The truth behind Soviet ghost cosmonauts #shorts #history

One of the weirdest rumors to come out of the Soviet Union in the 1960s was the idea of ghost cosmonauts. This is basically the idea that there were cosmonauts who launched into space before Yuri Gagarin, but because they didn't survive or something happened on the mission, their existence was completely covered up. One of the stories comes from the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker. It said that on April 7th or 8th of 1961, just a few days before Yuri Gagarin went to orbit, another cosmonaut was launched on a flight and everything was perfect. Except he came back somehow deranged with space madness and it was such a bad result that he had to be completely hidden from the public for the rest of his life. The newspaper gave the cosmonaut's name as Vladimir Ilyushin and he was a real guy. He was a test pilot. He just never trained to be a cosmonaut, never went into space. He completely existed and somehow got wrapped up in this weird story. Another strange story comes from Dr. Vladimir Goliakovsky. He was called in to treat a badly burned man who was rushed to the hospital under the name Sergeyev Ivanov. The doctor wasn't given any information about what happened, no idea about who he worked for. He just knew because he was so heavily guarded that this man was very important. The rumors seeped out that he was badly injured in some kind of cosmonaut test, which wasn't wrong, but his name was wrong. It wasn't Ivanov, it was Valentin Bondarenko, and he was injured in an oxygen fire during a pressure test. As if to fuel the rumors, his death was quietly hushed up, which is not surprising for the Soviet Union. At the time, any mission that failed was given a different designation so it could be hidden from the West. That way, the Soviets could present the impression that their program never failed, that it was just all wins. And that gave NASA and the United States a feeling that they were falling even more deeply behind. Soviet propaganda was a huge part of the Cold War and of the space race, and the rumors of these phantom cosmonauts kind of feed into that. And it's honestly a great reminder that there's a lot of that still out there.