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The Lost Cosmonauts (or Phantom Cosmonauts) were cosmonauts that allegedly entered outer space but whose existence has never been acknowledged by either Soviet or Russian space authorities.

Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts do not disagree that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive space travel, but claim that the Soviets attempted to launch at least two humans into space prior to Gagarin, both of whom died. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin, is said to have landed off-course and was held by the Chinese government. The Soviet government supposedly suppressed this information to prevent bad publicity for their space program during the height of the Cold War.

While there is some evidence supporting these assertions, much of it is disputed. Even with access to published Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no hard evidence has emerged. Some argue that records are still being kept confidential, or were destroyed altogether. James Oberg, who has researched space-related disasters in the Soviet Union, has found no evidence of these Lost Cosmonauts (Oberg 1988:156-76).

Contents 1 Supposed incidents in space 1.1 Late 1957, Aleksei Ledovsky 1.2 February 1958, Serenti Shiborin 1.3 January 1959, Andrei Mitkov 1.4 1959, Mirya Gromova 1.5 15 May 1960, Unknown person 1.6 27 September 1960, Ivan Kachur 1.7 11 October 1960, Piotr Dolgov 1.8 ?? December 1960, Alexis Graciov 1.9 1960-1961, V. Zavadovsky 1.10 1961, Ludmila and Nikolay (Anatoly) Tokovy? 1.10.1 The Torre Bert Recording 1.11 2 February 1961, Gennady Mikhailov 1.12 24 February 1961, Unknown Couple 1.13 23 March 1961, Valentin Bondarenko 1.14 7 April 1961, Vladimir Ilyushin 1.15 November 1962, Alexis Belokoniov 1.16 1966 2 Confirmed Hoaxes 2.1 Igor Fedrov 2.2 Ivan Istochnikov 2.3 Andrei Mikoyan 2.4 Porfiri Yebenov 3 Cultural references 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

An article published in the English language edition of Pravda [2] in April 2001, forty years after Gagarin's successful orbit, gave some details about the three cosmonauts reputed to have been lost in earlier missions.

Various amateur enthusiasts throughout the West purport to have picked up a terrified message that went along the lines of "Remember us to the motherland". The craft is then rumored to have slingshot off the Moon and headed towards the Sun. This speculation is almost surely an urban legend, however, as the chances of such an event actually taking place before the USSR had achieved fully orbital flight is minimal.

In December 1959, a "high-ranking Czech Communist" leaked information about many purported 'unofficial' space 'shots'. Aleksei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a converted R-5A rocket.^{[citation needed]}

Pioneering space theoretician Hermann Oberth claimed in 1959 that a pilot had been killed on a sub-orbital ballistic flight from Kapustin Yar in early 1958. He never provided a source for the story. In December 1959, the Italian news agency Continentale reported that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czech communist. Among these were Serenti Shiborin, said to have perished in 1958. No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital manned flights ever came to light.^{[citation needed]}

In December 1959, a "High-ranking Czech communist" leaked much information about many of these 'unofficial' launches, and Andrei Mitkov was, like Ledovsky, mentioned as being launched inside of an R-5A conversion.^{[citation needed]}

In December 1959, a "High-ranking Czech communist" leaked much information about many of these 'unofficial' launches, including that of Mirya Gromova, a woman who purportedly flew "some sort of 'space aeroplane' into oblivion". Neither seen nor heard from again. If the story of Gromova is true, her craft most likely disintegrated upon re-entry from a sub-orbital flight. The 'Space Aeroplane' would likely be a Cosmonaut training vehicle, intended for high-altitude operation.^{[citation needed]}

Robert A. Heinlein wrote in his 1960 article "'Pravda' means 'Truth'" (reprinted in Expanded Universe) that on 15 May 1960, while traveling in the Soviet Union, in Vilnius (mistakenly called by its Polish name "Wilno" throughout the article; Vilnius is far away from Soviet rocket launch sites), he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit that day, but that later the same day it was denied by officials and that no issues of the Pravda national newspaper could be found in Vilnius, or reportedly, other Soviet cities. Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch (later said to be unmanned) on that day but the retro-rockets had fired while the vehicle was in the wrong altitude, so recovery efforts were unsuccessful. [3]

According to Gagarin's biography^[1] these rumours were likely started as a result of two Vostok missions, equipped with dummies and tape recordings of the human voice (to check if the radio worked), that were made in the period just before Gagarin's flight.

According to the NASA NSSDC Master Catalog, on 15 May 1960 Sputnik 4 with "a self-sustaining biological cabin with a dummy of a man" was launched. [4]

A 1959 edition of Ogonyok carried images of three men (Piotr Dolgov, Ivan Kachur and Alexis Graciov?) testing out high altitude equipment. Kachur is known to have disappeared around this time- his name has become linked to this equipment.

Piotr Dolgov was a colonel in the Soviet Air Force. Over the years there have been false reports that Dolgov was actually killed on October 11, 1960, in a failed flight of a Vostok spacecraft. Such a flight would have occurred six months prior to the historic Vostok 1 flight of Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. These reports make Dolgov a phantom cosmonaut, one of the few such cosmonauts who actually existed, although he was not a member of the cosmonaut team.

On November 1, 1962, he was killed while carrying out a high-altitude parachute jump from a Volga balloon gondola. Dolgov jumped at 28,640 meters (93,970 feet). The helmet visor of Dolgov's Sokol space suit hit part of the gondola as he exited, and the suit depressurized, killing him.

In late 1959, Ogonyok carried pictures of a certain 'Comrade V. Zavadovsky' testing high altitude equipment (perhaps with Graciov and others).

Zavadovsky would later appear on lists of 'dead cosmonauts' without a date of death, or accident description^{[citation needed]}. On 23 February 1962 however, Col. Barney Oldfield revealed in a US press conference that a space cabin had been orbiting the earth since about 1960, as it had become jammed into its booster rocket. Korab Sputnik 1, as it was known, was a prototype of the later Zenit and Vostok manned launchers. The onboard TDU had ordered the retro rockets to fire, but had instead malfunctioned, and done the inverse - putting the craft into a higher orbit. The re-entry capsule was apparently without even a heatshield. The Soviet Union claimed the capsule had been unmanned.^{[citation needed]}

Supposedly a married couple - Ludmila Tokovy and Nikolay Tokovy or Anatoly Tokovy.

TASS later reported that an unmanned satellite roughly the size of a London bus had been launched, but had disintegrated during re-entry.

Regardless of the existence of either Nikolay or Anatoly Tokovy, the Torre Bert listening station, in northern Italy purported to have picked up a transmission, in which a womans' voice, presumably that of Ludmila (although how and why this name has become attached to the voice on the tape, no-one knows), who sounds both confused and frightened as her craft begins to break up upon re-entry. The interpretation of the tape, which is somewhat garbled, can be found at the website. [4]

Alleged first human in orbit, Gennady Mikhailov may have died in orbit due to heart failure. This rumor may be derived from reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7 (launched 4 Feb, not 2) was a manned mission. In fact, it was a failed Venus probe, according to TASS. This is believed to be the source from which the Torre Bert listening station recorded both heartbeats and breathing. Both files can be found at the lostcosmonauts website.[4]

Launched on the 17th, there were reports of a couple aboard a 'Lumik' spacecraft orbiting the earth, reporting "Everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the earth" at regular intervals.

On the 24th, there were some garbled verbal transmissions about something that the couple could see from outside their ship, and had to urgently tell the earth. After this point, what happened is unclear, but communication was lost.^{[citation needed]}

One of the incidents that fuels the "lost cosmonaut" stories is the death of Valentin Bondarenko. A member of the original cosmonaut program, Bondarenko died in a training accident on the ground, when a high-oxygen pressurised chamber he was in caught fire, on 23 March 1961. He was erased from official Soviet pictures and descriptive materials of their cosmonaut program, leading to all manners of speculation about him, and other cosmonauts whose histories were less than perfectly known. The true nature of his accident was not revealed until the 1980s.

Vladimir Ilyushin, son of the Russian airplane designer Sergey Ilyushin, was a Soviet pilot and is purported to have been a cosmonaut who is alleged by some to actually have been the first man in space on 7 April 1961, an honor generally attributed to Yuri Gagarin on 12 April.

The theories surrounding this alleged orbital flight are that a failure aboard the spacecraft caused controllers to bring the descent capsule down several orbits earlier than intended, which resulted in its landing in the People's Republic of China whereupon the pilot was held by Chinese authorities for a year before being returned to the Soviet Union. The international embarrassment that would have resulted from having their pilot held is cited as the Soviets' reason for not publicizing this flight and instead focusing their adulation on the subsequent successful flight of Yuri Gagarin.

However, there are reasons to disbelieve this allegation, notably that although both were Communist governments, relations between the Soviets and Chinese were strained, and the propaganda value to the Chinese of a Soviet pilot captured flying over their territory would have given little reason for Chinese complicity in a cover-up. Also, "bringing the capsule down several orbits earlier than intended" doesn't make much sense considering that the mission involved a single orbit.

This theory was originated on 10 April 1961, by Dennis Ogden, the Moscow correspondent of the British Communist newspaper Daily Worker, and was based on the actual Ilyushin's cure course in China. According to many Russian sources, including the article in Komsomolskaya Pravda on 11 July 2005, although Ilyushin was a famous test pilot he was never involved in the space program. On 5 June 1960 his legs had been seriously injured in a car accident, and Ilyushin underwent a cure for a year in Moscow and then was sent for a rehabilitation course into China, Hangzhou, where there were specialists in oriental medicine [5] [6] [7]. This explanation was also confirmed by a Soviet defector Leonid Vladimirov, an engineer, who had personal contacts with Ilyushin in 1960, in his 1973 book "The Russian Space Bluff", published in Frankfurt [8] (Russian translation of the book).

The theory was lent some credibility in a documentary called Cosmonaut Cover-Up about the subject in 1999. Sergei Khrushchev (the son of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev) said that it was true and Vladimir Ilyushin was actually held in China for over a year as a "guest" of the People's Republic of China. He was returned later to the Soviet Union but by then the Gagarin legend was in full swing and the bizarre incident was covered up. The main reason was not to let the USA see the schism between China and the USSR. He gave the interview in English.

Also, Vladimir Ilyushin, who currently lives in Russia, has never confirmed this theory.

Alexis Belokoniov is reportedly one of three (two men and a woman) cosmonauts aboard a November flight. The Torre Bert tower in Italy allegedly picked up a frantic set of messages relayed by the three occupants. 'Conditions growing worse why don't you answer? ... we are going slower... the world will never know about us . . '^{[citation needed]}

Sources in western intelligence claim that at least three undisclosed missions failed in the second half of the 1960s, including a multiple launch in 1966.^{[citation needed]}

A number of claims have been confirmed as hoaxes, some of them intentional:

• Igor Fedrov
• Ivan Istochnikov
• Andrei Mikoyan
• Profiri Yebenov

A 1998 American urban legend held that during the fall of Soviet Union, one of her cosmonauts was stranded on the Mir space station. The basis of the story can be found in the fact that the Soyuz ferry spacecraft had a nominal on-orbit storage life of 180 days. After the fall of the Soviet Union, due to financial, technical, and supply-chain problems, launches of replacement crews to the station became rather irregular. Several times this led to the Soyuz docked to the station being in orbit over its six-month rated life. Every time this happened 'experts' would be trundled out on the television news to declare that the crew was 'stranded'. This first happened on the Soyuz TM-15 flight of 1992.

The legend became the basis for the Norwegian short film 'Kosmonaut', directed by Stefan Faldbakken. The film created a sensation at the 2001 Venice Film Festival^{[citation needed]} and told with considerable technical accuracy^{[citation needed]} the story of fictional cosmonaut Igor Fedrov. Fedrov, on a long duration mission aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, is unable to reach ground control in the chaotic period after Gorbachev was overthrown in 1991. Stranded in his Soyuz capsule, unable to receive instructions or updates for his guidance system, his life support supplies dwindling, he finally attempts a manually guided return to earth and dies in the attempt.

Officially Soyuz 2 was an 'unmanned spacecraft' that was the docking target for Soyuz 3. However, Mike Arena, an American journalist, found in 1993 that Ivan Istochnikov and his dog Kloka were manning Soyuz 2 and disappeared on 26 October 1968 with signs of having been hit by a meteorite. They had been "erased" from history by the Soviet authorities, who could not tolerate such a failure.^[2]

The entire story was a hoax perpetrated by Joan Fontcuberta,^[3] a 'modern art exercise' that included falsified mission 'artifacts', various digitally manipulated images, and immensely detailed feature-length biographies (which turned out to be riddled with hundreds of both historical and technical errors). The exhibit was shown in Madrid in 1997 and the National Museum of Catalan Art in 1998. Brown University later purchased several articles, and put them on display themselves.

Mexico's Luna Cornea magazine however, failed to notice this, and ran issue number 14 (January/April 1998) with photos, and a story explaining the tragic and as-yet-untold truth.^[4]

The name Ivan Istochnikov translated to English from Russian reads "John of the Fountains"^[5]. Joan Fontcuberta's name translated to English from Catalan reads "John Covered-Fountain", thus revealing the origins of the hoax.

On 11 June 2006, Cuarto Milenio,^[6] a mysteries program led by Iker Jiménez on the Spanish TV channel Cuatro, presented the story as possibly true.^[7]

Andrei Mikoyan was reported killed together with a second crew member in an attempt to reach the moon ahead of the Americans in early 1969. Due to some system malfunction they failed to get into lunar orbit and therefore passed the moon.

The source of this story was undoubtedly the television series 'The Cape'. The episode 'Buried in Peace' first aired on 28 October 1996. In the story, a shuttle crew on a mission to repair a communications satellite encounters a derelict Soviet spacecraft with a dead crew - the result of a secret attempt to send a manned mission to the moon 30 years earlier, and before the United States. Tom Nowicki played Major Andrei Mikoyan in the story.

A Moscow urban legend reported that the Apollo 11 astronauts were in fact stranded on the moon due to an engine malfunction. A naked Russian cosmonaut, Porfiri Yebenov, obviously stranded on the moon some time before, assisted them in repairing their lunar module so they could return safely to earth.

When Buzz Aldrin was asked about this supposed incident, by cosmonaut Gregori Grechko, it came to light that in fact, 'Yebenov' is Russian slang for 'fucked', and that the entire tale was a joke.

The lost cosmonauts are referred to in pop culture including art, science fiction and videogames.

• A 2005 Russian mockumentary movie First on the Moon (Первые на Луне) features the fictional story of 1938 Soviet landing on the Moon.
• Ivan Istochnikov and his faithful dog Kloka were reported lost aboard Soyuz 2, the 'unmanned spacecraft' that was the docking target for Soyuz 3. What then seems to have been the case is that Soyuz 2 and 3 drifted apart, and when they re-established contact, Itochnikov was nowhere to be found: his craft appeared to have been hit by a meteorite.
• The Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater characters of The Boss and The Fury were fictional but noteworthy lost astronaut/cosmonauts.
• There are also references to stranded Russian astronauts in UK comics. A 1989 installment of Philip Bond's "Wired World", published in the UK comics anthology Deadline magazine, features a cosmonaut who crash lands in a park in London where the main characters are picnicking. He goes drinking with them then phones his mother, and is later grabbed by men in black, presumably KGB officers. There is also a character called Yuri in Grant Morrison's 2000 AD series "Really And Truly" circa 1992, who wears a space suit all the time and has the strength of seventeen men.
• Daniel Kalder's account of anti-tourism in the unknown ex-Soviet satellite states is titled Lost Cosmonaut

• Space disaster
• Apollo moon landing hoax accusations
• Soviet Moonshot
• Kwangmyŏngsŏng
• Soyuz 1
• Laika

1. ^ Bizony, Piers (1998). Starman: Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin. Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-3688-0. 
2. ^ Ivan Istochnikov: El cosmonauta fantasma, El Mundo Magazine, 25th May 1997. Following the links, we find the announcement of the Fontcuberta exposition.
3. ^ Sputnik Foundation. Notice the "PURE FICTION" text in red text over a red background.
4. ^ Istochnikov at the Encyclopedia Astronautica.
5. ^ Ivan corresponds etymologically to the first name John, and istochnik (источник) is Russian for source or fountain [1]. "Istochnikov" is genitive plural for istochnik, and so it translates as "of the fountains"
6. ^ Cuarto Milenio, page of the 11th June 2006 program at the Cuatro site.
7. ^ El cosmonauta fantasma, a blog entry at the El Correo newspaper. An excerpt from Cuarto Milenio hosted in YouTube is included. From the same author, there is an article in Hoy.

• Encyclopedia Astronautica: Phantom cosmonauts
• James Oberg (1988). Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost, Random House, ISBN 0-394-56095-7

• Lost Cosmonauts
• Encyclopedia Astronautica: Phantom cosmonauts
• Straight Dope on "lost" cosmonauts
• Oberg chapter on Dead Cosmonauts