Judica Cordiglia brothers

The Judica-Cordiglia brothers are two Italian former amateur radio operators who made audio recordings that allegedly support the conspiracy theory that the Soviet space program covered up cosmonaut deaths in the 1960s. The pair claimed to have acquired recordings of several secret Soviet space missions that ended in tragedy and mystery. This has generated public interest for more than 50 years, despite there being a large number of detailed rebuttals to the brothers' claims.

Achille (b. Paderno Dugnano, 1933 - d. Turin, 2015) and his brother Giovanni Battista (b. Erba, 1939) set up their own experimental listening station just outside Turin. They began to pick up the signals in October 1957. The brothers used a disused German bunker at a site named Torre Bert. Working with scavenged and improvised equipment, they claimed to have successfully monitored transmissions from the Soviet Sputnik program and Explorer 1, the first American satellite, using equipment that recorded flight information such as telemetry, voice recordings and visual data.

The following month, the Soviets sent the dog Laika into space, the first animal to orbit the Earth. The Judica Cordiglia brothers claimed to have intercepted signals from this release. Achille, a medical student at the time, identified the animal's heartbeat. To verify, they woke up their father, a doctor and a college professor, and compared the sounds to his pet dog.

On November 28, 1960 they made recordings that they claimed refuted the idea that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. The Bochum Radioastronomical Observatory in the West Germany reported that it had received signals different from those that used to come from Soviet satellites. The Judica Cordiglia brothers also picked up on these signs, and claimed to have heard an SOS message in Morse code. Based on the Doppler effect, they deduced that the spacecraft was moving further away from Earth, rather than orbiting. "Two days later, once again, the Soviet Union announced that it has put a 7.5-ton spacecraft into orbit, and that it has disintegrated. Strange coincidence," noted Achille in the TV documentary "I pirati dello spazio" (The Space Pirates), made in 2007. Moscow has always denied that it was a manned flight. The historical flight of Gagarin is also in the documents of the two brothers. In the film, they show a recording made the morning of April 12, 1961, which they claimed to be conversations between the cosmonaut and mission control.

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