One Small Step? E-Book

Gerhard Wisnewski

• Herausgeber: Clairview Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Is it possible that the famous American moon landings were nothing but an illusion - a fabrication? Could NASA have fooled the world by broadcasting simulations that had been filmed for training purposes? From the very first manned flight into orbit right up to the present day there have been serious anomalies in the official narrative of the conquest of space. Bestselling author Gerhard Wisnewski dissects the history in minute detail - from the first Russian missions to the final American moon project of Apollo 17 - looking at films, photos, radio communications, personal statements and any other available material. Using forensic methods of investigation, he pieces together a complex jigsaw depicting a disturbing picture of falsifications, lies and fakery in the Cold War struggle for supremacy between the Soviet Union and the USA. The evidence he presents casts serious doubt on the possibility of humans ever having walked on the moon. Wisnewski's research calls for a reassessment of the received wisdom that has entered the fabric of our culture. The true story of space exploration has a more sinister undertone, he argues. Beneath the guise of civilian space travel the US military has been developing fearsome new equipment and weapons to be secretly stationed in space with the aim of militarizing the orbit around the earth. The potential targets: every human being on the planet. Profusely illustrated with over 200 photos and diagrams.

Leseprobe

GERHARD WISNEWSKI was born in 1959. He studied political science, and since 1986 has worked as an author and documentary filmmaker. His bestselling (German) books include Das RAF-Phantom (The RAF Phantom), Operation 9/11 (Operation 9/11), Mythos 9/11 (9/11 - a myth) and Verschluss-Sache Terror (The secret files of terror). The film Das Phantom, based on the book Das RAF-Phantom, was awarded the Grimm Prize in 2000.

ONE SMALL STEP?

THE GREAT MOON HOAX AND THE RACE TO DOMINATE EARTH FROM SPACE

GERHARD WISNEWSKI

Translated by J. Collis

Clairview Books Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, East Sussex RH18 5ES

www.clairviewbooks.com

Published by Clairview 2012

Originally published in German under the title Lügen im Weltraum, Von der Mondlandung zur Weltherrschaft by Knaur Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich, in 2005

Translated by Johanna Collis

© Knaur Taschenbuch 2005 This translation © Clairview Books 2007

Gerhard Wisnewski asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 905570 59 1

Cover by Andrew Morgan Design Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

My flight on 12 April 1961 was the first manned space flight in history.

Yuri Gagarin

That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Neil Armstrong

Have the courage to make use of your own intelligence.

Immanuel Kant

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Lies travel long distances

Space – the perfect place for a falsehood

PART ONE: THE SOVIET UNION

Lost in space

SOS to the entire world

The front in space

Heroes don’t fall out of the sky

An unremarkable man

The flight of Yuri G.

The Vostok myth

A voice from space

If only landing were unnecessary...

The smiling major

An embarrassing accident

PART TWO: THE USA

A victor’s strategy

Master weapons smith to the world powers

Knowledge and the realities

Let’s begin with the lap of honour

A dud rocket named Redstone

The case of Virgil G.

The Apollo 1 disaster

Off to the moon

Once and never again – the lunar module

The moon landing

The hidden plot

The USA – a rogue state?

Mountaineers and hunters...

He came along, he had a look, he took a snap

A moon with two suns

The riddle of the crosshairs

Silent lift-off from the moon

‘My God, space is radioactive!’

When astronauts see stars

Welcome to ‘Hotel Lunatic’

The death of Laika the bitch

Bad news about moon rocks

A photon named NASA

Has anyone got a lunar module to spare?

Galileo and the moon landing

Along comes a spacecraft

Hunting for Apollo

The UFO trap

The simplest assumption is the right one

The best simulation of all time

One small step for NASA...

PART THREE: TO DOMINATE THE GLOBE

‘Failure was not an option’

The power of the MIC

NASA, a department of the Pentagon

La Paloma Blanca

Mission to Planet Earth

Ronald and the rockets

ISS: Last man out to switch off the light

Dubya has a vision

Guantánamo in the solar system

Atom bombs into space

The arsenal of Dr Strangelove

Table: ‘Where did you say Apollo landed?

Notes

Bibliography

Picture Sources

Acknowledgements

Preface

Washington, December 2004. There is uproar in the corridors of the Capitol, almost as though airliners from Osama bin Laden were once more hovering above the heads of the senators. There is no doubt that the security of the nation is under threat again. But the threat this time is not from Osama bin Laden or some other Islamists gone wild but from the Government itself and the circles that support it. What it wants to do is put a highly secret satellite system into space at a cost so high that even some of the senators are getting cold feet. The sum that has so far leaked out is: 9.5 billion dollars – a huge amount for a single project. ‘Experts suspect that the satellites in question are to be armed,’1 commented Der Spiegel.

The uproar surrounding these most recent secret machinations of the United States in space highlights what has been going on above our heads throughout the course of 45 years of ‘civilian space exploration’. After over 40 years of manned and unmanned space aviation no one quite knows what the USA is really up to out there in space – not even its own congress is allowed to speak publicly about it. This was not the plan when the world first began to hold its breath over the adventures of ‘civilian’ astronauts – or was it? Was everything even then geared to dominating the world from space?

This is only one of the questions I intend to explore in my present book. First one asks: Is the history of space travel as it is being told to us actually true? And if not, what exactly is hidden behind it? In this respect the events of 11 September 2001 provided me with a key experience. When researching my books Operation 9/11 (Operation 9/11) and Mythos 9/11 (9/11 – a myth) I came across numerous inconsistencies, and I was not the only individual whose outlook concerning the American past began to change. More and more people were asking themselves what else they ought to know about the other stories the USA had been telling the world about itself. Many of them have since been exposed as humbug, for example the tale about the sinking of the battleship Maine in 1898, the supposedly surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the official version of the August 1964 Tonkin Incident. All these events served as excuses for entering into a war and all resulted in huge national efforts. But none of them had followed courses as described by the USA.

The more closely you scrutinize American history, the more impenetrable does the thicket of contradictions, half-truths, distortions and lies become. These false representations are also the reason why there is so much scepticism worldwide regarding many of the US Government’s claims: ‘One of the reasons for these conspiracy theories is that the US Government lies so much,’ said the American secret service expert and best-selling author James Bamford to my colleague Willy Brunner and me in 2003 while we were working on a film in the USA: ‘I mean, the US Government is always lying, lies about so many different things. Lies about whether there are nuclear weapons in Iraq for example, sends phoney documents to the UN, just recently. It lied all about Vietnam, it lied about Watergate, lied about a lot of things. So obviously there is gonna be a lot of suspicion about whether the US Government is telling the truth.’ It is tempting to embrace the idea that the might of the United States of America derives not from its military machine, its atom bombs or its financial and commercial strength but from its lies.

The greatest success story told to the world by the USA since the end of World War II, however, is the epic tale about the landing on the moon. It tells of two dozen American heroes setting out once upon a time to conquer the moon on behalf of all mankind. The moon landing brought the USA an overwhelming political, publicity and propaganda victory over its then enemy, the Soviet Union. And not only over the Soviet Union. With this achievement the USA showed everyone, once and for all, who had the final say the world over. The landing on the moon brought the USA a prestige advantage which it enjoys to this day. So at least in this matter, was everything as it appeared to be?

For some time now numerous suspicions have been making the rounds, suspicions that hint at facts and reasons why all is not in order. This is for me the reason why now, after writing Mythos 9/11, I want to follow up this huge American saga: What is the moon landing all about? What really lies hidden behind civilian space aviation? Is it really aimed at conquering space or actually perhaps at conquering the earth? I hope to have come closer to presenting answers to all these questions by the end of this book.

Gerhard Wisnewski

Munich, May 2007

Introduction

Lies travel long distances

It is 21 July 1969 at around 0340 hrs Central European Time. On a distant heavenly body a window opens in a strange spindly-legged vehicle. Like an odd-looking beetle a human being slides out on his stomach; in his clumsy spacesuit he somewhat resembles the famous Michelin Man. Hand over hand he slowly descends the ladder till he ends up standing on one of the large landing feet of the vehicle. Hopping down off this he says: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’

Here was sensationalism at its most accomplished – the Americans the first to land on the moon having beaten the Soviets to it. That Neil Armstrong/Buzz Aldrin team was followed by five more. All six conducted scientific experiments there, brought back with them a total of 382 kg of moon rocks and then lived happily ever after, if not on the moon then on the earth. And if they are not dead, then ... But did this really happen? Did twelve American heroes really land on the moon before returning safely to earth, as President Kennedy had decreed in 1961? Or was it all nothing more than a strategic lie as an increasing number of sceptics maintain? A lie intended to establish ideological and political dominion over the globe once and for all?

We shall see. In my search for the truth I will begin before the summer of 1969, for the story of the moon landing obviously does not begin in 1969, nor in 1965 or 1963. It begins in 1961 at the latest, which was the year when the first manned flight in space was launched with the Russian Yuri Gagarin on board. More than any other, this event was the one that finally set off the race to reach the moon by providing the USA with the ultimate justification for its multi-billion dollar programme of manned space exploration. So to whet readers’ appetites, let me begin with a brief consideration of the beginnings of manned space travel in the USSR. As we shall see, it was not solely a matter of two great powers battling against one another, for their space programmes were also complementary. However much they may have been serving their contradictory interests in their rivalry, in terms of public interest the show they put on amounted to a collaboration. The space adventures of cosmonauts and astronauts alike held the attention not only of the two power blocs but of the whole world for decades. The two blocs gathered their populations around their own heroes and their own political leaders, getting them to hold their breath in anticipation of the next showdown in space, causing them to forget their day-to-day problems and – above all – the billions and billions-of-billions seeping away in the military and industrial complexes of each country. At the sight of those beaming heroes very few thought to ask where the huge sums of taxpayers’ money had gone; that would have appeared small-minded and unpatriotic.

Those heroic deeds have long since found their way into school and history books and now belong to the cultural heritage of humanity as a whole. Both in the USA and in Russia the adventures of the space travellers have attained cult status. Especially in the United States schoolchildren are systematically primed concerning the heroic deeds of the astronauts with whom they are expected to identify. The adventures of both astronauts and cosmonauts are not forgotten but have become obligatory components of school curricula, important for unifying the nation.

So what is the psychological and propagandistic significance of Yuri Gagarin’s flight as the basis of America’s moon programme? Having undertaken what I found to be an exciting trip into the beginnings of Soviet manned space flight we shall then, in Part Two of this book, endeavour to leave no stone unturned (on the moon, of course) in following up almost all known and not yet known indications that point to a faked landing on the moon. I want to clear up a number of unjustified doubts while also uncovering some new and hitherto not yet investigated absurdities. My leading question will not be whether the USA faked the moon landings, but whether they only faked them. Obviously they had to be simulated initially for training purposes, but the question remains as to whether they then subsequently actually took place. This is a peculiar question, is it not? For surely the former cold war enemies have recognized each other’s achievements in space without any envy? Has not every space flight been photographed a thousand times and documented as well? Haven’t the heroes been passed from hand to hand the world over on lecture and interview tours?

Yes, they have. Yet the doubts continue to multiply. The supposition is growing that there have been lies and swindles, fibs and fakes everywhere. In Part Three, finally, I shall show how civilian space travel has been used as a cover for achieving domination over the whole world, and what we can expect from space in the future. The book will ask what has been done – in addition to or instead of the so-called ‘conquest of space’ – with regard to conquering the earth. I shall show how, under the cover of civilian space travel, the powers exploring space, first and foremost the USA, have transformed the orbit into a battlefield of the future, with the ultimate aim of shackling the whole globe.

Space – the perfect place for a falsehood

There are many reasons why the ‘history’ of space travel should be taken with many pinches of salt. I have already mentioned one of those reasons: the free and easy way in which the USA has been treating truth. Another is the fact that information about space travel emanates almost exclusively from Soviet and American propaganda machines. ‘The information reaching the public is at best filtered, and not unusually falsified by propaganda,’ we read for example on the jacket of Harro Zimmer’s book Der rote Orbit (The red orbit). Propaganda and falsification are integral parts of military operations as depicted in the space activities of the superpowers. In every case careful decisions are made about which aspects of an operation are to be disclosed to the public and which not, for what the public knows is also known to the enemy. This means that in principle the public and the enemy can be seen as essentially one and the same thing.

It goes without saying that the space programme of the USA is first and foremost a military programme. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) emerged from NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), an agency devoted to researching military aeronautics. The men who landed on the moon were officers bound by the mechanisms of command and obedience. The rockets used by both blocs for the first ‘civilian’ missions were modified intercontinental rockets.

The best (tall) story about a military operation is the one that says it is not a military operation at all. This is how the idea of ‘civilian’ manned space travel came into existence.

The reason why we intuitively believe in American space travel more than in the Soviet variety is because the ‘information policy’ of the USA was quite different. Whereas the Soviet Union released information extremely sparingly, the exact opposite applied to America’s strategy which was positively loquacious. Especially as regards the moon landings they bombarded journalists with fat press kits while also publishing detailed drawings of the spacecraft involved. In comparison with Soviet handling of information, the public following American space travel were thoroughly smothered in it. Everything appeared to be taking place in full public view. With their mystification and contradictory carry-on the Soviets created one gap in their credibility after the other, whereas in America any similar potholes were immediately filled in with vast quantities of information – whether true or false being initially of secondary importance. So much eloquence certainly made it appear that there could be no secrets, and definitely no murky secrets.

The question, however, is: With all this seeming or actual openness, how was the American side handling its crisis management? While the secrecy of the Soviet Union served to hush up awkward incidents or mishaps, the Americans appeared to be courting the danger of spectacular failure before the very eyes of their ideological enemy. If the Soviet publicity machine was used for crisis and reality management, how were the Americans handling the matter of crisis and reality management? For it is surely obvious that for their propaganda specialists, too, this would have to be the most important task.

How were the United States dealing with the huge dangers of the moon missions? What precautions had they taken with regard to reality management? Did they really take the risk of failing in spectacular fashion before the very eyes of the whole world? Having built up their astronauts for years and years as national heroes, did they really send them to the moon as the whole of humanity watched in real time – while leaving the result open – like an open-ended military mission in which they subjected themselves to a kind of ‘divine judgement’ as to victory or defeat? Are we really expected to believe this? Or was there a back door somewhere, as it were a ‘win-win situation’ which to this day we know nothing about, or at least nothing specific?

There was nothing that either of the two sides ‘needed less than dead astronauts or cosmonauts. Only survivors could be used to demonstrate superiority,’ says Matthias Gründer quite rightly in his book SOS im Weltall (SOS in space).2

And finally there is also another reason for scepticism, namely, that outer space is a theatre like no other in the history of humanity. Apart from the powers involved in space travel, no one can go there to check whether everything is in order or perhaps to see if all those stories about heroic space missions are true. So space is the perfect place for a falsehood. As ever, the adventures undergone there are described virtually exclusively by those who underwent them, a typical characteristic of what is known on earth as the seafarer’s yarn. In respect of the truth this bodes nothing good.

PART ONE: THE SOVIET UNION

Lost in space

San Maurizio Canavese near Turin, 2 February 1961. In a room in their father’s house, Villa Bertalazona, the Italian brothers Achille and Gian-Battista Judica-Cordiglia have rigged up an amateur radio station for monitoring Soviet satellites. They have named the station Torre Bert after the villa. Torre stands for one of the villa’s towers, Bert for Bertalazona. For months they have been hunting for the beeping of Soviet ‘Sputniks’. But what they hear today takes their breath away. There is a clear sound like groaning or sighing coming from orbit. And the sound of a human heartbeat is also reaching them through the loudspeakers of their small listening station. They stand there electrified: the Soviets have sent a human being into space! This was the beginning of manned space travel – and not Yuri Gagarin’s flight – if we are to believe the descriptions of Gian-Battista and Achille Judica-Cordiglia (today in their mid-sixties and early seventies respectively). They are still fighting for their version of the history of manned space travel to be recognized. Listening to these two Italians makes you doubt your own ears. According to their reports, Yuri Gagarin was not the first man in space. Long before his flight on 12 April 1961 the Soviets had begun to send people into space. And always listening closely were the Judica-Cordiglias, two sons of a medical doctor from San Maurizio Canavese.

However much the Soviet empire tried to shut itself off, as soon as a spacecraft went into orbit and began to transmit radio signals it was in principle possible for anyone to pick them up. Having once spoken with a sheep-breeder in Australia, a professor in San Francisco or a scientist at the South Pole, someone from Central Europe couldn’t help becoming hopelessly hooked on amateur radionics. But the prospect of being able to listen-in to a satellite flying in space was frankly unheard of.

However, it is not as difficult as it sounds to listen to a satellite. The altitude of a few hundred kilometres at which it flies is nothing like as far as the normal reach of an amateur radio enthusiast.

The Judica-Cordiglia brothers at their listening station (left) and today (right)

On 23 May 1961 Gian-Battista and Achille now pick up something that officially does not exist: the voice of a woman in space. Until this moment the only people supposed to have travelled into space are Russian Yuri Gagarin (12 April 1961) and the American Alan Shepard (5 May 1961). But the Judica-Cordiglias stick to their story of hearing from space, through much crackling, the desperate voice of a woman:

Listen! Listen!

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... ? Forty-five? What?...

Forty-five? Fifty?

Yes... Yes... Yes... Breathing...

Breathing... Oxygen...

Oxygen... I am hot...

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...

Forty-one... This way... Our transmission begins now...

Forty-one... 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...

Thirty-two... Thirty-two... Forty-one... Forty-one

Am I going to crash? ... Yes... Yes... I feel hot!

I feel hot! ... I will re-enter! ... I will re-enter!...

I am listening! ... I feel hot!...

(English translation from Russian)3

At the time, the record written down by the two doctor’s sons from Piedmont was taken entirely seriously. The story of space travel was still young and had not yet coagulated to a viscous mass that has since gummed up school books and encyclopedias. The international media were regular visitors to the brothers, feeling this to be the most likely place to garner the latest news about the satellites of the ‘Reds’. To a good many of them the brothers seemed more trustworthy than the Soviet and American PR machines, both of which appeared not only obscure but also driven by selfish interests. The Judica-Cordiglias were regarded as an independent source – though nowadays we never hear anything about them. A long article about them in the Readers Digest is only one example of countless media reports. Under the title ‘Italy’s Amazing Amateur Space Watchers’ we read: ‘With home-made electronic equipment, two young Italians are keeping tabs on Russian satellites and making some startling discoveries.’4 Already ‘on 17 May 1961, the voices of two men and a woman were heard in desperate conversation,’ says Readers Digest: ’ “Conditions growing worse. Why don’t you answer? We are going slower. The world will never know about us...” Then silence. The same words were picked up in Alaska and Sweden. Their meaning? No one will know until the Russians choose to talk.’

The problem was that officially the Soviets had no three-man spacecraft at that time. The most moving message was undoubtedly the wordless one in February 1961: ‘Tapes, which I myself heard at Torre Bert,’ continued the Digest reporter, ‘recorded the racing beat of an over-exerted heart (the hearts of all astronauts are monitored automatically) and sounds of laboured breathing. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers took the tapes to famed heart surgeon Dr A.M. Dogliotti. His verdict: “This is the heart of a dying man.” The brothers are convinced that the Russians were very lax in the way they dealt with human lives in their quest for success in space. Collected evidence points to at least ten deaths.’5

The revelations of the brothers posed such a threat that the propaganda machine of the mighty Soviet superpower turned its attention onto the two young radio amateurs: ‘In March of the present year the Milan daily Corriere della Sera published an article about “Soviet cosmonauts who perished in space”,’ thundered Radio Moscow on 7 April 1965:

The article is based upon statements made by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers, who allegedly received signals and recorded conversations in space by a number of Soviet cosmonauts who did not return from their flights... Two years ago the same nonsense could be found in the pages of the Washington Post... A few organs of the bourgeois press, in an attempt to give their cosmic lies an appearance of truthfulness, mention data provided by the American information services... However, such data do not reflect the truth. And with this statement we could close the whole matter. But we want to add a few words about the Judica-Cordiglia brothers. This is not the first time that they got involved in the reception of these signals... No one can doubt the safety of our space vehicles any more.6

So the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union was thoroughly rattled by the two young Italians. No wonder, for they were behaving like an uninvited theatre critic who kept reporting on failed rehearsals for a new play. The Soviets, however, wanted to tell only perfect tales, tales of clean heroes fulfilling their duty in space without any hitches before receiving a red-carpet welcome by the party leadership, as happened in Yuri Gagarin’s case.

Today, every school textbook tells us that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Full stop. But if their reports are true the history written by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers and other sources is rather different. According to them, Soviet manned space travel began in 1957 with suborbital flights in which a capsule is shot into the sky more or less vertically and falls back to earth almost immediately. Soviet experiments with orbital flights began in 1960, when manned spacecraft began to orbit the earth. But according to the reports and research of the Cordiglia brothers, by the time Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov went into space in 1961 a number of human guinea-pigs had already been sacrificed in space flights.

Can this really be true? Is it really possible that the Soviet Union led the world by the nose to such an extent? In principle it is, for this practice was rife in the whole of Soviet space travel, not only in manned flights. Only successes or else staged events were made public. In the case of Soviet probes and lunar missions, Mission Mond (Moon Mission), a popular moon lexicon, tells us how things went:

When a successful entry into an orbit was achieved, the probe was given the name Luna plus a running number. But when a rocket crashed during launch or soon after, it remained without an official name. If a launch was successful but the probe failed to leave the earth’s gravity it was officially included as a satellite in the sequence of countless Sputnik or Cosmos launches. In this way the West remained ignorant for a long time as to the true number of failures.7

In other words, the Soviets simply swept failed missions under the carpet. So why should they not also apply this method to the much more ticklish manned missions? After all, such failures would be far more embarrassing and damaging to national prestige than failures of unmanned flights.

SOS to the entire world

An especially sinister report came from the Judica-Cordiglias as early as 28 November 1960, i.e. four-and-a-half months before the official inauguration of the age of manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin. They described it as a message in Morse code saying: ‘SOS to the entire world.’ What the brothers found unusual about it was the presence of the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect is a distortion of radio frequency from which one can deduce the speed and direction of a spacecraft. And the Doppler effect in this case, they said, showed that the message came not from a spacecraft in orbit but from one that was travelling away from the earth:

We confirmed the presence of the Doppler effect in amounts very similar to what we later detected during reception of signals from such moon probes as the Luniks. Clearly the signal was not coming from an orbiting satellite, but rather from something that was moving away from the earth. The signal was very weak.

And then Gian-Battista Judica-Cordiglia described a scenario that gives one the shivers. In order to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere from orbit, a Soviet spacecraft had to be turned to point its retro-rockets forward in the direction of flight prior to ignition.

We surmised that the capsule may not have executed the attitude reversal at the time of retro-rocket ignition, gaining speed in the process. Starting at a speed of about 8 km/sec, the spacecraft may have been pushed into a higher orbit, even reaching sufficient velocity to escape the earth’s gravitational pull. If my recollection is accurate, the escape velocity required to reach the Moon is about 11.2 km/sec. The Morse code message was broadcast in English. We believed it was a desperate plea for help ... After a while, the signals stopped. I remember that on 2 December [i.e. four days later, GW] the Soviet authorities announced the launch of Sputnik VI and almost immediately announced that it had been lost.8

Sputnik VI was still known by a different name: Vostok, the name of Soviet manned spacecraft. The official Soviet statement listed a cargo of two dogs, insects and plants. But a glance at the planning for Vostok flights yields a nasty surprise: no flights with experimental animals were planned. Vostok planning in April 1960 show:

- a prototype Vostok 1 (IK) for launch trials and construction in orbit, after which it would burn up. It had no heat shields or life-support systems;

- to adapt Vostok Platform 1 as a spy satellite called Vostok 2 (alias ‘Zenith’) and also as a manned spacecraft (Vostok 3) with life-support systems, a seat and heat shields.

The Vostok family tree thus looked like this:

No animals are mentioned here. According to Vostok planning, between September and December 1960 three Vostok 3 spacecraft were to be prepared for manned flights. Manned flights were to take place from 11 October 1960 right up to December.9

And, according to the Judica-Cordiglias, this involved a certain Piotr Dolgoff exactly on 11 October 1960, Alexis Gracioff in December 1960 and Gennady Mikhailov in February 1961. Interestingly, it even appears that Sergei Korolyev, Soviet construction engineer in chief, confirmed the start of manned space flights long before Gagarin’s flight on 12 April 1961. On 30 March 1961 he wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in which he reported on ‘two launches of Vostok 3A’,10 i.e. evidently the manned type. Strangely, however, Korolyev mentions in the same letter that preparations were complete for the first flight of a human being into cosmic space. Was he contradicting himself? Or did he simply mean the first official manned flight? Or was he simply playing with the fact that the functionaries of the Central Committee would anyway not know the difference between Vostok 1 and 3? Quite possibly. But it is also possible that Korolyev’s letter was only written after Gagarin’s flight – as an official documentation of history. The timing appears to be perfect. On 30 March Korolyev reported to the Central Committee that manned flights could now be undertaken, and only 13 days later Gagarin flew. This seems to be quite a short interval. On 3 April 1961, nine days before Gagarin’s official flight, Korolyev told the Central Committee that the cosmonauts were very well prepared and knew the capsule and in-flight conditions better than he himself did. The in-flight conditions? Why the in-flight conditions? ‘He himself believed the outcome would be successful, he continued. His confidence was founded on the technology, the men who would be flying, and a “degree of knowledge” about the in-flight conditions.’11 A degree of knowledge? What kind of a ‘degree of knowledge’?

If Korolyev states on 30 March 1961 that five flights of Vostok 1 and two of Vostok 3 had taken place, this could mean that

- at least two manned flights had been carried out;

- on 28 November 1960, when the Cordiglia brothers received the SOS, a spacecraft had been launched not with dogs but with human beings on board.

The Vostok ejection seat in the museum (left) and in action (right)

As mentioned already, Vostok planning refers only to flights of unmanned prototypes (Vostok 1), spy satellites (Vostok 2) and manned flights (Vostok 3). The Soviets did send animals into space, for example the bitch Laika. But she was on board a craft of the Sputnik II type, already on 3 November 1957. In other words three years earlier. And it is highly unlikely that the Soviets would have sent dogs up in costly space capsules intended for human passengers.

Another version surmises that in the early Vostok 3 flights only dummy humans were sent up, together with a whole menagerie of experimental animals including dogs. During the descent through the earth’s atmosphere it is said that the dummies were ejected while the animals remained in the capsule and landed safely. The problem here is that powerful rockets were needed to release the ejection seat, resulting in huge increases in temperature and pressure. How did the animals remaining in the capsule survive this? And if they did, was their experimental usefulness impaired?

The front in space

Another radio amateur, Walter Kunz from Münchenstein in Switzerland, is also said to have caught Russian voices in space long before Gagarin’s flight, for example on 17 January 1961. In Germany the Oberrheinische Zeitung reported on 25 January 1961: ‘Reliable sources in Moscow and Helsinki confirm information which the Soviets have been anxiously suppressing as a state secret but which the western press reported several days ago: two Russians have failed to return from space flights.’12 And in April 2001 punctually on the fortieth anniversary of Gagarin’s flight, even Russian Pravda let the cat out of the bag:

Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut... Three Soviet pilots died in attempts to conquer space before Gagarin’s famous space flight, reported Mikhail Rudenko, senior engineer-experimenter with Experimental Design Office 456 (located at Khimki, in the Moscow region). According to Rudenko, spacecraft with pilots Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov at the controls had been launched from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome (in the Astrakhan region) in 1957, 1958 and 1959.

This was even before production of the Vostok spacecraft. It is not clear what craft were used for these flights. ‘All three pilots died during the flights, and their names were never officially published,’ said Rudenko:

He explained that all these pilots took part in so-called suborbital flights, i.e. their goal was not to orbit around the earth, which Gagarin later did, but make a parabola-shaped flight. ‘The cosmonauts were to reach space heights in the highest point of such an orbit and then return to the earth,’ he said. According to his information, Ledovskikh, Shaborin and Mitkov were regular test pilots, who had not had any special training, Interfax reports. ‘Obviously, after such a series of tragic launches, the project managers decided to cardinally change the program and approach the training of cosmonauts much more seriously in order to create a cosmonaut detachment.’13

Perhaps it was these catastrophes that led to the decision to build a ‘proper’ spacecraft – the Vostok. Whatever the case may be, we have here uncovered a further thumping lie: Yuri Gagarin, ‘My flight on 12 April 1961 was the first manned space flight in history.’ We may add that it is unlikely that everything simply went quiet on the space front between those first confirmed flights and that of Gagarin. On the contrary, an accumulation of hints suggests that a desperate life-and-death battle for supremacy in the cosmos was going on behind the scenes of Russia’s gleaming space travel. Personages like Yuri Gagarin appear suddenly at the front of the stage as though to hide the skirmishing going on in the background. Both space powers were pushing to get a man into space at last, at any price – or rather to achieve a manned space flight good enough to present to the world. Early in 1961, shortly before Gagarin’s official flight, the competition intensified. The Americans put a chimpanzee into space on 31 January 1961 while their first manned flight was scheduled for 24 March 1961 with the American Alan Shepard. The Soviets were panicking.

At some point during that time, towards the end of March or the beginning of April 1961, a man was taken to Moscow’s Botkin Hospital. The doctor on duty, Dr Vladimir Golyakovsky, was astonished. The patient’s skin was completely burnt with only enough untouched skin left on the feet to enable the doctor to inject painkillers. The man’s name was Sergeyev and he was a lieutenant in the air force, said his companions. This was their first lie, for his name was not Sergeyev but Valentin – Valentin Bondarenko. And he was not only an air force lieutenant but also a cosmonaut. The question is: what had befallen him and why was his body ‘totally denuded of skin’, as Dr Golyakovsky remembered? It looked almost as though he had been in some kind of baking oven. But what kind of baking oven could it have been? It remained a state secret for 25 years. But then the Soviets came out with the following story. Bondarenko had been subjected to an endurance test in a chamber with an atmosphere of pure oxygen. After several days Bondarenko had removed the remains of a medical sensor from his skin with the help of a cloth or cotton-wool pad soaked in alcohol. He had then by mistake put the cloth or pad on a hot cooker used to prepare food. Thereupon the woollen suit he was wearing had immediately caught fire.

Well, no scientist who had not lost touch with reality would put a person wearing a woollen suit into an atmosphere of pure oxygen together with a cooker and flammable liquids. What makes this even less likely is that Soviet spacecraft did not fly with an atmosphere of pure oxygen but with a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen because – among other reasons – this would have constituted a huge fire hazard (a theme to which I shall return in my chapter on Apollo 1). It also seems strange that Bondarenko was not even equipped with a fire extinguisher during this dangerous laboratory experiment. At least, the description of this incident does not give any account of such a thing having been used. What it does state, though, is that people simply could not get to Bondarenko in time. It had taken over half an hour before the chamber could be opened.14 So now we are looking for a chamber

- that can get hot enough to burn off a man’s skin almost entirely;

- in which just his feet, of all things, remain undamaged;

- in which no fire extinguisher is to hand;

- in which the occupant cannot easily be accessed in case of an accident.

Since the story of the oxygen chamber is not plausible, the mysterious chamber might perhaps have been something quite different, for example a space capsule that begins to glow on re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere. As it happens, in addition to his woollen suit Bondarenko was indeed wearing airman’s boots while inside that ‘oxygen chamber’.15 Perhaps this explains why the soles of his feet remained undamaged.

Shortly after this, Soviet propaganda described Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight as the deed of a single shining hero, yet behind the scenes space appears to have been teeming with cosmonauts. In his book about Gagarin, Gagarin – Kozmikus hazugzag? (Gagarin – a cosmic lie?), the Hungarian author István Nemere names two candidates for a failed space flight in early April 1961; one of these is indeed Valentin Bondarenko. The other was called Vladimir Ilyushin.16 It is possible that Ilyushin was a more fitting candidate than Yuri Gagarin for the flight in space. He was none other than the son of the well-known aircraft construction engineer Ilyushin while also being the most famous test pilot in the Soviet Union. In Gagarin we may search in vain for aviation achievements equal to those of Vladimir Ilyushin. ‘Access to recently declassified documents in the Kremlin archives by western journalists, coupled with newly forthcoming eyewitnesses now confirm that Yuri Gagarin, the symbol and heroic icon of the Soviet empire, was not the first man in space. This honor belongs to Vladimir Ilyushin,’ said the American television documentary The Cosmonaut Coverup.17

The producer, Dr Elliot Haimoff, ferreted out Ilyushin in Moscow. ‘Although now in his seventies, retired air force general Vladimir Ilyushin still works as one of the designers of the Suchoj design bureau, a Moscow based fighter jet manufacturer.’ Ilyushin went back on an agreement to speak in front of the camera, but:

He revealed many other facts about his life never before made public that clearly indicated his involvement in the Soviet space program ... At that time Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Ilyushin was unquestionably the Soviet Union’s most famous and experienced test pilot. As a test pilot he set dozens of speed and altitude records. And also the world altitude record of nearly 30 kilometers, which he set in 1959 using a Suchoj 9 military interceptor jet. In late 1960 Ilyushin was awarded a hero of the Soviet Union, their highest military honor, for his altitude records.

Although Vladimir Ilyushin does not appear on any official list of Soviet cosmonauts he was, according to The Cosmonaut Coverup, included in the corps of cosmonauts on account of his father’s political influence. In the TV documentary, Colonel Yuri Lislov of the Soviet strategic rocket forces is quoted as saying: ‘During his training he was intense, detail oriented and meticulous ... and the results were the best of any cosmonauts in training.’

Vladimir Ilyushin – then (left) and around 1999 (right)

But why have we heard nothing of Valentin Bondarenko or Vladimir Ilyushin as being the first men in space, but only of a certain Yuri Gagarin? The TV documentary explained that nothing had come of presenting Vladimir Ilyushin as a space hero. During his third orbit there had been a malfunction in the electrical system which had caused the steering electronics and radio signalling to cut out. Ilyushin had lost consciousness shortly before re-entry so that during the descent he had been unable to use the ejection seat which would normally have been the procedure. Instead of that he had landed heavily – regrettably not in the Soviet Union but in China where he spent a long time being treated in hospital. Instead of explaining his long absence, Soviet propaganda put about a dramatic tale of his having been sent to a rehab clinic in China after a car accident. A top military test pilot, son of the fighter jet engineer Sergei Ilyushin, sent to a foreign country for recuperation? ‘I never heard of anybody being sent from the Soviet Union to China for medical treatment,’ said Dennis Ogden in the film. He had been Moscow correspondent for the Daily Worker at the time. ‘The medical facilities available in the Soviet Union were perfectly satisfactory, probably better than those available in China.’ Relations between the Soviet Union and China had been strained at that time, he said, and he found it ‘difficult to understand’ why someone like Ilyushin should have been sent to China for recuperation. So here we are, back in the midst of the propaganda and communications theme:

The confused stories about Ilyushin simply demonstrate the point that I made several times, that the Soviet Union was its own worst enemy. The talk of Soviet propaganda being efficient and effective is pure nonsense. I don’t believe, I never believed that the Soviet Union was good at propaganda. It was not.

Quite so. The Soviets lied for all they were worth – without taking any account of resulting disadvantages. The trouble is that those lies still exist in our school and history books.

The ostensible space hero Gagarin was treated by the Chinese with eloquent disregard. In contrast to most other countries on earth they sent no congratulations to Moscow, so Ogden tells us. Yet they acted quite differently after all subsequent space missions. Even when Gagarin was being fêted in New Delhi not a single Chinese diplomat was to be seen anywhere: ‘Although the Indian Government sent invitations to the embassy of the People’s Republic of China every time there was an event involving Gagarin, the Chinese diplomats failed to attend and gave no reasons why,’ reported the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 4 December 1961.

Can all this really be true? Did the Soviets really sacrifice a whole sequence of cosmonauts prior to being able to announce a successful space flight? Of course it can be true, for after all we are talking about an army here. To send a hundred soldiers into the crossfire so that ten get through is an everyday military occurrence in wartime. Why should this change suddenly? The cosmonauts were soldiers just as much as their superiors. Whether they were marching against a human enemy or to conquer a new frontier in space was basically all one and the same thing: sacrifices were necessary, and it was possible and permissible to make them. Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union in particular had had millions of dead to mourn. So why have doubts now? On the contrary: this time a tremendous victory could be achieved with only a handful of soldiers.

So there is indeed, as the Readers Digest put it in 1965, ‘an eerie possibility that a long-dead Russian astronaut is today hurtling silently through space at thousands of miles an hour – the victim of a Soviet space shot that went wrong.’ This is a reference to that flight which may have left its orbit round the earth before sending that SOS. ‘His body perfectly preserved by intense cold, he may be a lonely wanderer in space for centuries to come.’

Heroes don’t fall out of the sky

Moscow, 8 April 1961. The leadership of the Soviet Union is in a desperate situation. There is a danger that unmanned Soviet space flight is about to lose its triumphant advantage as the imperialistic United States of America are increasingly catching up. The American Alan Shepard almost made it into space on 24 March 1961. Almost every month one or two cosmonauts had been coming to grief at the invisible barrier in space. The last two had been Bondarenko and Ilyushin, the former being burnt on re-entry and the latter crashing in China. The class enemy, however, must be stopped – immediately, at any price. So one day after Ilyushin’s probable crash a memorable meeting took place at which an unknown man was introduced. A new hero signified new good fortune. He was to bring the enemy to a halt, if not in space then at least at the propaganda front. This was Flight Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin. Only one thing was required of him. To parachute out of an aeroplane on a certain day and thereafter land on the earth, as well as in the annals of world history, as a cosmonaut. Everything else would be attended to by Soviet propaganda.

Chronology

The following table shows how the true story of early manned space flight might be pieced together. The official flights are printed in bold type.

1957Loss of Alexei Ledovskikh (source: Pravda)1958Loss of Serenti Shaborin (source: Pravda)1959Loss of Andrei Mitkov (source: Pravda)From September 1960Construction of three manned Vostok spacecraft begins27 September 1960Loss of Ivan Katshur (source: Judica-Cordiglia)11 October 1960Manned space flights begin according to Vostok planning11 October 1960Loss of Piotr Dolgoff (source: Judica-Cordiglia)28 November 1960’SOS to the entire world’ in Morse code. Departure from earth’s sphere? (source: Judica-Cordiglia)2 December 1960Soviets announce loss of Sputnik VIDecember 1960Loss of Alexis Grassiov (source: Judica-Cordiglia)17 January 1961‘Voices from space’ (source: Walter Kunz)2 February 1961Sound of heartbeat and breathing from space, possibly Gennady Mikhailov (source: Judica-Cordiglia)Early April 1961Valentin Bondarenko taken to hospital7 April 1961Space flight of Vladimir Ilyushin (source: The Cosmonaut Coverup, inter alia)12 April 1961Yuri Gagarin, Vostok 1, first Soviet in space, orbital (source: official)5 May 1961Alan Shepard, first American in space, suborbital (source: official)17 May 1961Voices of two men and one woman from space (source: Judica-Cordiglia)23 May 1961Female cries for help from space (source: Judica-Cordiglia)21 July 1961Virgil Grissom, second American in space, suborbital (source: official)6 August 1961Gherman Titov, Vostok 2, second Soviet in orbit (source: official)21 February 1962John Glenn, first American in orbit (source: official)15 May 1961Loss of Alexis Belokoniov (source: Judica-Cordiglia)

This was the view entertained by sceptics like the Hungarian István Nemere (Gagarin – a cosmic lie) of the true career of Yuri Gagarin, supposedly the first man in space.

According to the propaganda, the spacecraft Vostok 1 was launched from a pad near the small town of Tyuratam (later Baikonur) on 12 April 1961 at 0907 hrs Moscow Time with Yuri Gagarin on board. (The counting system employed by the Soviets meant that the first successful flight of the Vostok 3-type manned spacecraft came to be known as Vostok 1. Of course the public knew nothing about the flights of the Vostok prototypes and spy satellites.) Gagarin is said to have completed one orbit of the earth, 181 km distant at its closest point and 327 at its furthest (apogee), and to have landed in the region of Saratov 1 hour and 48 minutes after the launch.18 This propaganda account of the beginning of manned space flight sounds rather too good to be true. According to it there had been not a single failure and also no suborbital flights. Instead Gagarin, now hastily promoted to the rank of Major, was said to have taken off in Vostok 1 for a first and entirely successful orbit around the earth after which he is supposed to have landed safe and sound in the Soviet Union. Research thus far has shown, however, that in reality the Soviet Union had not yet come to grips at all with manned space flights. Yet here was Gagarin appearing in the Soviet space programme like the famous phoenix rising from the ashes. The only question is: Did he really make that flight? Or is it rather the case that the actual space flights were not publicized whereas the publicized space flights didn’t actually take place?

An unremarkable man

Who was Yuri Gagarin? Was he, for example, carved from the same block as the test pilot and fêted air ace Vladimir Ilyushin? His curriculum vitae shows a huge leap forward in his life from a particular point in time. He is said to have completed an apprenticeship in a foundry at the age of 17. At 21 he appears to have been doing some kind of skilled work in the Saratov region. Aged 20, in 1954, he became a member of a flying club. Ten months later he achieved his first solo flight in a single-engine, two-seater training aircraft, a Yak-18. Thus, five-and-a-half years before his flight in space, Gagarin was a young beginner, still wet behind the ears, in the cockpit of a single-engine flying contraption. Yet in the four years that followed he is said to have served in the flight regiment of the North Sea Fleet. Unfortunately his career is not well documented. There is only one picture of him during his time at the foundry – a painting. Might one ask how many foundry apprentices had their portrait painted during their apprenticeship? A photo from his time at the flying club shows him not in the cockpit but cleaning it.

And there is a group photo showing Gagarin as an airman, but it’s a forgery. His left arm looks deformed, and his head is not straight on the neckline of his flying suit.

Only three pictures exist showing Gagarin in a cockpit, in one of which he appears to be a physical and psychological wreck. I shall refer to this again later.

Yuri Gagarin at the foundry (left) and cleaning a cockpit (right)

Group photo with Gagarin showing the added flying suit, details

At the end of his military service with the North Sea Fleet, Gagarin applied on 9 December 1959 for a job with the Soviet Union’s cosmonaut corps. After this everything went very quickly. He began training as a cosmonaut only three months later. And three months after that he joined the Communist Party. A year after beginning his training he passed the cosmonauts’ exam, on 3 March 1961. Only just in time, for five weeks later there he was – the first man in space.

The question is what motivated Gagarin to embark on this rapid career path, and what made him capable of succeeding? Perhaps, as we are told, it was because he was an ‘enthusiastic pilot’.19 But it cannot have been this, for when he died in March 1968, seven years after his supposed space flight, he had still only completed 340 flying hours, 75 of which were as a jet pilot.20 Evidently he had not been in a cockpit very often during his time with the air force regiment of the North Sea Fleet – and neither was this a frequent occurrence after his flight in space. In this respect Gagarin was a misfit not only in the Soviet corps of cosmonauts but also among all the space flyers of that era. His cosmonaut comrades had an average of 1500 jet flying hours under their belts,21 and American astronauts an average of 5000 hours.22 By contrast, Gagarin probably collected the larger part of his few flying hours after his space flight. He was also a complete novice at parachute jumping. In the years prior to his cosmonaut training he had only done five jumps.23 In comparison, to take the parachute exam in Germany you have to have done about 30 jumps.

So how did this particular man get ahead of all other cosmonauts and astronauts? Did he perhaps possess other superior capacities? ‘His appearance as an exception is not expressed through any special success in individual skills,’ wrote his biographer, Gerhard Kowalski. Gagarin, he said, was a cosmic multi-discipline athlete who became world champion ‘despite not having won first place in any individual discipline’.24 This sounds like a very diplomatic way of saying that Gagarin had no superior qualities that made him into a cosmonaut. According to Gherman Titov, who is claimed to have become the second Soviet citizen in space after Gagarin, in August 1961 there appears to have been ‘something symbolic about Gagarin’s biography: the son of a peasant who survived the terrible days of the Fascist occupation, trainee at a craft college, worker, student, member of a flying club, aviator. This was a path followed by many thousands of Yuri’s generation.’25

Was Gagarin really no more than an average person whose life was symbolic? Is his flying nothing but a bit of embellishment helped along by a few flying hours? Was this how the perfect Communist cosmo-Frankenstein was created: peasant’s son, victim of Fascism, craftsman, worker, student, and then something brave (let’s say, aviator)? Looked at like this, half of Soviet society must have felt inexorably drawn to identifying with Gagarin.

The matter of his one-year training as a cosmonaut also fails to ring true. If it had really taken place, why was he only shown two days before launch ‘what security measures applied to which circumstances’?26 Was such a thing not part of the training? And why was he only told at the last moment over the radio that five minutes would pass between the command ‘activate the starting switch’ and the actual firing up of the engines? Was this, too, not included in his training? None of this fits with a person who has undergone a year-long training as a cosmonaut. It would sit more believably with someone who has been picked up by the scruff of his neck like a rabbit and put into a capsule – which perhaps wasn’t even intended to be launched at all.

Why was the hatch of the spacecraft opened again once Gagarin was already inside it? The officially described mishap cannot have been the reason since there was no such mishap. Allegedly a warning light had shown at 0758 hrs that the hatch of the spacecraft was not properly sealed, so it had been reopened. But nothing alarming was found, so it was then closed once more. Strange to say, it was only now that the hatch was prepared for take-off by having its seal tested:

Something called a suction instrument is applied, a kind of strong round bowl that is attached over the outside of the hatch. Then the air is pumped out of it so that it becomes firmly pressed to the cabin wall. Any change in pressure would signal that the hatch was not sealed. But this did not occur.27

So why was this test not carried out after the hatch had been closed the first time? For of course at that point no one would have known about the impending mishap. Or could they? Was no launch planned at that stage?

Anyone venturing to discover the truth about Gagarin’s flight is liable to drown in a sea of contradictory information, descriptions and versions. The closer you get to the object, the more it seems to recede into the distance. You find one of the most spectacular events in human history disappearing into a grey zone of information and disinformation. Gerhard Kowalski’s account, Die Gagarin-Story already quoted, also gets lost in the midst of this grey zone. In spite of numerous absurdities and proved falsifications Kowalski refuses to accept that Gagarin’s flight is basically slipping through his fingers. Despite what he himself calls a thicket of ‘intended false information, half-truths and lies in which Soviet propaganda finally got itself entangled’, Kowalski stuck undeterred to the notion that the flight was of historic importance.28

With the help of information which he and also others have supplied I shall presume to paint a somewhat different picture of that first manned space flight in human history. So let’s now set out to follow the trail of Yuri Gagarin’s flight.

The flight of Yuri G.

What evidence is there, actually, to prove that on 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin set off on the first space flight in human history? ‘Actually,’ remarks Kowalski quite rightly, ‘one might have assumed that the Soviets would have been highly interested in presenting to the world that tremendous launch into the age of space travel in words, pictures and sound. But one could not have been more mistaken.’29 Most of the written material, he says, was not assembled until after the flight, and some of the pictures did not appear until several years later. Quite incredible! Did the Soviet Union really accomplish the greatest achievement since the first flight in a propeller aircraft without having any still or film cameras at the ready? One would have expected them to be rather keen on proving their achievement, once accomplished, but the Soviet Union had not the slightest interest in doing so.

Let’s take a look at the triumphal celebration of Gagarin in Moscow on 14 April 1961, two days after his flight. As was the custom in Communist countries, people held huge photos aloft as they marched along, including some of Gagarin. How strange that there were none of Gagarin the cosmonaut. In fact there were only two pictures. One showed him in the pristine new uniform of a Major. And the other as a parachutist during his time at the Saratov flying club, so again not as a cosmonaut.30 Somehow or other there appear to have been no photos of Gagarin as a cosmonaut to hand. And it was the same at the post-flight press conference on 15 April 1961 for which the world press had gathered. Not even there were the Soviets able to muster a few pictures. Gagarin himself pointed out to the astonished journalists that there was ‘not a single camera and no photographic equipment’ on board the space capsule. No photographs had been taken, ‘so nothing exists that could be published’.31