The Mysterious "Lost Cosmonaut" Recording | Random Thursday

the space race of the 1960's was tight like real tight in fact Yuri Gagarin went up in April 12 1961 and the u.s. followed really close behind only 23 days later with Alan Shepard and similarly the Soviets launched the first woman into space valentina Tereshkova in 1963 in the US followed right behind was Sally Ride 20 years later seriously 20 years but seriously valentina was a badass she was only 26 years old at the time and she got the job because she was an avid parachutist and the early Vostok designs actually required the cosmonaut to parachute out of the capsule after re-injury turned out they didn't wind up doing that but still she went up into space she spent three days doing 48 orbits around the earth and then when she landed she landed on the border of Kazakhstan and China and was found by some villagers who invited her for dinner which she did valentina certainly deserves her place in space history but some people believe that she wasn't actually the first woman in space there may have been someone before her someone who tragically died during reentry and someone whose name has been completely lost to history but whose final words were recorded on audiotape Sputnik went into orbit in 1957 panic ensued throughout the Western Hemisphere for the first time there was a Soviet communist presence in space above us turns out there wasn't really anything to worry about with Sputnik anyway all Sputnik really did was just send out a message a little beep through a radio signal that the Soviets actually published and anybody could go and listen to and this was something that the US did later when they put up the Explorer 1 satellite they published the the frequency the radio frequency so people could listen to the signals and this kind of created a bit of a side fed which was people listening for signals for satellites just like the whole space race was a craze everybody was following it everybody was into it it also kind of started the secondary craze of people creating radio listening stations to listen to the satellites that have gone up into outer space one of the most successful teams at this were the Italian brothers Achille and Giovanni Utica Cordelia it's a lot of syllables these guys were excited about the possibility of listening to these satellites that were going overhead so they set up sort of a makeshift listening station in their home they picked up the first satellite Sputnik and then they later picked up the Explorer 1 satellite they also picked up signals from Sputnik 2 which actually had a dog on board Lika and they actually recorded this sound which they believe to be the heartbeat of Lika [Applause] their success at capturing and recording some of these satellites actually got them a little bit of Fame around there their hometown there and they they use this fame to invest a little bit of money into actually buying an Old World War two concrete bunker and setting up their own listening station there that they called Torre Burt in at Torre Burt they did some groundbreaking radio listening stuff they actually were able to figure out how to calculate the direction and speed of a satellite by measuring its Doppler effect the shift in the Doppler effect as the satellite passed overhead and along the way they also captured some very strange and unexpected signals on November 28th 1960 they picked up the signal of an SOS which is the International distress call and the thing that was interesting about it was that it didn't have that Doppler shift so that they could measure the direction of it it just kept growing fainter and fainter and fainter which to them meant that it might have been a human being in a capsule that was flying away from Earth that maybe was going too fast and escaped the Earth's gravity and was just traveling away from Earth and that's why the signal kept getting weaker and in February of 1961 they picked up a signal that sounded to them like the heartbeat of a man and maybe some gasping breaths [Music] [Applause] what's interesting about those recordings both of those took place on the same day and from the same you know mission that they believe that they captured but right after that the Soviets announced that they did have an unmanned craft that crashed in the Soviet Union so there's a possibility that maybe there was an actual person on there and of course they listened in and recorded Yuri Gagarin's flight just a couple months later in April 1961 but the most mysterious one by far was one that they recorded in May of 1961 just a month later this one was the voice of a Russian woman so it's calling out in distress saying that she felt hot that she could see flames and was asking if she was going to crash the brothers interpreted this to be the final words of a female cosmonaut as she was burning up in the atmosphere [Music] unlike the previous instance where they recorded something and then the Soviets reported an unmanned craft crashing there were no records at all released by the Soviet space agency anyway of any kind of launches or any kind of mission or any kind of failures that happen at that time so in a perfect world that would be the end of it they said it didn't happen therefore it didn't happen but the Soviets had a history a very known history of covering up space accidents you know again the stakes were super high the space race was basically a proxy war between the East and the West and the Soviets had their own state news agency so they were able to control the narrative in a way that Western countries just couldn't in fact there are now well-documented cases that have come up when documents have been Declassified after the fall of Soviet Union that showed that they did actually cover up many space accidents during that time some Western sources claim that at least 11 different accidents occurred fatal accidents occurred between 1961 and 1967 that were later covered up by the Soviet Union and those are just the ones that they've uncovered we also know that the Soviets had painted some cosmonauts out of official pictures which is something that was done back in Stalin's regime when they wanted to erase somebody from history very Orwellian there's also a story that came up of a cosmonaut named Vladimir Ilyushin who claimed he went up five days before Gagarin but his his craft entered too early and he actually landed in China where he was held captive for a year now this is all super murky we don't know what's true and what's not true because they covered up a lot of stuff and the the truth has been obscured but it's not impossible to think that this recording of a female cosmonaut could have actually been a failed mission of course there are some problems with this whole scenario one of them is that as a capsule re-enters the atmosphere the atmosphere around it ionizes and that causes a radio blackout so if this person was actually burning up through the atmosphere there's no way that the brothers would have been able to record the radio signals coming out of it the other thing is that even after the fall of Soviet Union a whole lot of documents were Declassified there was no record whatsoever of any female astronaut or cosmonaut that went up in the early 1960s and the other is after the fall of the Soviet Union a lot of documents got Declassified a lot of information got on earth about some of these covered up accidents and nothing was in there about this particular mission and finally a lot of people questioned whether or not these two amateur radio astronomers could have picked up on this signal when all these other major listening stations around the world run by a huge governments like the United States with a lot more power and a lot more sensitivity weren't able to pick up on this so some people think they faked it you know they got a lot of attention with their recordings and maybe this was a way to just sort of keep that attention so what do you think this was do you think the USSR actually put a female cosmonaut up into space and she died on reentry do you think that these guys made it up do you think that they just recorded something else that could have been who knows what what do you think talk about down in the comments thanks so much for watching if this is your first time here maybe check out this video Google thinks you'll like it and maybe check out some of my other videos I come back with stuff it's on science and mysterious topics every Monday and every Thursday if you liked this t-shirt I got many more available at the store answers with Jo comm slash shirts there's all kinds of cool fun nerdy stuff that I think people will tell you you look cool in because I get that a lot I have gotten it all right with that you guys go out now have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 880,032

Rating: 4.7919879 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, random thursday, space travel, space mystery, lost cosmonauts, judica-cordiglia brothers, space history, sputnik, Laika, Sputnik 2, Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, Soviet space history, vostok, alan sheppard, space race

Id: RZidFWLrLnU

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019