Lost Cosmonauts

Flyboy Will wrote:

Yes, this is my original research. However I'm extremely surprised that no one else has reviewed the tapes from this point of view and debunked them up until now.

Take this recording on their site for example: http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/wom.htm

The woman speaks in broken Russian with a heavy non-native accent. It doesn't sound like any regional accent from the former USSR, Georgian, Estonian, etc. I've never heard Italian-accented Russian, but I know what Italian-accented English sounds like, and that sounds a whole lot like that. Softened Ls, elongated vowels, general articulation, it all sounds very Italian.

The transcript on the site has some clear translations of phrases that are completely inaudible on the tape. Some of the things listed in the transcript are not heard at all. A very large section ("BREATHING...BREATHING... OXYGEN...OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS)ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL... ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...") from the transcript simply cannot be heard on the tape.

The accent is evident from the very first word. However once we get into complete sentences, broken phrases also pop up all over the place. "OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW" from the transcript is "Наша передача будет теперь" on the tape, which is not only completely wrong from the protocol point of view, it's broken Russian. "I CAN SEE A FLAME!" from the transcript is even more telling. She tries to say "я вижу... пламя", which again is broken Russian, but she pronounces "пламя" wrong - pleh-mya instead of plah-mya, (the word she ends up saying is Russian for "tribe"). To me, the long pause and the slight hesitation with which she says "plehmya" sound very consistent with somebody momentarily stumped by an unfamiliar word.

The Russian is so bad, I hardly even need to get into matters of protocol. The speaker has 0 understanding of Soviet Air Force codewords. She even says "come in" wrong, saying "rah rah rah" (whatever that means) instead of the standard "priyom". She also consistently breaks protocol by never identifying herself and identifying the listener. Compare to Gagarin's transcript, where he begins each phrase with "zarya, this is kedr" and ends each sentence with a "priyom", "come in, over".

Further, she says something completely inane for "I will reenter" - "я вернусь" - which doesn't even translate as reenter but simply as "I will return". Not the phrase one would use for unexpected reentry. While I can see how someone trying to translate "reentry" into Russian would come up with "вернусь", not knowing the proper cosmonaut lingo, the reverse is much less believable, that someone would hear "I will return" in Russian and somehow infer that it meant reentry.

The numbers the woman says throughout the transmission are gibberish. Compare to Gagarin's transcript, which has no random numbers like that. Standard air force protocol, to which Gagarin adheres, is to identify each number with what it is for - altitude, temperature, etc. The very first count-down she does, five to one and then up to five, is again wrong. First of all, Russian count-downs are 1 to 10, and in the other direction (1 to 10 then back to 1). Comm check countdowns must also be clearly identified as such, and ended with a "how do you read, over". Compare to Gagarin's transcript.

Her saying "i feel hot" in broken Russian as "мне жарко" is again wrong. Even if that could be expected once from a distressed person, a native Russian speaker with air force training would not have used that verbiage, and ground controllers would have immediately asked for specific details: cabin pressure, cabin humidity, cabin temperature.

All of this should be immediately obvious to anyone with some understanding of Russian, especially to any native speakers. Wall-to-wall breach of protocol should also be clearly evident to anyone who knows anything about aviation, regardless of language.

Based on the fact that the transcript provides a lot of details that cannot be discerned on the tapes, my guess is that the "transcript" was created first, and then translated and recorded by someone with poor command of the Russian language. And the Fortean Times articles speaks of the Judica-Cordiglia brothers' "younger sister" who "was fluent in Russian".

I find it unbelievable that none of this was pointed out before.

Occam's Razor:

1. Soviets launched a foreign woman into space who communicated with ground control in broken Russian with complete disregard for protocol.

2. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers wrote a script in their native Italian, which immediately betrays their complete lack of understanding of Soviet and international communication protocols. They then had their sister, known to have some understanding of Russian, translate and possibly record a short tape of those pseudo-communications, hoping that their intended audience in Italy would not know Russian well enough to realize they've been duped.

Anonymous wrote:

Native Russian speaker here, a lot of the protocol breaks could be explainable due to being in distress, but "Наша передача будет теперь"? That's not something *any* native or even near-native Russian speaker would ever say. The lack of any identification whatsoever of whom they are and to whom they are speaking to also makes no sense. Finally, the recording is so goddamned staticky that I can barely make anything out, which makes actual voice matching far more difficult, not to mention masks accents quite well, which makes option#2 look even more plausible than it was already when you mentioned it, really. Probably sadly a clever attempt at a hoax.