Quote:That recklessness - and the Soviet Union’s penchant for denials and cover-ups of setbacks and disasters - led to rumors of a top secret Soviet space program that was sending humans into space long before Gagarin’s journey. As far back as 1959 there were stories circulating that the Soviets had lost multiple cosmonauts - including a woman - in attempted suborbital flights.
Some of these rumors came from misunderstandings, such as the 1962 death of Colonel Pyotr Dolgov. Dolgov parachuted from a balloon at almost 94,000 feet but didn’t survive; he hit the visor of his helmet while jumping from the balloon gondola and his suit depressurized, killing him. At least that’s the official story.

Some of the “Lost Cosmonaut” theories have the spacefarers dying in space or on the launchpad, but the conspiracy theory surrounding famed Soviet test pilot Vladimir Ilyushin is much more entertaining. Ilyushin, some claim, beat Gagarin to space by five days, launching on April 7th, 1961.

But Ilyushin’s trip didn’t make the history books because it was a major embarrassment to the USSR, as a malfunction supposedly brought Ilyushin’s capsule down in China. He was taken prisoner and held for a year. There’s some plausibility to this tale, especially when you realize that unlike the US space program the Russians kept their launches secret. Gagarin’s feat was only publicized when he got home safely, so is it impossible that Ilyushin’s mission would be scrubbed from the records? In 1999 Nikita Kruschev’s son told documentary filmmakers that the story was true, but Ilyushin himself never spoke of it, taking the truth to his grave in 2010.

Quote:Of all the notorious myths that have enshrouded the space mission of Yuri Gagarin on Vostok on April 12, 1961, the oldest and most interesting has been the story that his flight was preceded by a secret mission that failed. Most specifically, many people claimed—and as we shall see, still claim—that the first man in space was actually Vladimir Ilyushin, a noted Soviet test pilot and son of the leading aircraft designer.

In 2009 we saw the release of “Fallen Idol: The Yuri Gagarin Conspiracy”, a new program that was an outgrowth of a 1999 documentary, “The Cosmonaut Coverup”, both produced by a veteran team led by Elliott Haimoff of Global Science Productions. It alleged that Vladimir Ilyushin was really the first man to orbit Earth.
This was supposed to have occurred on April 7, 1961, but Ilyushin was off course and badly injured on landing, and came down in China, where he was held prisoner for a full year. The Chinese agreed to cooperate with the USSR’s pretense that Gagarin (launched April 12) was really the first man in orbit.