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 UFOs come up only in passing, as an outdated sensation.
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Document 3 of 10 9. ``However, even Oberg, although a specialist himself, could be wrong. But there are also other sources. Of course, one can't believe the official Soviet sources of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. It is interesting, however, that an emigrant, V. Fedorov, in a critical article about the Soviet space program, published by DER SPIEGEL in 1973, also refuted rumors about allegedly concealed cosmonaut losses. Only one name is mentioned--Yuriy Dolgov. But he, according to Fedorov's data, died while testing a space suit.'' 10. ``It should be stated,'' Karel Patsner continued on, ``that, over the 25 years that I have been traveling to the USSR, I have never heard anything like that from my own friends--scientists, cosmonauts and journalists. Even in conversations at midnight, when wine or cognac had loosened tongues and they talked to me frankly about launch delays, about details as yet unpublished about the deaths of the crews of the Soyuz-1 and the Soyuz-11, about the many accidents of rockets involving people and about the difficulties with the hush-hush moon project. However, there was not even a hint of tragedies involving unknown cosmonauts. As for accidents prior to the end of 1960, they can be ruled out if only for technical reasons. At that time, the Soviets still did not have a readied, tested spacecraft. In fact, the first satellite was launched in October of 1957. But fine, assume that I had not met with 'knowledgeable people' and that those launches were conducted in a special, supersecret sector, so that my informants could not know anything about them. But that is illogical because a tremendous amount of money would have been required to carry out two parallel programs. And the existence of the programs cannot be kept a secret among the specialists.'' 11. Patsner reported in detail about Ya. Golovanov's book "'Kosmonavt nomer odin'" [Cosmonaut No. 1], published in 1986. Discussed in it as well were rumors about our cosmonauts' catastrophes. Back in the spring of 1961, in an American weekly, there appeared a report that, several days prior to the 12th of April, a person had died in space and that Yuriy Gagarin was now playing his role on the ground. Later, in that connection, the name of V. Ilyushin, the ship Rossiya and the date--the 7th of April--came up. But Ilyushin had been in a serious motor vehicle accident back in June of 1960. 12. Does it not seem that the Hungarian writer was raising the old rumors to cause a stir? 13. On the other hand, Patsner still other weighty arguments. Dr. C. Sheldon--chief of the Research Division of the U.S. Library of Congress, until his death considered to be the greatest American expert on the Soviet space--wrote a report for members of congress in
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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.