Between 1957 and 1976, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a space race which will remain as the symbol of the technological rivalry then opposing the two powers. Although the period was marked by numerous frenetic experiments in an attempt to be the first country to walk on the Moon, fatal accidents remained relatively rare. However, the leaders were prepared for possible human losses. US President Richard Nixon even prepared a contingency speech in case the Apollo 11 mission turned into a disaster.
Officially, the most notable tragedies would have occurred during pre-launch tests, such as the fire in the altitude chamber which cost the life of cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko, or another which decimated the crew of Apollo 1. However, from 1962, rumors circulated about the possible death of Soviet cosmonauts, relayed by the journalist Drew Pearson, convinced that the USSR was hiding several deaths with the complicity of the United States. If these theories are unverifiable, two Italian brothers claimed to have audio recordings confirming at least one of the deaths, reports the American magazine Popular Mechanics.
Brothers and radio enthusiasts, Achille and Giambatista Judica-Cordiglia, originally from Italy, regularly visited an abandoned German World War II bunker. It was within the latter that, in the 1950s, they would have picked up signals from the Soviet Sputnik program and the American Explorer 1 probe. The two Italian radio amateurs claimed to have intercepted these transmissions using radio equipment cobbled together from wire mesh, recovered pipes and American military equipment resold after the war.
For decades, the two Judica-Cordiglia brothers will say the same thing: they heard a message coming from a Soviet spaceship and it was “…—…”, which means “SOS”, in Morse code. If true, it would mean they picked up a distress signal from a Soviet cosmonaut on a test flight, a call the USSR would never acknowledge.
Multiple unverified records
In February 1961, Achille and Giambatista Judica-Cordiglia did it again and claimed to have intercepted another mysterious signal. This time it’s not Morse code, but heartbeats. They recorded the palpitations and heavy breathing and entrusted the file to the Turin cardiologist Achille Mario Dogliotti, who described it as that of a dying man.
A few months later, on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history by becoming the first human to fly into space. For the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, as for others, he was only the first human to survive the flight… Shortly after, a new recording was intercepted, suggesting that the USSR had also tried to send the first woman into orbit, without success.
Still available online, the transmission is said to have been emitted by a panicked Soviet woman during her atmospheric re-entry. We would hear snatches of sentences like “I see a flame!” or even “I’m hot”. Again, the recording will never be authenticated.
Difficult to decide between a hoax or a state secret. The two Italian brothers have always denied any invention, but the lack of official confirmation raises questions. Especially since other Soviet tragedies initially passed over in silence ended up being revealed, such as that of the Nedeline disaster, when a rocket exploded by accident on the launch pad of the Baikonur cosmodrome (now Kazakhstan), on October 24, 1960, causing between 78 and 126 deaths.
