmonauts

The Story

In the early years of the space race, the Soviet Union announced its successes loudly and its failures not at all. Missions were often not announced until they were over. That secrecy created fertile ground for rumors that some cosmonauts had died in space and been erased from history.

The most famous rumors came from Italy. In the early 1960s, two brothers, Achille and Gian Battista Judica-Cordiglia, set up an amateur tracking station near Turin called Torre Bert. But they also claimed far more dramatic recordings.

One hidden death was real. The Soviet Union kept it secret for 25 years.

Among them: a Morse code message in November 1960, months before Gagarin's flight, reading 'SOS to the whole world'; a recording from February 1961 said to contain the heavy breathing and racing heartbeat of a dying cosmonaut; and a woman's voice, first reported by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in March 1965, describing rising temperatures as her capsule burned up during re-entry. The brothers' claims were widely reported in the 1960s.

Experts later found serious problems. Critics such as Sven Grahn and Thierry Lombry have said the brothers' antennas and radio gear were not capable of picking up some of the signals they described. Some of the frequencies they cited were reserved for other uses. The heartbeat recording is also doubtful because Soviet missions sent heart and breathing data as numerical telemetry, and, as Aerospaceweb put it, telemetry signals 'sound like nothing but static over an audio channel'. And the dates of the supposed woman's flight changed over the years.

Yet the Soviet Union really did hide a cosmonaut's death. In April 1986, the government newspaper Izvestia revealed for the first time that cosmonaut trainee Valentin Bondarenko had died in a training accident on March 23, 1961, just 20 days before Gagarin became the first person in space. Bondarenko, 24, was finishing 10 days of experiments in a pressure chamber with an oxygen-rich atmosphere. After removing medical sensors, he threw away a piece of cotton wool dampened with alcohol, and it landed on a hot plate. His woolen training suit caught fire. 'For eight hours, doctors struggled for his life,' Izvestia said.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, archives, diaries and witnesses confirmed other disasters that had long been rumored. But none of them supported the Torre Bert recordings. As Aerospaceweb's review put it, there are no engineers from the Soviet space program who say they worked on such missions, no family members who have spoken up, and 'no official or unofficial records of any kind to corroborate these rumors.' The lost cosmonauts remain unproven.