A Small Revision to History

[billroper]

Via Instapundit, apparently Yuri Gagarin was not the first man in space. He was, however, the first to survive the trip.

Comments

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

I find that VERY hard to believe. While we didn't have the eyes in the sky we have today, we still did a very good job monitor missile traffic launching from within the USSR. We would have noticed sub-orbital launches.

Plus, they didn't possess a boaster in 57 that could have launched a manned capsule.

No, sorry, don't buy it.

[rook543.livejournal.com]

And besides...Fred Flintstone went into space in a few episodes and he was from the stone age!

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I agree. This is a 2001 claim; hard to find reliable corroboration on the Net. For example, if James Oberg believed the claim, I would take it seriously. Suprised Glenn would offer up such a thing without checking; he knows better.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Secret dead cosmonauts have been a not-very-credible racket since the Space Age began. I suggest you read this and the following few pages.

[whl.livejournal.com]

I don't buy, it either.

On top of Oberg's work, a fair amount of CIA analysis of the Soviet space program has been released, and it doesn't seem to back this up.

[whl.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. The source is the Pravda website? Recent things I've read compare that (unfavorably) to the National Enquirer...

A summary of previous reports is at the astronautix.com website.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Oberg says in a 1988 book chapter that he investigated this claim and found it without merit in 1973.

Really, someone should point this out to Glenn Reynolds.

[madfilkentist]

We all know that "Pradva" means "truth" and what that's worth ... but would the modern Pravda invent something that made the Soviets look bad? I don't know the answer to that but tend to doubt it.

dzarron: The Russians were doing a lot of missile tests in the fifties. US intelligence didn't tell the public everything it knew about Russian launches. How would these launches have been visibly different from other tests Russia was doing, that they would have stood out as obvious manned launches?

I want more information than one source, but I'm not dismissing the claim either.

[madfilkentist]

I notice also that the article links directly to a report of the first extraterrestrials to be videotaped, and that they look just like the space aliens of every bad close encounter report. Either this is a particularly impressive day for space news, or we might entertain a few doubts about one or both articles.

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

Take a bit to digging to bring up attribution but in the days before satellites we had many telescopic observation station along the Soviet border trained at the horizon watching for launches.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Snopes doesn't have this one (I searched there for "cosmonaut" & "Gagarin"). I've sent them a link to this blog entry and the debunking comments & links posted by beamjockey & whl.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

A whole lot of similar stories have been debunked in the past. And while it's interesting to see Pravda as the source, I'm still skeptical.

The Soviets were sending dogs and bunnies on suborbital flights from Kapustin Yar in 1957-1959, in rockets/payloads too small to cram a human being into. With all the fascinating stuff that was revealed about the Soviet space program in the 1990's, including news of a lot of substantial failures, nothing that indicated the existence of a manned spacecraft before Vostok appeared, and no suggestion of Vostok being flown on anything smaller than the R-7 booster has appeared. I doubt it could have been flown on the V-2-sized and stretch-v-2-sized rockets being flown from Kapustin Yar in thos days. The R-7 requires a huge specially-built complex that was never installed at Kapustin Yar.

It's not impossible--maybe there was a sort of Russian X-15 that I don't know about--but I am very skeptical.

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

The first issue of the now-long-defunct Space World magazine speculated darkly about such possible secret failures in a 1961 article, basing their speculations mainly on payload weight. Given the information climate in 1961 (propaganda from everywhere about as thick as cigarette smoke in a diner), we'll probably never know for sure. I just try to keep my automatic Snark Detector properly calibrated ("Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice! What I tell you three times is true . . . .") Meanwhile, hats off to the folks who have obviously done their homework. ;-)