Documents / FOIA release
This is a Joint Publications Research Service translation, report JPRS-USP-91-002, of a KOMSOMOLSKAYA PRAVDA article from 22 September 1990 by correspondent Ye. Chernykh in Prague. It takes up a Hungarian book by I. Nemere that claims Yuriy Gagarin did not make the 12 April 1961 flight. It quotes the Czechoslovak space writer Karel Patsner, who rejects the rumors of hidden cosmonaut deaths, citing James Oberg, Charles Sheldon's congressional report and CIA archive documents. UFOs come up only in passing, as an outdated sensation.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 3 of 10 Page 2 prepared to take whatever steps were necessary to preserve the legend and the eternal "'truths." It wasn't until a press conference at the end of August that journalists learned the name of the author of the sensational book. 5. They have lived for some time in the fraternal countries of socialism, and I can visualize the reaction. They are removing the statues of Lenin and defiling the memorials to the Soviet soldiers. Now they have even gone after Gagarin. 6. But it is someone "'from among them'" who came forward in defense of Gagarin--the famous Czechoslovakian journalist and author of 12 books on the space program, Karel Patsner. His article has just been published in Prague by the newspaper MLADA FRONTA DNES. One detail: after 1968, Karel had big problems. So, wish as you might, you cannot regard him as a staunch Marxist ready to defend "'communist legends'" at any price. 7. ``To tell the truth, doubts about Yuriy Gagarin being the first person in space are nothing new,'' wrote K. Patsner. ``This began back in the mid-1960s. All the rumors that appeared in the Western press were filed by the American writer, D. Oberg, in his book 'Secret Soviet Accidents,' published in 1988. Cosmonaut Lodovskiy died in 1957 while taking off from the Kapustin Yar cosmodrome. In that same year, Shiborin died. Two years later, there was the death of Mitkov. A cosmonaut, still unknown to this day, crashed in May of 1960. In September of 1960, while Khrushchev was giving a speech at the UN, an unknown cosmonaut died, identified at one point as Petr Dolgov. On 4 February 1961, some Western amateur radio operators picked up a transmission from an astonishing Soviet satellite of the 'beating of a human heart,' which faded away shortly thereafter. According to some reports, two Soviet cosmonauts were circling the Earth and, according to others, there were three of them: Belokonev, Kachur and Grachev. In early April 1961, Vladimir Ilyushin flew around the earth three times, but he was injured during the return. In mid-May 1961, some amateur radio operators in Europe caught a weak call for help coming, apparently, from two Soviet cosmonauts. On 14 October 1961, a Soviet craft with a crew was lost in the vast reaches of space. In November of 1962, Italian amateur radio operators heard SOS signals from space. According to some sources, that's when Belokonev died. On 19 November 1963, an attempt to place a second female cosmonaut into orbit ended tragically. One or more Soviet experimenters, again according to the reports of Italian amateur radio operators, died in April of 1964. 8. ''Oberg himself was previously engaged in military missile research and worked at NASA's space center. He emphasized that all those reports were absolutely false.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 5 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.