On a snowy, blustery morning in March 1968, a two-man MiG-15 UTI jet took off from Chkalov air force base outside Moscow on a routine training flight. Barely ten minutes later, the aircraft’s pilot radioed air traffic control, announcing it was cutting its flight short and requesting permission to land. Then, the transmission went dead. At nearby Kirzhach airfield, a group of cosmonauts undergoing parachute training heard two loud explosions in the distance, and dispatched a flight of six helicopters to investigate. Three hours later, the search team discovered a smoking crater in a birch forest just outside the village of Kirzhach. And though the aircraft had been all but vaporized on impact, it did not take long to identify the pilots. One was Colonel Vladimir Seryogin, an experienced test pilot, flight instructor, and war hero who had flown more than 200 combat missions during the Second World War. The other was possibly the most famous man in the Soviet Union - if not the world: Colonel Yuri Gagarin, who seven years earlier on April 12, 1961 had made history by becoming the first human to travel beyond the atmosphere and orbit the earth. The death of this national hero at the age of only 34 shocked the Soviet people and sent the nation into mourning. It also raised questions as to the exact circumstances of his death - questions that linger to the present day. Was it a simple accident? A case of negligence or pilot error? Or were there more sinister forces at play? This is the story of the mysterious death of the first man in space.

Author: Gilles Messier

Host: Simon Whistler

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