The Lost Cosmonauts
Two Italian brothers said their radio caught the voices of Soviet cosmonauts lost in space before Gagarin.
What was reported
In the early 1960s, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia ran an amateur listening station at Torre Bert, near Turin. They said they had recorded signals and voices from Soviet spacecraft, including a heartbeat, an SOS in Morse code and a woman's voice describing heat in her capsule.
The recordings fed a belief that the Soviet Union had secretly lost cosmonauts before and after Yuri Gagarin's flight in 1961.
Explanations offered
When Soviet records opened after 1991, they showed no hidden deaths in space, though accidents on the ground had been kept secret. Russian speakers say the voices' Russian contains mistakes a cosmonaut wouldn't make, and the radio frequencies don't match. Most researchers think the recordings were faked or misheard.
- When
- Early 1960s
- Where
- Torre Bert, near Turin, Italy
- Witnesses
- Two radio amateurs, the Judica-Cordiglia brothers
- Status
- Probably a hoax
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.