Wednesday Weird: Phantom Cosmonauts

Shoutout to one of my best friends, Kim, for sending me the info for this post. I had never heard about lost or phantom cosmonauts until her email, but after I did the readings and research, it's clear this is definitely a Wednesday Weird post.

So. Phantom Cosmonauts.

There's a theory that Soviet cosmonauts entered space in secret, without their existence acknowledged by Soviet authorities.

First off, even proponents of the Phantom Cosmonauts theory agree that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive space travel (4/12/61) but there are claims that the Soviet Union attempted to launch two or more manned space flights before that, and that at least two cosmonauts died in the attempts.

Another cosmonaut, Vadimir Ilyushin is rumored to have landed and been held by the Chinese government. The Soviets supposedly hid this information, to prevent bad publicity during the the Cold War. Ilyushin died in 2010 and he never confirmed nor denied anything.

One of the main issues is, though, that the evidence supporting the Phantom Cosmonaut theory is generally not regarded as conclusive, and several cases have been confirmed as hoaxes. But what is known as fact is that the Soviet Union spent A LOT of time covering up a lot of stuff during the Cold War to make themselves look better. That's a proven fact, so really, covering up failed, manned spaceflights isn't at all outside the realm of possibility.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, tons of previously restricted info became available, including on Valentin Bondarenko, an early cosmonaut whose death on Earth the Soviet government covereup.

In 1960, Heinlein wrote in his article Pravda means 'Truth' that on May 15, 1960, while traveling in the Soviet Union, he was told by Red Army cadets that the Soviet Union had launched a man into orbit that day, but that later the same day it was denied by officials. Apparently, no issues of Pravda could be found Soviet cities for that date. Heinlein wrote that there was an orbital launch, later said to be unmanned, on that day, but that the retro-rockets had fired at the wrong altitude, making recovery efforts unsuccessful.

Now onto some of the more creepier evidence. Because you know what? Space is effing terrifying, even without aliens or other creepy stuff.

On May 19, 1961, the Torre Bert listening station in northern Italy said they picked up a transmission of a woman's voice, sounding confused and frightened as her craft began to break up upon reentry. Theorists state this may be the voice of Slavic Cosmonaut Ludmila Tokov who would have been the first woman in space (beating Valentina Tereshkova by 2 years and Sally Ride by more than 20).

I'm not going to lie, this recording creeped me the hell out. I don't know why, but it did. And usually I'm a rock about this kind of stuff. You have been warned (translation below the video)

 

 

Translation: five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five...come in... come in... come in...
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN! COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?...
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING...BREATHING... OXYGEN...
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS) ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS? WHAT?... TALK TO ME!...

HOW SHOULD I TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES...
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... ... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?...
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A FLAME!...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO... THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!...
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER...
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...

Another recording from Torre Bert purports to be the sounds of labored breathing and a failing heartbeat. This combined with reports in the French and Italian press, claiming that Sputnik 7 was a manned mission, gave rise to claims that a cosmonaut named Gennady Mikhailov was the first man in orbit and died there due to heart failure.

The third Torre Bert recording claims to have heard a couple launched on February 17, 1961, aboard a spacecraft orbiting the earth, reporting "Everything is satisfactory, we are orbiting the earth" at regular intervals.
On February 24th, there were some garbled transmissions about something the couple could see outside their ship, that they urgently had to communicate to Earth. Apparently the communication was lost. Around the same time Torre Bert reportedly picked up an SOS signal from a craft in space. As the signal got weaker, it was assumed the craft disappeared into space.

Alexey Beokonev is supposedly one of three (two men and a woman) cosmonauts aboard a November 1962 flight. The Torre Bert tower allegedly picked up a frantic set of messages from the occupants. "Conditions growing worse why don't you answer? . . . we are going slower . . . the world will never know about us. . . "


 So. That's the Phantom Cosmonaut theory in a nutshell. What are your thoughts?

Wednesday Weird: Life On Mars?

Space: The final frontier and all that junk.

Dammit. I shouldn't have written that. Now I'm going to have the entire monologue and the theme song to the beginning of Star Trek in my head.

So today we're hightailing it back out to space. Because, folks, space has some weird ass stuff out there. Weeeeiiiird stuff we're talking about.

BUT! Today, we're going to stick close to home and talk about our favorite celestial neighbor, Mars!

Awww! So cute!

OT for a second. Remember this movie?

Jim Carey, Damon Wayans and Jeff Goldblum

I don't really have anything to say about it. Just all this talk about Mars made me think of Earth Girls are Easy and then I'm both delighted and flummoxed that something like this happened.


Anyway. Let's get our asses back to Mars. (Super Bonus Nerd Points if you can identify the source of that slightly bastardized quote!)

Scientists have discovered large quantities of methane in Mars's atmosphere. Why is this weird, you ask? Because the ultraviolet in sunlight does a really good job of breaking down methane. So, technically, Mars shouldn't have any methane.

Which means, that something on Mars is producing the methane.

Geological events can sometimes produce methane, but there's no evidence of any happening on Mars recently.

So you know what else produces methane? Life.

There's also a possibility that maybe some unknown geological event produced the methane, but in order for that to happen it would require liquid water flows and lava.

So even if life didn't cause the methane, it would mean that Mars has liquid water. Or maybe both!!

Yeah. Think about that for a bit.

We love you Mars!


(Fun fact: I typed "methane" wrong almost every time I wrote it in this post. I kept missing the last "e". Also I had to type it 4 times in this fun fact before I finally got it right. Skilz: I haz them.)

Wednesday Weird

Woo Hoo! Back to our usual installment of Wednesday Weird. Oh how I've missed it.

Before we get started, though, just a brief update. This weekend I will be heading out to Wiscon 36, and because of that, I won't have blog posts for either Friday or Monday, since I'll be driving to and from Madison WI (hopefully without getting any speeding tickets). Blog posts will resume as normal next Wednesday.

OK! Onto the Weird!

Today we're going to talk about Sedna.

What's Sedna, you ask? Why the ninth planet in our solar system, of course! (tenth, if you're still counting Pluto. I haven't made my mind up on that yet)

See that dot? Yep. That's Sedna.

What what you ask? Yep. You heard me.

Let's get serious here. Space is effing big. We can all agree on that. And pretty much it's too bright between Mercury and the sun and too dark after Uranus to even really see anything with our current technology. So really, anything could be in our solar system. Space whales? Why not! Space Titanic? Don't be ridiculous. That thing crashed on its maiden voyage.

Even though we're pretty confident about our existing planets (except for Pluto, of course) we're actually not all that confident about other possible planets hanging out in the neighborhood. Which is too bad because they probably hate us for not inviting them to the block parties and junk.

Back to Sedna. Scientists discovered an object orbiting the sun. Yep. Sedna. As of 2012 it was about 3x the distance from the sun as Neptune. So you know, waaaay out there. No one's really sure of its size, but it's at least as big as Pluto. Sedna's long, elliptical orbit takes 11,400 years to complete. Which means chances are, anyone living there has never had a birthday.

So there you have it! Sedna! Of course, I haven't even mentioned Tyche yet, or the fact that there's also a huge gap in asteroids after Pluto, which tells scientists that there's likely a planet between the size of Earth and Mars hanging out back there, munching up all that space rock.

Ahem. But we will. We'll get to Tyche and other things (Nemesis) on later Wednesday Weirds.

Space is awesome.

So what do you think?
.