The Missing Cosmonauts: Soviet Secrets in Space

The Space Race, a Cold War battle between the United States and the Soviet Union, captivated the world during the 1950s and 60s, culminating in Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight aboard Vostok 1. However behind this remarkable achievement, there exists a complex web of conspiracy theories and tantalising rumours suggesting the USSR might have secretly launched other men and women into space before Gagarin, all of which ended in tragedy. Known as the ‘missing cosmonauts’ or ‘phantom cosmonauts’, these tales paint a picture of concealment, cover-ups and casualties in the relentless drive for space supremacy.

Launching humans into space a mere fifty-eight years after Orville & Wilbur Wright first took to the skies was not without its risks, but did the Soviet Union cover up a series of space race disasters in the years before Gagarin? Is there any truth behind this famous cosmonaut conspiracy?

This time trip back to the dawn of the space age will attempt to shed light on the legend of the lost cosmonauts.

The origins of the stories of phantom cosmonauts are shrouded in mystery, with hushed whispers of secret Soviet space missions first emerging from various sources, including unverified rumours that the Soviets were launching people into space in full knowledge that they’d yet to come up with a way of returning them to Earth.

Reports from an alleged Czechoslovakian intelligence source about failed Soviet space launches were leaked to the western press as early as 1959, and these claims were repeated second- and third-hand by a number of European news agencies.

The most well-known of these lost cosmonauts stories was of military pilot Vladimir Ilyushin who – according to a widely debunked conspiracy theory – was in fact the first man in space. The story goes that he launched a few days before Gagarin and crashed in China where he was held captive. Ilyushin died in 2010 and never once put voice to the missing cosmonauts theory.

As well as Ilyushin, there are a number of names that seem to appear as part of the telling and retelling of the story of the Soviet astronauts lost in space, including –

• Alexei Ledovsky – alleged to have died in a repurposed R-5A rocket in 1959
• Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin & Maria Gromova – all alleged to have died in or around 1959 in space flights
• Pyotr Dolgov – alleged to have died on the launchpad when his rocket exploded in 1960, however the official Soviet line was that he died during a high-altitude parachute jump when his suit depressurised
• Men named as Alexei Grachov, Ivan Kachur and Alexey Belokonov were said to have died in an exploding spacecraft, however Belokonov, interviewed in the 1980s or 1990s, claimed almost all the names mentioned above, and others, were never part of the Soviet space programme.

It’s important to acknowledge that no solid evidence has ever surfaced to substantiate any of the claims associated with the Soviet cosmonaut conspiracy, and none of these names are linked to any verified space missions or accidents in space.

While the Soviet space programme did suffer genuine tragedies, including the death of Valentin Bondarenko during a training accident on Earth in March 1961 (details of which weren’t officially published by the Soviet Union until the 1980s), there’s been no verification of the alleged lost cosmonauts on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Despite the declassification of thousands of documents following the collapse of the Soviet Union, no credible proof has emerged to support the existence of these mysterious, unreported space missions.

One of the most intriguing elements surrounding the fascinating story of the missing cosmonauts is that of the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, Achille and Giovanni. They were two amateur radio operators from Italy who claimed they’d intercepted – and recorded – distress signals from doomed Soviet space missions.

They cobbled together old, discarded and improvised radio equipment and set up a listening station in an old WWII bunker outside Turin called Torre Bert. From there, they claimed to have monitored radio transmissions not just from the alleged Soviet missions, but also from Explorer 1, the first satellite launched by the USA.

For over sixty years, these recordings – allegedly capturing the final moments of an unidentified female cosmonaut during re-entry, alongside various distress calls and a supposed SOS in Morse code from a spacecraft in peril – have been central to the story of phantom cosmonauts.

The brothers – Achille died in 2015 and Giovanni in 2024 – maintained to the end their recordings were genuine, but doubts have been cast on the authenticity of their story.

Real or Fake?

First, it’s worth saying again that the Soviet cosmonaut conspiracy has been largely debunked and there’s no evidence to suggest the USSR covered up any deaths in space, but these recordings are out there and easily accessible.

Some experts suggest the brothers were after their fifteen-minutes of fame and fabricated them entirely. Others have pointed to inconsistencies and oddities in the transcripts of the recordings, including the point that none of the alleged cosmonauts in the recording used correct terminology, and none identified themselves, hard to believe from highly trained Soviet Air Force pilots.

A number of linguistics experts have also alluded to the suggestion that in at least one of the recordings, the voice in question may not even be Russian.

The debate as to their authenticity continues, however the general consensus is that these recordings were either hoaxes or misinterpretations of other signals.

…are there? It seems there aren’t according to most sources, including James Oberg, former NASA trainee, a designer of the ARPANET (the forerunner of the internet), Mission Control specialist, historian, author, and arguably the world’s premier authority on the legend of the lost cosmonauts.

His research, while uncovering inconsistencies in Cold War-era Soviet reporting, ultimately concluded that there’s no credible evidence to support the existence of these phantom cosmonauts. Oberg’s work revealed that many of the stories could be traced back to misunderstandings, misinterpretations of data, or even deliberate disinformation campaigns.

To this day, the Soviet Union – and its successor states – have never officially acknowledged that any cosmonauts perished in space before Yuri Gagarin’s flight, and the overwhelming evidence suggests that none did.

While the Judica-Cordiglia brothers’ recordings and other anecdotal evidence remain part of the narrative, they lack definitive proof. The story of the missing cosmonauts persists as one of the most intriguing and controversial chapters of the Space Race and the Cold War-era.