Did you know…?
According to Italian space trackers, there are cosmonauts stranded in space.
In 1959, space enthusiasts Achille and Gian Battista Judica-Cordiglia built a space tracking station with a 40-foot octagonal dish antenna in Turin, Italy, in order to follow the work of Russian cosmonauts in space. The station, named Torre Bert, was incredibly sophisticated and was the center of a worldwide amateur tracking network. On 24-hour alert, with their own Russian translator (the brothers’ sister), they were able to track everything the notoriously secretive Russians were doing in space.
The brothers tracked everything from routine launches to failed moon shots in the year before the historic flight of Yuri Gagarin. But three transmissions, received from troubled Soviet spacecraft, point to a cover-up of epic proportions: cosmonauts lost in space.
The first, on November 28, 1960, was the cryptic message “SOS TO THE ENTIRE WORLD” received from a Russian moving space vehicle. It was repeated three times, and monitors in Texas and Germany heard it as well. Three days later, the Russian government admitted a launch which had ended in failure, but said nothing about a man being on board.
The second, on May 17, 1961, was a desperate conversation between two Russian men and a woman: “Conditions growing worse, why don’t you answer?. . . We are going slower…the world will never know about us . . .” There the transmission cut off into dead silence. Those same words were picked up in Alaska and Sweden.
The third, and most moving, was a wordless message. In February 1961 Torre Bert recorded the sounds of an exerted heart (the hearts of all cosmonauts were automatically monitored) and labored breathing. The brothers took the tape to a doctor who confirmed that the tape was of “the heart of a dying man.”
None of these incidents have ever been acknowledged by the Russian space program.
Were the Russians covering up the loss of cosmonauts in space? It sounds unbelievable, but the Russians did cover up at least one cosmonaut death during the 1960s (Valentin Bondarenko, who died in a fire in the oxygen-rich pressure chamber in which he was training) and went to great lengths to remove other cosmonauts from their records, including airbrushing cosmonauts out of photos.
So, are there cosmonauts hurtling through space, the victims of space shots that went wrong? Unless the Russian space program opens its files, we may never know.
Did you also know…?
- Potpourri
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- Because of a printer’s error, one edition of the Bible went from pious to downright wicked.
- Singing “Happy Birthday to You” in public can land you in jail.
- According to Italian space trackers, there are cosmonauts stranded in space.
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- A small strait off the coast of Wales is the scene of the strangest coincidence ever recorded.
- The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
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- Shakespeare wrote the first knock-knock joke.
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- The word “Abracadabra” was originally used to cure malaria.
- Post-it® notes were invented in church.