The Lost Cosmonauts Recordings

Summary

In the early 1960s two Italian brothers, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia, said they had recorded Soviet cosmonauts dying on secret space missions. When Soviet records opened after 1991, no such missions or cosmonauts were in them, and the heartbeat recording does not match how Soviet spacecraft sent such data.

The brothers ran a real listening station and picked up real signals. The dying cosmonauts are the part that has never been found: not in the archives, not in the memoirs, and not in the radio technology of the time.

What is documented

The brothers. Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia were radio enthusiasts in Turin when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in 1957. They built receivers from war-surplus equipment and later ran a listening station called Torre Bert outside the city. Sven Grahn, who has written a detailed technical history of their claims, describes an array of six Yagi antennas, a US war-surplus receiver and a rotating shortwave antenna, with equipment donated by the Geloso radio company. He accepts that they "did run a tracking station and picked up signals from various spacecraft."

The claims. Among the recordings the brothers said they made:

• 28 November 1960: a Morse message, "SOS to the whole world", from a spacecraft whose retrorockets, they said, had fired in the wrong direction and sent it away from Earth.
• 2 to 4 February 1961: the heartbeat and forced breathing of a dying cosmonaut.
• 17 May 1961: a voice saying, in their rendering, "Conditions growing worse, why don't you answer? We are going slower".
• 14 June 1963: a female voice, with the claim that Valentina Tereshkova had been launched two days before the official date.
• A woman cosmonaut crying out as her capsule burned up on re-entry. According to Jeff Scott of Aerospaceweb.org, this story first appeared in Corriere della Sera in March 1965, dated to a flight in November 1963; later versions moved it to May 1961.

The publicity. In 1965 Reader's Digest presented their story as fact, according to a 2020 article in Vice. In 2006 the brothers published a book, Dossier Sputnik. In 2020 Giovanni Battista, then 80, told the story again to Vice; Achille had died.

The flights that did happen. The first human spaceflight was Yuri Gagarin's, on 12 April 1961, and the first woman to orbit the Earth was Valentina Tereshkova, on 16 June 1963, according to the United Nations. Two of the brothers' distress calls, in November 1960 and February 1961, therefore come before any acknowledged human flight.

The archives. After the Soviet Union's collapse, archives, memoirs and interviews became available. The space writer James Oberg wrote in 2007 that they "establish quite conclusively that the claims (and names) of such dead cosmonauts have no reality." Real accidents had been hidden: Scott lists the death of the trainee cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko and the Nedelin disaster of 1960 among Soviet secrets revealed later.

The technical checks. Grahn points out that heart rate and breathing were "never transmitted directly on the Vostok/Voskhod voice link"; they went as telemetry, and he asks why failed flights would have used a different system from successful ones. For the SOS craft, he calculated that escaping Earth after a wrongly aimed retrofire would have needed a mass ratio of 3.3, "more than twice its dry mass as propellant", which would have put the whole vehicle at more than 13 tonnes in orbit, beyond what the Vostok rocket could lift. He describes the May 1961 voice as "so garbled that it is virtually impossible to make out individual words".

Leading explanations

No lost cosmonauts. Established as far as the records allow. The post-Soviet disclosures show no such missions or deaths, while the accidents that really were concealed have since come to light. Oberg wrote in 2007: "No space historian today believes that any of these claimed events actually happened."

Real signals, embellished claims (Sven Grahn's account; well supported, not established recording by recording). Grahn thinks the brothers received genuine signals and then, having made "fantastic claims", were "trapped" into producing more sensations, with journalists eager for stories. Oberg called their 2006 book "nothing more than a lengthy self-indulgent fantasy". What each tape actually contains has not been settled in any source the registry has read.

Secret failed flights (the brothers' claim; rejected). It requires crewed missions before the first acknowledged one, transmissions in a form Soviet spacecraft did not use and, for the SOS, a spacecraft heavier than the rocket could lift. It has left no trace in the archives.

Current status

Debunked. The recordings exist, and some of what the brothers heard was real. What they said the recordings were, the last words of cosmonauts on secret missions, does not survive the opening of the Soviet records or a check of how Soviet spacecraft transmitted. The case stays in the registry because it shows how a genuine hobby, a secretive state and a hungry press can produce a story that outlives its evidence.

A Soviet document recording any of the claimed flights would reopen it.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.