Uri Gagarin not the first?

[egkelly]

Great thread-can anybody verify or disprove the following story?
When the first Russian cosmonaut made the first space walk , the Sovs released a photo showing him dangling in orbit. It was a color photo, and the background clouds looked pale green-a color never exhibited in any subsequent photo (Russian or American). Anyway, the really curious thing is-the cosmonauts (mirrored) visor shows a reflection of three (3) light sources-really weird, considering we have only one sun!
The rumor I heard was that Leonove’s space walk was real (he nearly died trying to get back into the capsule), but they had no photos to show the world-so they cooked one up in a movie set!
Another item-back in the early 1960’s there were two Italian brothers who build a radio monitoring post with surplus equipment-I forget their names-they supposedly recorded the failing heartbeat of a “lost” cosmonaut.

[charizard]

The two Italians (the Judica-Cordiglia brothers) are precisely the source of much of the information on lostcosmonauts.com.

On the web site, you can hear the recording you mentioned, plus other moving recordings of apparent Russian space-disasters-in-progress.

[dtilque]

After seeing this thread, I asked about it in sci.space.history. Several people answered and it turns out that it’s come up before. The general conclusion is that it’s a hoax. In specific, Henry Spencer said:

It’s bullshit, a long-ago error by an overenthusiastic journalist, and has long been known to be such. Ilyushin was not a cosmonaut, his injury was entirely coincidental, there was no space launch on that day, there are no rockets or Vostok capsules unaccounted-for, and there were no failed manned launches before Gagarin. It’s a myth.

Some of you may not be familiar with Henry Spencer, so let me put it this way. On certain subjects, and this is one of them, if Henry and Cecil were to disagree on something, Henry is more likely to be right.

[madd1]

Guess someone should tell PBS. But I will wait 'till the Fund Drive is over.

[HorseloverFat]

**

Some of you may not be familiar with Henry Spencer, so let me put it this way. On certain subjects, and this is one of them, if Henry and Cecil were to disagree on something, Henry is more likely to be right.
**

I can’t say I find an apeal to authority very convincing, this quote doesn’t cite and refrences or explain why Ilyushin himself claims otherwise, not to mention other strange events in the USSR at the time as noted by people such as Robert A. Heilein.

Not that I’m taking one side or another but “I asked on USENET and a really smart dude said it was fake” isn’t exactly informative or proof. Even really smart dudez are wrong sometimes.

[dtilque]

Here’s some more from that sci.space.history thread (the stuff preceeded by > are my comments, the rest is from Henry Spencer):

>I did not see this documentary, but from what that letter says, there
>are Kremlin documents, but apparently were not shown…

Funny that there’s no hint of it in primary sources, like Kamanin’s diaries. (Kamanin was head of cosmonaut training, and was the man who chose Gagarin to make the first flight.)

>And they interviewed Ilyushin, but I suppose he could have lied about it.

One has to be a bit cautious about this sort of thing, bearing in mind how far hard currency goes in Russia these days. There is no shortage of Russians who have figured out that telling gullible Westerners what they want to hear is very profitable.

The first thing they teach you in any how-to-do-history course is that a very important part of historical research is assessing the reliability of your sources, which must not be taken for granted.

I should also note that it’s very difficult to prove that something didn’t happen, but there doesn’t seem to be the evidence in the primary data sources (diaries) to support it.

This is not the first time this has come up in that group (the documentary apparently was shown last fall), and I imagine that Henry didn’t feel like posting all the arguments over again. I certainly didn’t feel like pressing him for them.