Dr Tom Ellis talks about the myth of the Lost Cosmonauts, why this symbol has had such staying power, and what it tells us about Western perceptions about the Soviet Union and its space programme. Topics include:

-American reactions to Yuri Gagarin’s flight

-The secrecy of the Soviet space programme breeding rumours and myths

-The idea of the ‘communist mind’ and communism as a ‘secular religion’

-Robert Heinlein and the Lost Cosmonauts

-‘Yurimania’ and promoting Yuri Gagarin as a sex symbol

-The Italian Battista brothers’ claims of recording lost cosmonauts

-The Lost Cosmonaut image in film and art as a representation of memories of the Soviet state

-Vladimir Komarov, the ‘real’ lost cosmonaut

-Lost cosmonauts as a political idea vs a cultural idea

LINKS

Buy Me A Coffee

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wideatlantic

Tom Ellis on Twitter

https://twitter.com/Tomsomol

Tom Ellis’s Blog

https://redskyatdawn.wordpress.com/

Gagarin And The Lost Moon

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v24g

Tsar-Bomb album

https://heimatderkatastrophe.bandcamp.com/album/hdk-68-bajkonur

Imogen Knox’ article on Haxan

https://terribleimaginations.wordpress.com/2021/04/24/haxan-rationalism-and-retrospective-diagnosis/

Bobcat Goldthwait’s American Bigfoot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTY8xinMrSI

Conspiracy Culture, Peter Knight, 2000

https://www.routledge.com/Conspiracy-Culture-From-Kennedy-to-The-X-Files/Knight-Knight/p/book/9780415189781

Hermann Oberth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth

Roadside Picnics Article by darmon Richter: Chernobyl and the Falcon Lake UFO Incident

https://www.exutopia.com/chernobyl-ufos-falcon-lake/

The Space Suit Film, Gary Westfahl, 2012

https://books.google.ie/books/about/The_Spacesuit_Film.html?id=kej2ygAACAAJ&redir_esc=y

Supposed Lost Cosmonaut Recordings

http://web.archive.org/web/20180309024747/http://www.lostcosmonauts.net/man.htm

http://web.archive.org/web/20180309024745/http://www.lostcosmonauts.net/wom.htm

Sven Grahn’s Article about Torre Bert

http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Torre/TorreB.html

Into The Silent Sea: Short Lost Cosmonaut Film

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2rmTVKU37Y

The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling, Andrew L. Jenks, 2012

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13226355-the-cosmonaut-who-couldn-t-stop-smiling