From the question on the original article:
"One story in there, just before JFK was assassinated, was about some Russian cosmonauts who were stranded in an expanding orbit around earth–they were slowly but surely pulling away from the earth and there was no means of retrieval. "
This section alone calls the story into question. Closed orbits (ie. orbits that are elliptical, rather than hyperbolic or parabolic) cannot be “expanding”, and objects in such closed orbits cannot “pull away from the earth”. The only way an object in orbit can be placed in an orbit further away is by injecting more energy into the system, which usually involves firing a thruster of some kind. Orbiting objects drift, or decay, towards the earth–not away from it. Again, you must actively inject energy into the object’s total mechanical energy in order to increase its altitude.