Yuri Gagarin: How the First Man on the Moon Ignited the Conspiracy Theory

Everyone knows that the first person to step on the moon was the American Neil Armstrong. Most also know that they were not the first to fly into space. Be that as it may, Alan Shepard paved the way for American astronauts on May 5, 1961, and a little earlier, in April of that year, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin took Earth orbit. But really, livescience.com asks?

Today, the name of J. Gagarin is forever recorded in the record books, and throughout the Soviet Union he was considered the hero of the nation. Named the triumph of the Soviet-American space race, the 27-year-old astronaut, selected for the mission three days earlier, spent 108 minutes in space, orbited Earth, and returned home healthy and alive after a spectacular flight.

But even before his journey into space began, a doubt had already been planted in the minds of many people. Rumors circulated that the Soviets had sent the man into space before Gagarin set foot on Vostok 1. The enigmatic astronaut was said to have done so on April 7, five days ago.

Dennis Ogden, a correspondent for the British communist newspaper Daily Worker, wrote that the story screamed from the front page under the headline: “The First Man in Space.” The article said that the man, “the pilot pilot son of a high-ranking spacecraft builder,” “came back alive but was suffering the consequences of the flight.”

The beginning of the missing astronaut conspiracy theory.

Gagarin had not yet resisted Earth when the newspaper appeared in the media and caused such confusion, sparking the first rumors of the conspiracy theory that is still believed today. The Soviet Union insisted on such rumors and was quick to inform the media about Gagarin’s triumph.

Mr. Ogden also wrote about it, both about the “consent of the hero” and about the great joy of the Soviet Union “for a successful trip abroad.” This post from him could be seen as an attempt to correct an initial error, a confirmation that he had originally made a mistake on the April 7 flight. But then Ogden’s example was followed by French journalist Eduard Bobrovsky, who discovered that the test pilot could have been Vladimir Ilyushin, and clarified that his flight took place on March 25.

The problem is that the mission, according to media sources, did not go according to plan at all. That is why Ilyushin’s mission was overshadowed by Gagarin’s successful takeoff and landing.

Ilyushin was a highly regarded Soviet general and test pilot. He improved more than one speed and altitude record, and his father designed and built more than one World War II fighter and bomber. Furthermore, Ilyushin the Elder managed to establish himself in power. So her 34-year-old son, who saw both hot and cold life, was simply an ideal candidate for a trip into space. Unfortunately, the second half of the mission was not as successful as everyone expected: during landing, his spacecraft drifted off course, causing the pilot to suffer physical and psychological injuries. There were rumors that after the incident he even went into a coma.

“It was reported that his spacecraft was found where planned, but Ilyushin was mentally unstable, unconsciously treated in a Moscow hospital,” Spokesman Review said in a statement on April 12, 1961. The publication adds that Mr. Bobrovsky He claims that his information was obtained from reliable sources that he cannot name, and that Russian officials simply rejected such allegations.

The Soviet Union claims that Ilyushin was treated in hospital for injuries sustained in a car accident. The Soviets weren’t the only suspects who appreciated this story. Even the Americans did not believe the journalist’s statements. Pierre White Salinger, a then-White House spokesman, told reporters that there was no evidence that a spaceflight had taken place on April 7 and no one had raised similar suspicions in March. The space observation stations of the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) did not detect anything suspicious and the United States did not want to engage in a war of words with the Russians at all.

But even that was not enough to silence the speeches. Some journalists thought that the stories of some kind of accident were just an attempt to cover up the truth. And even when the Soviets voluntarily choose to quietly forget the mistakes they made over and over again, as if trying again for the first time, there are not one or two in history. Furthermore, at that time, Washington and Moscow were competing intensely, whose achievements in space would be most impressive, so there was no compelling reason to bury failure, even if they wanted to: the Soviets tried to present communism as the most impressive ideology. perfect. costs.

Is this (still unknown to journalists’ sources) a sufficient reason to believe that J. Gagarin’s story in space is not as it is presented? Later, Ogden claimed to have seen a photo of Ilyushin before the supposed flight into space, dressed in a special suit, but that was it. V. Ilyushin himself, who died in 2010 at the age of 83, never confessed to anyone that he flew into space.

Only those rumors never disappeared anywhere. One of the most interesting sources of information on the subject is the 1999 52-minute documentary The Cosmonaut Cover-Up, presented by Global Science Productions and directed by Elliott Haimoff, who co-produced Vladimir Ilyushin: The Real First Man a year later. .in the space “.

The film says Ilyushin was unable to escape the capsule, fell in China, was trapped there, and was not returned to the Soviet Union until 1962. The documentary’s creators say Ilyushin did not agree to talk about his experience in front of the camera, according to Sun Community News, I wanted to keep it a secret.

Could it be that V. Ilyushin himself, confirming such statements, opened it up to the world as necessary for intimidation? Since the film was made shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when most of the mysteries emerged and historical events finally regained objectivity, most consider that Ilyushin had nothing to fear.

In fact, the Soviets began to tell the truth while the Soviet Union still existed. In 1980, the West finally learned of the death of Valentin Bondarenko. He died in 1961 in Moscow on the tenth day of fifteen low-pressure resistance experiments. The tragedy occurred in the event of a fire.

It took the world a little longer to learn of the fatal incident at the launch site on October 24, 1960, when, according to official figures, 78 people were killed. The truth only became clear in 1989. It is said that Mr. Gagarin is used for propaganda, but no document or statement mentions Mr. Ilyushin after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Still, strange evidence kept popping up. Two former amateur Italian radio operators, Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglios, claim to have been able to record sounds from an orbiting capsule a few days before Gagarin’s flight. And that’s just one of four important excerpts the couple will release.
The first was made in May 1960, it was a manned spacecraft that went off course. On the second of November of the same year, it was an SOS signal in Morse code from a spacecraft leaving Earth in orbit in trouble. The third passage is the lurid, presumably, roar of a suffocating deadly astronaut from 1961.

If we were to consider these records as indisputable evidence, then we would have to admit that not only was Gagarin not the first man in space, but Ilyushin was not. But since all of the people involved in such searches are no longer alive, it can be very difficult to know the truth.

Who was the first man in space?

What if Mikhail Rudenka, a former Soviet engineer and founder of Experimental Design Office 456, the editorial team of the oldest Soviet newspaper Pravda, declared that the Russians sent astronauts into space in 1957, 1958 and 1959?

“All three pilots died during the flights, their names were never officially announced,” Rudenka said in an article on pravda.ru, published on April 12, 2001, stating that the names of the people in question were Ledovskich, Shaborin and Mitkov. . . They all participated in flights around the Earth.

“The astronauts had to reach the highest point of orbit and return to Earth,” added the author. Since Pravda also had headlines like “Aliens Pushed Americans off the Moon” and “Aliens and Human Skulls Found on Mars,” you wouldn’t want to believe your journalists.

It is even more difficult to say where Ilyushin was in March and April 1961. Unable to answer exactly the question of why he was injured, the Soviets also did not help each other. The accident was an extremely abstract explanation and, furthermore, no one could specify when and where it happened. It also could not explain why the test pilot was in China. He added that he was never an astronaut. There is also no classified information or memoirs to confirm that he was ever in the original astronaut team.

Furthermore, it is very difficult to compare Italian records with data from any official source.

The intercepting stations did not record anything similar to what the Italians say, and radio astronomer Bernard Lovell, who set up the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, England, rejects claims that there were other Russian attempts to fly into space in 1963.

But here too things are not so simple. Mr. Lovell was visiting Russia around this time, rumors were circulating that his brain had been brainwashed as needed. A year after one of those trips, he became seriously ill, the UK Defense Ministry said, which could have happened without trying to erase his memory of a Soviet proposal to build a telescope in the Soviet Union. According to the son, the scientist fell ill with fatigue, according to an article in Physics World magazine. That version sounds pretty convincing.

Furthermore, if Russia had experienced such failed space tests, deaths, and failures, would it have declared Gagarin’s achievement in this way?

According to a 1975 article in Space World magazine, James E. Oberg, the Russian news agency TASS, which was often used for Soviet intelligence purposes, made its first report while Gagarin was still flying. If they had worried about the potentially bad news, would they have waited until the mission was over and Gagarin’s legs hit the ground?

We probably don’t know the answers to these questions. Two men directly involved in the story are no longer alive: Gagarin died on March 27, 1968, when his MiG-15 pilot crashed and he was only 34 years old. Thus, on the basis of the available evidence, it can be said that J. Gagarin was the first man to ascend into space.