Thinking Sideways: Lost Cosmonauts

yet another mystery. This week we're going to talk about what I would call a conspiracy theory, and that is the Lost Cosmonauts. This, of course was a suggestion from It was on Facebook by Tom. Yeah. Tom sent that. In most of your ago, we've had other people Yeah yeah. I think Tom was the first one that cover Oh yeah, I'll add you to the list and then forget something. But I know that we got a bunch of them

on this one. So the Lost Cosmonauts, also referred to as the Phantom Cosmonauts is as I said, I call it a conspiracy theory. I find it really interesting because there's so many claims and then the counterclaims and it

just turns into kind of a crazy big ball. I get white people are into it and can be a little weirded out by it because you know, put yourself in somebody's situation in space that isn't gonna make it home that and yeah, actually, and there actually are documented and people not making it home, so yes, yeah, but they are probably not the ones that we're going to

talk of. That. So to start with, I need to preface what we're going to go through because this story deals with information that comes out of the Soviet Union in the fifties and the sixties. We don't know how much of it is actually going to be true because they weren't very forthcoming. They censored a lot of information. Still aren't very forthcoming. Yeah, and with the fall of the Soviet Union, we you know, people found in shared records, so we have information on a bunch of things cleared up.

But there are some things that we still don't know. So I don't know if the people were going to talk about a really existed or not, and b if they really did die in a space program, and see if they died on the ground or in the air. Just don't know, but we weren't talking about Nonetheless, I think there were a few people in the Soviet space program who died on the ground. We had not died on the ground too, though, so it's not unusual. You're

playing with big, scary, dangerous toys like rockets and stuff. Yeah, yeah, science. Science is not always uh, bunnies and rabbits. Bunnies and rabbits, No, it's but it's the thing. I'm ferries and gods. Literally, no idea what you're trying to All squishy and nice and fuzzy and safe, That's what I'm going for. Yes, thank you. See, this is why we have the smart one, because I know what girls are made of. Yeah, you're right, that's why you have me around. All right. Well, let's uh,

let's go through the story here. We've got a huge laundry list of supposed incidents that happened in the Soviet Union, So we've got a huge laundry list of people to get into. So we should probably start with the stories of all these different people. We're gonna do this in sort of chronological order because that's the way I like

to do it, because I'm easily confused. First off, between the years nineteen fifty seven and nineteen fifty nine, three cosmonauts are said to have been killed in individual attempts to reach space, so one each year fifty nine, and we don't know if that really happened or not because of the source. But according to the lore, these three people died in the Soviet space program trying to get to space. The names of these people are and I apologize my Russian is not good. I'm going to do

my very best with these. I've sounded them out a dozen times. Hooked on phonics work for me, so we're gonna go for it. We have Alexei lit of Ascik, Sergei Sheborin, and Andre mit Coff. Those are the three men. There is a report of potentially a fourth person that died in those years, and that is a woman by the name of Maria Gromov. But again we have one source for this, and that is a quote unquote high ranking check communist who isn't identified, so that sounds reliable.

Those are our first ones. Next up, we have three people in nineteen fifty nine, so this is a separate from the ones that I just talked about. In the year nineteen fifty nine, three different people killed in a botched attempt to get into space. Their names are Peter Dolgov, Ivan Kutcher, and Alexei Gruchov. And then we're gonna move forward. There's the whole on your list. I told you guys, there's a bunch of names here. Write them down. There's

gonna be quiz later. Yeah, spell him, spell him correctly. There's extra points. No googling though. Uh we uh. We have our good friend Robert Heinlein. Yes, the author Robert Heinlein, who says that on the fifteenth of May nineteen sixty, while he was traveling through the Soviet Republic, think you I think you're right. Yeah he uh. He said that he was told by soldiers that they Soviets put a

man into space that day. Officials, of course, immediately denied this as soon as he went up to somebody who actually was of rank and file. Oh no, no, no, that didn't happen. Don't know what they're talking about. But he wrote about it, and he's shared that story, so we have it out there. If what I just went through, these seven people plus hind line, if that was all that there was to this story, it would have died on the vine years ago. There's not enough here to

give it legs. Some people who there's some people who did give it legs. Oh yeah, and they're the brothers that were about to talk about the We've got a pair of Italian brothers by the name of Giovanni Batista and our shield Judica Cordelia. Hopefully I pronounced their names right, but that's okay. These guys were in the late nineteen fifties and then through the sixties what I would say kind of your difficult space nerds at the time, amateur radio and orge more like. Yeah, they got into that.

They started out just being into radio because I think their mothers scored a bunch of surplus military radio gear and they cobbled everything that they ever had together. I mean, they had a real ramshackle set up, kind of made their antennas out of whatever they could, and they started listening to everything that was broadcast between the Soviets and the Americans in the space race. Yeah, they the Sobats actually published, they publicized what frequency they were going to

be communicating on that. What's interesting not all of their frequency bluets, some of it, Yeah, they did, The Americans did too all that. What's what's interesting is their choice of frequencies is they're actually kind of crowded, a crowded band of the radio, the radio dial. So why they chose that, I don't know that. I didn't research that part. So the brothers they've made that made quite a few claims of things that they picked up over the airwaves.

And then I believe it wasn't just sim I think they had people, They had friends, and we had people helping people. That was the name of their their base that they called it. I can't remember. Well, they had a base of operations and people would come and go and hang out and gather during known launches and they would listen and they would record. Well, there's some very notable ones that they recorded. And I'm gonna I'm gonna go through this bullet point style so I know Devin

like this. Oh yeah, May sixty a manned spacecraft reports it's going off course. November nineteen sixty A faint s O S Morse code signal is sent from a spacecraft leaving Earth's orbits. And these guys say they confirmed that because they could say they did the calculations to figure out that it was leaving our orbit and drifting away. Apparently, what it is is the way they calculated the lad these objects is yeah, they would use the Doppler effects.

So since those these things in lower lower thor and they're traveling pretty fast, they went by a fast overhead, so you get the radio signal gets compressed when it's headed towards you, and as soon as it passes directly over you, then it starts stretching out again. But they were they were self taught. I mean, they figured this out.

So there I would say that maybe their calculations weren't exactly perfect, but yeah, so they so they claimed that since this SLS signal was getting weaker and since but since there was no Doppler effect, that's why they that's why they believe it was not zipping by across across

the sky's overhead. Yeah, that's absolutely right. February one, A cosmonaut is, uh, this is audio is recorded suffocating to death and this is not something that we do often, but the audio is available on the internet and we're going to use a little bit of it. So first, what we're gonna hear is we're going to hear the breathing of this supposed cause men on. And now we're gonna listen to is the supposed heartbeat slowing down of

said cosmonaut. April nineteen six one, a capsule is recorded orbiting the Earth three times before re entering the atmosphere. And you'll, if you are a fan of space history, you're gonna note that's April one. This is several days before Eureka Garon's historic flight to be the first human in space. It was the twelve. So this the official date on this, I believe they say is I've seen in different places. I've seen it seventh. I've seen it the ninth. I thought it was like five days, so

I think the seventh. Yeah, But it varies from place to place, as a lot of this information does. May nine sixty one, and orbiting spacecraft makes an appeal for help before going out of control. And this is this spacecraft is supposedly piloted by a woman. And this audio is very several minutes long, but we're only gonna play about fifteen twenty seconds of it. October of nineteen sixty one, a cosmonaut loses control of their spacecraft and it veers

off into deep space. November nineteen sixty two, a space capsule misjudges its re entry and bounces off the Earth's atmosphere and out into space. Can you do that? You got an actual thing? You can bounce skip a stone off the surface of the water. You can actually, if you come in too shallow that angle, you can bounce out the atmosphere. But you gotta be high up, great and more things to fear. I didn't. I'm of other things.

November of nineteen sixty three, if another female cosmonaut dies during re entry, and nineteen sixty four April of that year, yet another cosmonaut is killed when their capsule burns up in the atmosphere upon re entry. So that's a bunch of things that they are claiming that they have made recordings of. And we'll we'll go to some of this in a little more depth later on, but I just want to keep moving forward with the story as the

lost cosmonautor phantom cosmonauts story goes. So we're gonna move to another guy that you might have heard about if you've ever done any reading on this. And this is a gentleman by the name of Vladimir Illusion And no um, I know I gave you a bunch of information and now I'm drawing this way. I know, people hate it when I do that important and this guy actually plays into that April nineteen sixty one day that we were just talking about that five days before Gagarin because everybody

thinks it was him. Because everybody thinks it was him. And let's talk about Vladimir because he was He was a test pilot in the military and he had broken at least one, but I think several altitude records, and according to the lore, he loved that the glory that it gave him. But he realized that these guys that were going into the space program, we're gonna literally crush his records. They were going to destroy um. So somehow he gets himself into the space program. I think his

dad was well connected. Well, his dad was in some ways well connected. He was an engineer of some kind, maybe in the space program or connected to the rocket programs. I think he actually designed military aircraft and built them. I can't remember exactly, but there is there is what

jet is named after him, I believe. Okay, Well, the point is, according to the story, he either gets in in the beginning of the cosmonaut program or he gets in late and you know, manages to go through a crash course, no pun intended of what it takes to be a cosmonaut, and turns out to be the most qualified guy to do the job, better than than your

gregarretttt excuse me, mispronounced his name. According to the theory, what then happens is Vladimir gets into the Vostok space capsule on the seventh of April, was five days before Ggaran, like we were just talking about before, and he shot into space and okay, well if that happened, then why don't we know about Vladimir and who cares about Yuri? Well that's because something reportedly went wrong with his space capsule and mission control decided that they had to bring

him to Earth early. The thing to understand is that in the Soviet program, mission control on Earth controlled everything in terms of navigation. The cosmonaut wasn't in control of that. He was along for the ride. They probably didn't want the cosmonaut like firing his retro's early and landing in the US and probably yeah, yeah, then his uh by bringing him down earlier then he didn't even complete a

single orbit. Correct, No, according to this story, he made several orbits and they brought him home to Earth on the third orbit, but because they had to bring him down early because something went wrong. I guess he was supposed to do five orbits. According to this story, they had to bring him down and he landed in China, where he then stayed for a year as an honored guest of the Chinese governments before then coming home to Mother Russia and kind of just disappearing into the background.

I wonder what they did the Waterdom. Yeah, if anybody's ever heard the term honored guest, it's it's not actually being an honored guest. It's a spy. So okay, you sound confused. Yeah, I guess I'm just confused about why they wouldn't why his name wouldn't have been the one we all know. Then we're going to cover it up, Okay, So we're going to talk about in just a minute, actually how some of the censorship worked and the way that the Soviet government went about censoring things, and that's

going to kind help us understand what happened of Ladimir. Okay. I know it's a little weird, al right, and this whole thing, the story is very very difficult unless you keep in mind, and I'll just preface it a little bit that the Soviets operated on a system of only talking about your successes if something could be possibly embarrassing, or it didn't go according to plan, it didn't happen, swept under the rug out, there were, there were cosmas, There was there was one cost, but not too was.

He was cashiered from the program, and he was airbrushed from the photographs of the cos The cosmon did a lot of yeah, we're going to talk about him, so yeah, okay, but that doesn't trust you. We're there, We're gonna come back to it. So as anybody that knows space history knows, the one of July nine is when the Americans landed on the moon and beat the Soviets to that destination

ce ce c okay. Well, according to the Lost Cosmos theory, the Soviets didn't go down without a fight, and they threw a lot of men at the problem to try and get there first and killed several of them, kind of like the Russians like, we can't do this, We'll just throw a bunch of people at it. That's kind of true. Hum. And they actually did have a couple of accidents sixty nine. Yes, they did well. According to this.

In the summer of sixty nine, there was an attempted launch of a manned mission that of course failed, kills everybody on board. You said, the summer of kind of distract myself a little bit from the thing. Okay, it appears that that that launch wasn't the only one that the USSR was trying to put up. They made one blunder after another and made being a cosma one of their most dangerous occupations. Would it kind of evidently was because they had about a fifty success rating with some

of their rockets. Yeah, there's a lot of our rockets blew up to so they did. They did, But I think that, uh Court, we had a lot of unmanned rockets that blew up more often than not, and we you know, we went through extensive safety testing, and I know that the Soviets were doing that, but I don't know how much of that is reflected in our lore that we're going through. They used a lot of animals, that is very true. We used monkeys, and in our

Gemini program we didn't. There's that. I don't know if you've read the right stuff by Tom Wolf No, I haven't. There's kind of an amazing scene in there, you know that the first launch with the monkey and the monkey comes down. The monkey has been going through simulator training anyway, but when they opened up the caps so they thought

the monkey was going to be an hysterics. Instead, the monkeys just sitting backstrapped to his chair with his arms crossed across his chest, just looking board like has no idea what. And then and then one of that one it takes a lot had somebody hands him in an apple and Lucky just like without even kind of look at he just like reaches out with one hand and takes the apple and starts eating. Kind of bored. That's awesome. That's a pretty funny book. You should read it. Okay, well,

well let's go. That's that was the greatest. It was. Uh, we have a lore here, that story here that says in the Soyas Too, which was supposed to be an unmanned test mission, actually was a manned mission and the occupant of that capsule was Ivan Stotchnikov and his dog Cloaka was a man and dog mission. Then yeah, yeah, totally. And it's believed that they didn't come back and were scrubbed out of history because they were hit by a

passing meteorite and thrown off course. Yeah. Well, and yet one more attempt to get to the Moon before the Americans, we have the launch of Andre Mikoyan and another cosmonaut. They were supposed to go to the moon, but instead they shot past their destination, which was the Moon, and drifted off into space. And I really, really really want to know if at least somebody was humming back to the USSR. I really like this. The only thing I can think about, how you managed to miss the Moon?

It's really big. Was it was the intent of that mission? Do you know to actually land on the moon or just orbit the Moon? A few times have come back. I don't know. I really I have no idea overall. If if we follow the lore anywhere between eleven two dozens of people were killed in the attempt to get into space and then be to get to the Moon by the Soviet Union and their government in their space program, entirely possible. I mean, because not just cosmonauts getting killed,

other people are getting killed in accidents. Bunch of people get killed in accident. The reason that they're that people really kind of believe this entire theory is as we talked about earliers, all of the cover ups in the censorship that went on. Yeah, I mean, they certainly brought a lot of this on themselves. And even though they angrily denied all these stories, you know, they accepted the ones that really demonstratedly happened at sixty seven and sixty nine,

and they kind of brought it on themselves. Well they did. And it's and you know, people who lived through the Cold War era just expected that from the Soviet Union. Here's a funny story. I went over and saw my grandmother today and I was talking to her, and she asked me what we were, you know, what the show was going to be. And so I was talking to her about it, and I'm telling her. She goes, oh, no, I can totally see the Soviets doing that. I mean, I grew up in that time, I lived through that.

But that's just what I expect them to do, and I see I did. It's just gave me a totally different perspective of why this is such a popular, entrenched thing. Yeah, because to me it seems silly. But I'm of a different generation. Yeah, I mean, will we run into that a lot? I mean, it does run into that, like with when we talked about UVB somebody six. You know, you run into that a lot because it's popular to say, like, well, the Russians are doing all sorts of stuff. We have

no idea because like they are our nemesis. Americans there were just told that those are the bad guys over there, you know, And whether that's true or not is who knows. But that's that's what we're told. And it's very easy to just say, like, well, I don't know that it sounds like something they might do it's nefarious, so probably probably, even though like I don't, I don't know that that's necessarily true. I mean at least to extent that we we expected to have to be true. Yeah, let's let's

go through. I think I've got three different cases here of things that were censored and scrub from the books, like proved proved things with this with the fall of the Soviet Union between and these documents came out I think like an eighty nine or so, when documents started really people started really pulling some of the stuff out and finding out what happened. But the first one we're going to talk about is what is referred to as

the Nodelin catastrophe. This happened on October nineteen sixty. The Soviet Union had an ICBM that was being prepped for a test flight, which is an intercontinental ballistic missile. It's a big missile, goes from country to country with nuclear payload, is the intention. Um, But this thing you used the worst fuel ever it does. It's Devil's venom. Devil's venom is really nasty stuff. It's made of hydrazine and nitric acid,

which is obscenely corrosive. Really great for call being lift and burn, but unfortunately the side effect is that when it burns, it makes an amazingly toxic gas that just instant killer. I mean, there's no getting around. You don't hang around this stuff when it's burning. That seems fairly counterintuitive, like, Okay, we're going to bomb these people over here, we're going to ruin their lives, but at the same time we're going to kill ourselves. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's

probably true. They were all wearing gas masks. You really don't stand next to the launching rockets. They were probably in buildings nearby. Were supposed to be supposed to be Yeah, supposed to be is exactly right, because here's what happens. There is a guy by the name of mitro Fan Nodelin. He's the one who was the whole thing was named after, and he wanted this rocket to launch before the seventh of November of that year, which was the anniversary of

the Bolshevik Revolution. Why so important to him, I don't know. But the problem is is that because he pushed the schedule, a bunch of safety testing didn't get done. It's always the safety testing. It is so never like the rocket just didn't get painted. We forgot to put the numbers on it, you know. It's it's always the big major safety And that was the problem, is that they were

doing a test on something else. They hadn't done all their tests, and the igniter in um stage in the second stage goes off, which then lights the first stage of the rocket while it's sitting on the ground. You don't really want that. That's not what you like in the rocket. No, And if you don't know how rocket stages work, it's they're basically stacked on top of each other. They're a little jet engines. When one burns out, the next kicks on both of them. Kicking on at the

same time. Not the intended plan. Very bad thing. No, I don't even see this. This the second stage, of course, is sitting on top of the first stage, and so when it lights off, the first stage it's not supposed to be there anymore. Yeah, so it's a big explosion. It was a massive explosion, depending on the sources that you read, anywhere from a specific number of seventy one to a round number of over two hundred. People were killed, and sadly, the people that were right next to the

rocket died right away because of the explosion. Maybe not sadly, maybe luckily, well lucky for them in the way that they died. They were right there. They were incinerated instantly. The poor guys who were farther distance away when the rocket went off and ran evidently couldn't get out of the complex that it was in. The fences were shut and they died because of the gas, which is a

terrible way to go. But this whole thing was swept under the rug and officially, according to the records, Zellen died. It'll plane crash. I mean. People tried to pick up this story and they talked about the catastrophe several times over decades, but it wasn't until all of the records came out after the fall of the Union that we found out what really happened. Yeah, so that's uh, yeah, so that's why we don't necessarily take them at their words for a lot of stuff. Yep. We have another one,

and this is actually a space program specific story. This is of a cosmonaut by the name of Valentin Bondarenko. Valentine was selected to be in the Cosmo program and in he'd never make it into space though, because on the twenty three of March sixty one, he was taking part in an endurance test. It was a high altitude thing, so they had him in a pressure chamber and he was going to be in there, I think for a total of fifteen days. The atmosphere was fifty plus oxygen.

He's doing his daily work. He's got monitors on him, you know, a little sticky things. He finishes his job for the day. He takes off the monitors, but they leave that goose. So he uses a cotton swab and alcohol to wipe the goo off. But he's not very careful of what he's doing. Instead of throwing that cotton swab in the trash. It hits a hot plate that he was using to make tea and insiden, I do not disagree with you on this. The cotton swab goes up in flames the because there's so much oxygen in

that environment, basically everything burns. It takes half an hour to get the chamber open. By the time they get it open, he's got thirty reburns over almost his entire body. The only part of him that wasn't burned was his feet, and that's because he's wearing boots. He dies sixteen hours later. I'm kind of amazed that he wasn't already associated, but yeah, that is. I was amazed that he lived his long as he did. I don't I don't know how that happened,

but that failure was scrubbed from the books. And as you talked about before air brushing of photos, Joe, he was air brushed out. There are photos and you can actually see the before and after where he's with six or seven other guys, you know, arms around him, and then the next version it's a blank wall and that his arm is like they do good jobs of air brushing these photos, but he's gone, completely gone. Yeah, yeah, Um, the one that I think, the one that you were

talking about. The other one that was air brushed out is our our next guy, which is Grigory Nil you buff believe, Yeah, he and depending on the version, he and possibly another cosmonaut candidate got drunk and got into a fight with some soldiers and got kicked out of the program. But we're air brushed out because they were failures and they're the shame. Couldn't be on the space

program rush. Yes, And here's something else that I need everybody to understand is that the space program in the United States NASA is it's not a military organization, civilian organization. In the Soviet Union, the entire thing was run by the military, so therefore it had an extra layer of secrecy lumped on top of it from the start before

they did anything else. So even yeah, and even we didn't we were fairly open about our space program, but we didn't tell him about every every improvement we made in our gear rot. No. But we also didn't, you know, airbrush people out of photo. We didn't censor it to that level as far as you know, right, as far as I know, I could be wrong. So that's that's that's the proof or that's the evidence of why people

believe this story so much. But let's now and I know some people like when I do this and some people hate when I do this. But we're going to start over. We're gonna start up again at the beginning of the chronology that I gave and talk about some of that. First one we're going to talk about is the three individual launches and fifty nine that supposedly killed three individuals. Again, that was something that came from a quote unquote high ranking Czech military officer. I discount that

right off the bat. There's no reliable source. That's the that's the source every time, so I discount that. Yeah, this, uh well, I'll talk more about this later. Yeah. Yeah, there's a bunch of things well, and there's there's some blurring of facts and adding of them to different parts of the story, which is actually the next one, because I told you that in nineteen fifty nine there was three cosmonauts who were supposedly have killed Peter Dolgov, Ivan

Cature Culture, Alexei Gratchov. Those three well, they actually did die. They were not cosmic, They were involved in a capacity in the space program. They were high altitude jumpers. They parachuted from really high up and they were testing suits. Well Peter specifically, he died when he jumped out of a the balloon or whatever it was. I think they were balloons and gondola and a gondola. Well he jumped out his he hit the gondola and it cracked his

his visor and he de pressurized. And the other two people who were also high altitude jumpers, they just disappear. So it's presumed that they also had some kind of accident in their high altitude jumps. But they are then moved over into the story because the skies they didn't disappear in nineteen fifty nine, it was like a year or two later, so the timeframe is wrong. So that I I but I believe that is where they actually

came from. And I will tell you the fourth person that we talked about in that fifty nine story of Maria. No idea who Maria is. I don't know where Maria came from. Probably a fictional character. There's no source. Ever. Um let's move now to nineteen sixty with Robert Heinlein. Well, it turns out that what those uh, what those military men told him they sent a man into space that day might have actually been sort of true if you know what the Soviets were doing. Yeah, they were right,

they were. They had a dummy who was very life like. I've seen the pictures of him and it's amazing the lengths they went to make it look really all. And this dummy's name was Ivan Ivanovich, and Ivan is the one that they stuck in these chambers and one of the you know, because they would send him up with animals, they pressurized the suit. They'd have animals in the suit

to see if the pressure held. They have tape recorders playing in the suit so that the microphone in the suit was broadcasting the whole time, to see if the equipment worked when it went up and came back like

this is a huge test. One of the things that they had to test literally the adjectors seat, because the way that the Soviet program worked is the capsule comes down, a parachute expands and slows it down, and then our friendly cosmonaut gets out of it and parachutes down on their own capsules so fast and yeah that they wouldn't survive the impact. So that may abe what they were

testing that these guys saw that. They then told heindline very likely that that's what was going Ivan Ivanovich, even Ivanovich, he's creepy looking at Smith's. It's like John Johnson, right, yeah, or Ivan however you want to say, I'm saying, I'm googling it right now. The next stop in our timeline, Oh, Devon's looking at the mannequin pictures. He's Creepy's so creepy, it's very creepy. The next stop on our timeline dealt

with Vladimir and his supposed space flight. Yes, if you look at the flight of Euriga Garon, you're gonna notice something very significant, and that is the number of times that he went around the Earth. According to the lore, lad one three times and was supposed to go five. Yeah, which is a little strange. Do you want to know what else? So it's a fairly complicated thing to launch a man in space, and launching two within five days

of one another. Not I was just gonna say, like, I guess if you wanted to take that approach, you could say, well, okay, so then the original plan was to have your ego around five times. But since it failed so catastrophically, before they knew they could do it once. So they sent him up and did it once and brought him back and everything was fine, right. I mean, that's that is that is a train of thought that

you can take. Yes, But my problem with Vladimir is that it always says that he crashed to earth in China in his capsule. Oh okay, now I didn't. There's no way that he could have survived that impact. Absolutely not. And the other thing. But those people can jumble things up. Maybe he crashed in and he successfully ejected and it was captured. Well, but they say that there was something wrong with him and then he was unconscious. That's why they had the man they brought it home early. Is

that he was having some ill effects. Maybe he crashed in the ocean, well, but no, according to this, he crashed in China. China owns an ocean, well, they do, they do. The The official story from the Soviet government is that Vladimir was involved in a very severe car accident and hurt his leg quite severely, to the tune of being in the hospital for a year and then

a leg injury. I'm assuming that a car accident. You know, cars didn't have breakaway zones probably crushed both of his legs, and then they had him in the hospital for a year, and then they sent him to China for rehab. Makes

lots of sense. It doesn't, really, But what also doesn't make senses that if he really did crash land in China and he was in his capsule, the Chinese from a medical perspective were not all that advanced at that time, and there is no way that they could have treated a man who basically had every bone broken his body from the advanced people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get ancient Chinese secret here. I don't understand what you mean. I can tell you that, actually it's pretty

clear where the Vladimir story came from. Was Vladimir was no, no,

it wasn't him. It actually was a British communist. There is a paper that was in Britain called the Daily Worker, And evidently what happened is these guys heard that there was going to be a launch and Vladimir was known to be in the program according to this, and they guessed of a the date and be who was going to be in the rocket, and so on the eleventh of April they put out a paper that said that five days prior, Vladimir had gone up and was the

first man in space. And then on the twelve they found out what really happened, and they put out another paper on the twelve that said it was Gagarin who was the first man in space. But because they put that paper out, it's been latched onto and used as kind of fodder ever since. All right, we're gonna move forward. Now we're gonna talk about the the Italian brothers. So first off, here's one problem with their recordings. Nobody else

recorded what they recorded. None of the other listening locations. The Americans were listening, the Brits were listening, like the French were listening. Somebody else should have picked up what they had. And you know, okay, well maybe they got lucky, but they have so many things that I just say that there's too many things for them to have actually been lucky to capture and nobody else has. And there

are things like, you know, the heartbeat. You know, the heartbeat was the monitors that they put on astronauts to monitor their their lifestigns don't go through the audio channels exactly. It's not like they take a stethoscope to them and then put a microphone up to the stethoscope. I don't know, Russia, that might be the way they did it. Did you ever hear that story about this early space program. It's

like the Americans realized that we're talking about the pen Yeah. Yeah, so the Americans are realized that pens wouldn't work in zero gravity, and so they spent like like millions of dollars to develop this special pen that would work in zero gs and the Russian geese pencil. Yeah, well no, it actually turns out it's not that much smart because the reason, yeah, that graphite dust actually like totally screws all of the air filtering systems, So you have to

use a wax pencil. You really can't use the graphite pencil, which is what the Soviets were using anyway. But yeah, I know I did just read that and it's cute story. Yeah, yes, So you don't know, it could have been a stethoscope. Maybe most likely it was sent back like telemetry, you know, so I was converted to any of this audio of breathing. Yeah, it's probably a dog exactly, because they killed a lot of dogs in space, some of them came back, but

most of them didn't. Actually, I don't think any of them came back, but maybe they all came back and they all are living on that farm that all of the dogs forever and ever. I believe, I actually do think that some of the dogs came back. I mean there was that famous one Laka was it laka or like a like a like a yeah, yeah, like I

did come back. You're right. The other thing that people have pointed out about their record rings is the language that is used, and that it's wrong, like the woman who was peril and dying, and the grammar is wrong. The way that things are phrase don't match up. Because remember we said that the space program was run by the Soviet military. They have a very specific way that

you announce things. There's an order to it. These guys are all trained in that system, and yet none of these recordings match that there are people in in peril like close to Maybe there was laps and discipline there, yeah, may actually no. The Russian was really poor and it's actually believed that they probably faked it. The woman, the transmission of the woman that you were talking about that

we played. Some of the grammar is really bad. And evidently these brothers, the Italian brothers, their sister was learning Russian, according to their story, to help them translate. But about that time she would have had oh, good enough grass to speak some of the language, but not in good enough grass to speak it properly. I don't know what you want. They didn't have Google Translate. I'm saying that

it's probably there, probably made this stuff up. Well you think about it, is too as the brothers were clever, they were smart, you know, but obviously they either made some stuff up or we're just completely bamboozled by somebody else, who, by the way, knew what frequencies they were listening on, Like, yeah, the one where they picked up the S O S signal and then by by noting that it had no

it had no Doppler effect. Yeah, no Doppler effect. Then they surmised that it wasn't whizzing by every head and lower thorit but was but instead was heading directly away from the earth. Now, the problem with that if it's heading away from the earth, about the if it's achieved escape velocities, it's still moving fast, so you're still got to get a Doppler effect. Even if it's moving straight from Earth. But also the Soviets didn't have unless it

was moving away in a geo secret synchronous position. I mean, yeah, that's impossible. Yeah, so, I mean that's uh. And the Sobvieus didn't have the ability to They could achieve escape, well ascity with a very lightweight object, but not with with any kind of capsule, with a capsule. No, they didn't have that ability until is when that technology came around. Yeah, and so some of the other some of the other ones, like somebody went out of control and and just flew

out of orbit. Well, I'm sorry, that doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen. Uh. The what you need to and I think that Joe, I think this is where you're heading, is that their momentum away from the Earth is generated by the rocket that they're writing. And then once that rocket let's go there in orbit and slowly drifting back to the planet. They don't have enough velocity to continue to shoot away. They don't have that power at that time. Yeah,

they don't have the capability to do it. No, they don't. They don't. I mean, and and the idea of like you know, you know, there was another thing in here about somebody lost something, they lost control and flew out of ore, but bounce off the atmosphere. The other one to bounce off the atmosphere and in the space, well, it is possible to bounce off the atmosphere, but unless the atmosphere just gives you a massive boost, you're not gonna fly up in the space. You're just gonna go

one to a different orbit. And I'm actually probably get to go back into the atmosphere and neither either burn up or you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's there is a lot of problems with their stuff. Now there is to add one feather to their cap. There is a I'm using air quotes here senior engineer who is part of who said he was part of the Soviet space program, and in two thousand one he confirmed at the Brothers

recordings were real, all of them. I don't know which ones doesn't It never says which one specifically, but says that they actually caught stuff that was right. He was a senior engineer, one of those guys. Okay, um, And then let's just talk about these, uh, the moon landing attempts that were supposed to have happened well, there was a rocket test that did explode on a launch pad. That does line up with the supposed nineteen summer of

nineteen sixty nine loss of somebody in a capsule. Okay, that that actually is, except it was an unmanned capsule. The other one that I talked about, which is Ivan Istanovic and his dog Cloaca, That seems really, really good until you look at the fact that the rocket could take a small payload with it, but nothing big enough to hold the weight of a man and a dog and a life support system. Yeah, they could have put a small dog in there, maybe, but there was no

way that they could have done it. And oh wait, it turns out the whole thing was a fraud. There was an artist, I can't remember what kind of art exhibits she called it, but her name is Joan font Cuberta, and she made this art exhibit and she faked all kinds of documentation that from the outside looks believable. So of course the press ran with it until you actually started reading it and you knew what you were talking about, and then you discovered that it was utter and complete garbage.

It was it was full of holes, It was wrong and what year was that she did her thing? Yeah, there was actually some falsification going on before then too. Yeah yeah, yeah, so what she with this one of the guy and his dog going to the space and missing that, that's totally totally buggas that's good. That would have felt bad for the dog. And finally the less Yeah, I was gonna say, the last thing I want to

talk about is the actual theories. Because we have gone through all of the history, we should finally talk about the theories, which are very easy. That's yes or no, it's it's kind of a binary thing. Here totally has a binary theory section. Okay, so our theories are yes, it's real. And as we've talked about, there's was some weird stuff with the Soviet space program and how they

scrub people out of the history books. And it's entirely possible that there are people who we don't know about because whoever was supposed to remove them did such a good job that they scrub them out of everything and we just don't know. And they could be as simple as you know, having died in a simple training accident. We will got drunk and thought someone yeah, yeah, and

you can see whether it be. I mean, because rockets were kind of unreliable in those days, and frankly they still are kind of soun I mean, they're more reliable in the East to be, but but they still go wonking. Yeah, you think what they want to keep the whole thing secret. And then the mistakes early sixties they had a success rate something like that. So I mean, that wasn't exactly a job that I would want. Well, flip a coin,

you'll live and die. I don't want to do that every day I think about I mean, when you think about the like Apollo eleven, the first Moon mission. Okay, you can die on the launch, or you can or you can you know, wind up, some mishap happens like with Apollo thirteen, and you all like suffocate and dive into cold on the way to the moon. Uh number three. Then you gotta land on the moon. You gotta get an orbit around the moon and land on the Moon

successfully without crashing. And then and I played that game moon Lander. It's harder than you. Yeah. And then when you get back into your your moon Lander to take off, you better pray you don't know for for a certainty that that rockets going to fire off and get you off the surface of the Moon and back to your craft. And then you gotta get that craft back to Earth. You gotta get that craft to the capsule disorbiting above and then made up with that and then get it

back there. And so those guys, I mean the whole way along. You know, that's just amazing that most of those missions nothing really went wrong for the most part. And I'm going to say a thing that you see on the internet a lot, but it's it's also amazing that, like I carry a computer that's smarter than that in my pocket every day, right like my phone, your phone's where. They're all smarter than any of the computers that did all of that stuff for the astronauts, mostly the astronauts

that did that stuff. And it's just I've actually talked to a guy who had worked at NASA in the sixties and it was the old card based system. You know, you had the punch cards and that's how the computer worked.

But I don't know how they did this, but he told this great story of it didn't matter what sequence you put them into the computer in because you know, you put a bunch of cards in it once because somehow they had set it up because people had accidents that they would drop all of their stuff on the ground and you know, the whole thing would be mixed up. That didn't matter when you put it in, and somehow

is self sequenced it, which was amazing to me. He tried to explain it, and he was talking to somebody else and You're like, you're a NASA scientist, I literally have no idea. Yeah I was. I was. I was, you know, I was eavesdropping and I was like, I don't I'm not even I can't go there. I don't know what's going on. But pretty clever. Yeah, it was absolutely amazingly interesting. Yeah, I mean it is. It's incredible to think about the amount of sophistication that chance. So

I don't like thinking about it. Yeah. Well, here's the Here's the thing, though, is that the maybe this is true side of the theories is besides the censorship, the Soviet Union did some weird stuff that was outright lies that was kind of I didn't understand why they did it except for they decided somebody decided they had to. Here's what I'm talking about, which is covered up the

whole ejection thing. Well, yeah, because you know. I mean, there's there's a conspiracy theory out there that we're not getting into, which is that Garren never actually went into space. We're ignoring that we never went to the moon. Yes, we're ignoring that. But there is a group that in English, the name is the International Air Sports Federation, and they

would record records for flights. Well, their guidelines to be a successful space flight was that the person had to be in their craft when it left the Earth went into space, and be in it when it landed on Earth. Because they're dealing with airplanes and if a guy bails out of an airplane that means something went wrong with it, Whereas the rocket program worked at a space program work differently. But the point is, so it's just said, oh, yeah, no,

he totally landed. He totally landed in his capsule, so it's it totally counts, and they got the record. It wasn't until um six months later when the next guy went up, whose name that I have suddenly forgot went to to Well, when t Toof went up, he made no bones about the fact that he had jumped. He was he was just no, I totally jumped out of that thing. Man there's no way. So that's a weird thing.

And they did it. They did it one or two times with that, the AI f to get records and it was really for the longest space travel I think is what was his name again to yeah, he went around Yeah, So he got the record of longest man in space and they did the same thing with him, except he was like total lie. But whatever, I don't care.

You're paying me the uh this is this is my favorite part of the It's true though, is that one of the sources that you will be given to prove that this whole thing is real, is our good friend Fidel Castro the most reliable. Yes, Because in there's a gentleman by the name of Arnaldo Mendez. He was the first Cuban to go into space. He went into space

aboard the soyty eight. That year. Castro gives a speech where he's talking about the joys of you know, their friend, the Soviet Union, and the fact that he had gone to Gagarin's office, which was still maintained, and then he had also been taken to another room that was called the Hall of Martyrs for all of the people who died in the space program. Trying to get into space, except that I did a little digging and I found that speech and I pulled it up and Castro says,

none of that. So I'm sorry, but that was actually shoehorned in. But you will see that reference happen. Okay, So we're gonna move on to the other half of our binary theory, which is new didn't really happen, um, And I'll be honest, I fall on that side of the theories. I think everybody's listened to us for the last hour or whatever it is, knows that that's where I'm at. Here's my reason for it. The Soviet Union announced the Garins flight and eminent landing on Earth thirty

minutes before he touched down. Eminent landing, what did I say? Yeah, you know, imminent, eminent potato tadda, um, yeah, I don't know words. So come on, guys, I'm here for my good looks, shiny bald head forever. Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. Anyway. They announced his flight thirty minutes before he's gonna land. Okay. Now, if they've done all these other attempts where they had gotten people into space and then it's screwed. Up. Why did they choose this particular

flight to announce before it had successfully come down? Well, exactly, I mean, because they had plenty of successes Gagara and afterwards, and yeah, but the guys who died before and he's I mean, like, what's that guy? Doesn't make sense? Yeah, in the case of in the case of Gager, and probably what happened with the whole newspaper story and the Daily Worker is what they did as the Soviets, And they had the pattern from the beginning of Boss Talk

and Gagarin was last talk one. They would leak official word of maybe a week or so, a week or two ahead of the actual launch, they would leak something and so probably what they published was the leak, the sort of leaked announcement of Gagarin's launching, and then of course the official announcement was after the launch, then they would officially announce it. They repeated that pattern again. Uh. Several months later, when they launched Caermon Tita into into orbit.

It was July twenty nine. A source in Moscow reported the next man flight would be would be taking place in a couple of weeks, within a couple of weeks, and that they would there would be a much longer play. And then a week later t TOP was launched into space. They officially announced it to orbit of the Earth sixteen times and then came down. And so that was the

pattern all the way throughout their entire program. And obviously they waited to announce it until after the launch because rockets do blow up, so that's why they waited to announce it. So if you want to believe in this whole thing, what you have to believe is that there was a successful public program which was announced ahead of time, and in parallel with that, and rough at the same time, there was a big fail program which was secret where

everybody died. Yeah, that's what It's almost as if they had like three launches at a time planned, so if one blew up, they just launched the next, and then if that blew up, they launched the next, so they had, you know, they had a one in three chance of

getting a successful thing. To be honest, that like brings me a little comfort because you know, my whole big thing with my problem with thinking about people lost in space, which is why I've been so quiet this episode is um is because I always think, like, well, there's nothing we could do for them. Like that thought terrifies me. But hey, maybe the Russians actually just have like twenty rockets at any given time where they're like that one blew up, great, let's do this one next, next. So

maybe like maybe this fear is totally unfounded. Maybe they're always ready to just like throw somebody into space real quick. Yeah that's comforting out, it is. Take it. Yeah, yeah, I don't think so. I'm gonna I'm gonna put the final nail in the coffin of this thing. Um okay. So in July nineteen two, guy named Frank Edwards published an article in Fate magazine called those Lost Soviet Astronauts, And prior to this, in the Vostok program, the Soviet's

actually had a and put a woman in space. They had had. One of the assertions he made in the article, and he made a lot of assertions in the article, was that she was the first, not the first woman in space, she was only the first woman who survived. Yeah, he talked a lot, And so I think that's where Maria what's her name, that we that you said you'd never found any of your reference to anywhere. I think that's probably where she came from. As the Frank Edwards article,

you wrote a lot of stuff about. You know, I haven't actually seen this article. I wasn't able to find it. I read a long takedown of it somewhere else on the Internet by a guy that was writing about it back and in the mid seventies. He said that Edwards misspelled every Russian name he quoted, non existent source, He

jumbled up the names of the cosmonauts and the launch dates. Uh. He also talked a lot about September nineteen sixty event that involved a Russian test pilot named Pierre to or deut Dologoff, who was quote tracked for twenty minutes by

stations in Turkey, Japan's, England, and Italy unquote. But none of those stations actually had actually ever attracted them, like we talked about earlier, the brother the Italian brothers, you know, didn't you know they attract these things, and nobody else reported that actually hearing anything about that from any of

these spacecraft. The head the Jodrell Bank Listening station in Britain, the head of the of that in nineteen sixty three, wrote that there's no reason to believe that there have been any unsuccessful man space attempts by the U. S s R. In christ I was prior to nineteen sixty seven. But but still they had a good record up until nineteen sixty three at last. Anyway, a lot of this stuff made its way into the mainstream media from this

particular guy, from this particular article. The article itself actually attracted a lot of attention, and see the Washington Evening Star in nineteen sixty two and May sixty three, the New York Journal American. A lot of these, a lot of these are papers that don't seem to exist anymore. Baltimore Son and some others. And it's just another reason not to believe everything you read the papers. But Frank Edwards, do you recognize that name? Yeah? I should, and I

don't remember why. Yeah, yeah, he's so. He's he's the guy that created the anti Couney Lake mystery. He is the guy he took the took the It took a nineteen thirties article by Emmett Kellagher. Decades later he spotted into a big elaborate story and the original article it was like a half dozen tents or something, five to six Indian tents and the camp was deserted and it was allmosterious and kind of creepy. Yeah, but and that was it though. It's just a little campra a little

camp campsite basically. Yeah. Frank Edwards in the sixties published a book called Stranger than Fiction I think it was called, and he popped it way up and now that the village in the village of Antioquney Lake was dozens of wooden huts. Yeah, so he did he evidently from what Joe found, I didn't find this source, but Joe found that he also may be responsible part of this story. Yeah, I think it's probably nine. Frank Edwards created this whole thing out a whole cloth, just like he did any lake.

And you read up. A good point is that if if others had heard this stuff that was going on, if it was the Russian failures, the Americans most you know us, as the Americans, we had a big reason to let the world know that the Soviets were screwing up. Why would we conceal it if we had heard it? And that's one of the things he gets pointed as well, you know, it's Cold War. We wanted to put as

much egg on their face as we could. I mean, I suppose you could argue that, uh uh, maybe it was some sort of the CIA black op and that they actually put out these BS rumors and everything to try to make the Soviets look bad. Yeah, I mean it's possible maybe or maybe Frank Edwards was a CIA agent, you know, maybe they paid him some money. It was

a good spin doctor. Yeah, but I bet I think again that whenever, whenever you're looking too when I saw a mystery and you hear the name Frank Edwards, just yeah, yeah, Okay, Well you guys have any I'm out of stuff here, and I know we've gone over this pretty extensively. You have anything else? If you haven't listening to any Lake episode,

sorry I spoiled it for you. Way to go, Joe. Well, you can find this episode, as well as the Arecuney Lake episode, as well as all of our episodes and some of the research for every story on our website. The website is going to be thinking Sideways podcast dot com. You can download and stream from there. I know a lot of people get their episodes from different streaming apps. We're on just about all of them, or people will still and a lot of people still get it from iTunes.

If you're on iTunes, do leave a comment and a rating. We prefer the positive, but go ahead and leave a comment and a rating. If you have something negative to say, email us we can talk about because I yeah, usually they're they're very episode specific complaints and I think that they can probably talk through some of that or like the sound quality though of the old episodes is really bad. We know. We are of course on social media, so we are on the Twitter, we are thinking sideways, We're

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it's pretty dead right now. So if you're a reddit user, if you're one of those like hundreds of people who have managed to find us through like the Unresolved Mysteries I've read it or anything like that, it's just joined that one too. It could be fun, you never know, yeah, we're trying to do some people are we're trying, you know, why not. The main form of direct communication with us, of course, would be email. That's the main sword of our lives. Yes, the thing that we get the most of.

You are more than welcome to send us an email at Thinking Sideways podcast at gmail dot com. Episode suggestions, conversations, questions or concerns, their corrections, send it all to us. We'll answer it all. Might take us day at three four, but we will get a lot of them. I'm sorry, there's just three of us that we have jobs inn one of these days. Your cats don't count Joe uh oh. And last but not least, Patreon. We are on Patreon, so you can find us at patreon dot com slash

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everybody next week. Folks, Hey, did you guys know that when astronauts who have been on this space station for a long time, when they come back, they often forget that gravity exists really because you know, when you're in in the space station, you can just like let something go and it just sits there for a minute. Apparently like they do that and like once they're back on our several times, Yeah, they forget like that apple is not going to flip next one of the day. I

love it. Bye everybody, Bye, No