Are there really "lost cosmonauts" stranded in space?

I’m an ethnic Russian living in Australia (hence the nickname) for way too long now.

A couple of months ago one local TV channel screened a documentary on the Italian brothers and their “achievements”. Of course, the famous “last conversation with the lost cosmonauts” was played several times with chilling background music… I laughed.

Firstly, the so-called “intercepted conversation” consisted of very basic Russian sentences that wouldn’t be used by native speakers, especially those under pressure, one would hardly expect a person facing death say in robotic voice “we shall not return … we shall not return”, you wold expect something rather emotional, like “s…t, my … is on fire, do something!!!” Should I mention that no specific “cosmic” lingo was used?

Secondly, the female voice on the tape, the one that supposedly spoke to the cosmonauts, she spoke with a heavy accent which I couldn’t recognise until IN THAT VERY FILM they revealed that at the same time the sister of the two Italians was actually studying Russian language, as they put it, “to help her brothers translating the intercepted messages”.

Needless to say, there were more “intercepted conversations” which in fact were just two men talking over an unencrypted line gossiping about a woman… Seriously secret stuff, you know…

In a word, the Italian boys wanted to be famous. That’s THE WHOLE truth.

Ah, yes, nearly forgot to mention – had a glance over “The Lost Cosmonauts” website, laughed again. Here http://web.archive.org/web/20030622201840/lostcosmonauts.com/ilyushin.htm talking about Vladimir Ilyushin, they say his space ship was called “Russia”. Now that is SERIOUSLY ridiculous. It shows that whoever the authors are, they’ve never lived in the Soviet Union. Because if they did, they would know how the Soviets pedalled its UNION status to the extreme of suppressing everything Russian in favour of smaller nationalities. There were no ethnically specific names in Soviet spacecraft, only “Voskhod” (Sunrise), “Vostok” (The East) and – surprise, surprise – “Soyuz” (The Union).

That’s my five roubles.

Hi, there. Welcome to the Dope.

I think you’re talking about this column (we like to include a link): Are there really “lost cosmonauts” stranded in space?