Before the cosmonaut orbited the Earth, rumors abounded that someone else already had.
Yuri Gagarin trains in the Vostok spacecraft in November 1960, five months before his historic flight.
Everybody knows that Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the moon. Most are also aware that he wasn’t the first to go into space. After all, Alan Shepard paved the way for American astronauts on May 5, 1961, while Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin stole a march by rocketing into Earth orbit a few weeks earlier on April 12. Or did he?
Today Gagarin’s name is cemented in the record books, and he instantly became a national hero across the Soviet Union. Presented as a triumph of the fiercely fought Space Race against the U.S., the 27 year old, who had been chosen just three days before the mission, spent 108 minutes in space, orbited the Earth and returned fit and well following a drama-filled flight.
And yet, before he even embarked on his journey skywards, doubt was seeded in many a person’s mind. For rumors had surfaced that the Soviets had successfully launched a man into space before Gagarin set foot in Vostok 1, and the talk was that one cosmonaut had done so on April 7, just five days earlier.
Dennis Ogden, the Moscow-based correspondent for the British Communist Party newspaper, Daily Worker, reported as such, his story splashed across the publication’s front page with the headline: “The First Man In Space”. It informed readers that the spaceman — “the test-pilot son of a top-ranking aircraft designer” — was “back alive, but suffering from [the] effects of his flight”.
A lost cosmonaut conspiracy theory begins
Gagarin’s feet hadn’t even left the ground when the paper hit the newsstands, and it caused something of a stir, sparking the first whispers of a conspiracy theory which has continued to this day. The Soviet Union denied the reports and instead alerted the press to Gagarin’s subsequent feat. Ogden also reported this, his article again making the splash as he wrote of a “hero’s welcome” and a Soviet Union “wild with joy at [the] first trip outside this world”.
Ogden’s article could have been seen as something akin to a correction; confirmation that he was initially wrong about the flight on April 7. But then French journalist Eduard Bobrovsky followed up on Ogden’s claims and pointed to the man in question as being an accomplished test pilot called Vladimir Ilyushin, while also stating the flight actually took place on March 25.
Trouble is, this mission had — according to the press sources — not gone quite as well as planned. That is why, it has long since been claimed, Ilyushin’s feat was cast aside in favor of Gagarin’s successful launch and landing.
Ilyushin was a Soviet general and a test pilot of high standing. He had broken many speed and altitude records and his father was influential, having designed and built Second World War fighters and bombers. Ilyushin senior had also earned himself a place in government. To that end, his son would have been seen as the perfect person to send into space, his penchant for risk-taking such that the then-34-year-old pilot would have surely relished the task.
And so the story went that his journey outwards on board his spaceship was fine but, after three supposed orbits, Ilyushin’s return went awry. Apparently, his landing was off-course, causing him physical harm and mental anguish. There was even a suggestion that the accident had put him into a coma.
