Lost cosmonauts

Lost Cosmonauts, or Phantom Cosmonauts, is a conspiracy theory alleging that Soviet cosmonauts entered outer space, but without their existence having been publicly acknowledged by either the Soviet or Russian space authorities.

Proponents of the Lost Cosmonauts hypothesis concede that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive human spaceflight, but claim that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more manned space flights prior to Gagarin's, and that at least two cosmonauts died in the attempts. Another cosmonaut, Vladimir Ilyushin, is believed to have landed off-course and been held by the Chinese government. The Government of the Soviet Union supposedly suppressed this information, to prevent bad publicity during the height of the Cold War.

The evidence cited to support Lost Cosmonaut theories is generally not regarded as conclusive, and several cases have been confirmed as hoaxes. In the 1980s, American journalist James Oberg researched space-related disasters in the Soviet Union, but found no evidence of these Lost Cosmonauts. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, much previously restricted information is now available, including on Valentin Bondarenko, a would-be cosmonaut whose death during training on Earth was covered up by the Soviet government. Even with the availability of published Soviet archival material and memoirs of Russian space pioneers, no hard evidence has emerged to support the Lost Cosmonaut stories.

In December 1959, an alleged high-ranking Czech Communist leaked information about many purported unofficial space shots. Aleksei Ledovsky was mentioned as being launched inside a converted R-5A rocket. Three more names of alleged cosmonauts claimed to have perished under similar circumstances were Andrei Mitkov, Sergei Shiborin and Maria Gromova. Also in 1959, pioneering space theoretician Hermann Oberth claimed that a pilot had been killed on a sub-orbital ballistic flight from Kapustin Yar in early 1958. He provided no source for the story. In December 1959, the Italian news agency Continentale repeated the claims that a series of cosmonaut deaths on suborbital flights had been revealed by a high-ranking Czech communist. Continentale identified the cosmonauts as Alexei Ledowsky, Serenty Schriborin, Andreij Mitkow, and Mirija Gromov. No other evidence of Soviet sub-orbital manned flights ever came to light.

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