On April 12, 1961-55 years ago today-Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched into the great beyond, becoming the first human in space. When he came back to Earth, Gagarin was looked upon as not just a hero, but the very embodiment of the Soviet Union’s power. Streets were named after him. Monuments were erected. Khrushchev called him the Russian Christopher Columbus.
And then he was gone.
Less than seven years after his history-making mission, Gagarin died in a plane crash at only 38 years old. The cosmonaut and his flight instructor Vladimir Seryogin were flying a routine training exercise when they were lost, and the mysterious circumstances of the wreck have inspired a half-century of wild speculation. With little more than Soviet-sponsored reports, KGB investigations, and long withheld testimony as explanations, conspiracy theories sprung up to explain why a plane piloted by two experienced Russian airmen suddenly just fell out of the sky. So what really happened to the first man in space?
In a Flash
There are things we know conclusively about Yuri Gagarin’s final moments. He awoke early on March 27, 1968 to continue his “retraining” as a fighter pilot. (Prior to his days as a cosmonaut he had been a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force, so this was a formality.) Gagarin was stationed at Chkalovsky Airport, about 20 miles northeast of Moscow. By all accounts, his retraining was going well. Gagarin was scheduled to fly three practice missions in a Russian-built MiG-15 training jet that day-two solo and one with Seryogin, which was the day’s first flight.
“It was not their fault. They were following the instructions to the letter.”
It was a rainy and windy morning when he boarded a bus on bound for the airfield and realized he was missing his identification. Always superstitious, Gagarin told the people around him this was a bad omen. A little after 10 a.m., Gagarin and Seryogin took off in the two-seater jet and headed to the flight zone in weather conditions that were probably deteriorating. A few minutes later, Gagarin came over the radio to say he’d completed the exercise, which included barrell rolls and vertical loops, and was heading back to base.
Then, radio silence.
After ten minutes of no sighting or communication with the aircraft, the base dispatched rescue teams to seek the jet. Around 3 p.m., crews found the burning, charred plane among the trees and snow of the Russian countryside. The accident looks unsurvivable. While Seryogin’s body was identified, there was hope that Gagarin had ejected before impact. That hope dissipated the next day when Gagarin’s remains were found not far from the plane’s wreckage. His ashes were buried alongside other Soviet luminaries along the Kremlin Wall.
With the world mourning, Soviet authorities hastily assembled a commission to determine the cause of the crash. In November of 1968, the USSR’s State Commission filed a 29-volume investigative report that was basically inconclusive. Proposing several theories but never providing irrefutable evidence for any of them, the report said the pilots probably swerved to avoid hitting a weather balloon or a bird, which caused them to go into a tailspin from which they never recovered. In other words, it was pilot error, not a systematic or mechanical problem. Shortly thereafter, Communist party head Leonid Brezhnev closed the investigation and deemed it top secret. The people who investigated and wrote the report were told not to publish their own conclusions because it could “unsettle” the nation.
Drunks, Double Agents, and UFOs
A national hero dies under mysterious circumstances. The report can’t pin down a reason. A restrictive government seals the results. It’s the perfect recipe for conspiracy theories, and Gagarin’s death inspired ideas that persisted for decades, some more plausible than others.
One said Gagarin was drunk. Another proposed that he and Seryogin were joy-riding and taking potshots at deer below. A persistent rumor was that Gagarin was sabotaged by Brezhnev, jealous of the cosmonaut’s popularity. Maybe a UFO encounter caused the crash (no doubt fueled by Gagarin supposed belief in them).
The conspiracy theories got wilder from there. Perhaps Gagarin was poisoned by the CIA, or was a secret CIA agent himself. Or he actually survived the crash, only to be hidden out in a Soviet psychiatric ward until his real death in 1990. There are people who believe he’s still alive today, his identity protected for all these decades by intensive plastic surgery. The rumors got so numerous that the KGB did its own secret investigation into the Gagarin crash, discounting each and every one.
As preposterous as these rumors were, they were grounded in a real place: Gagarin’s troubled feelings about his own meteoric rise from farm boy to Soviet hero. Born in 1934 in the small farm village of Klushino, he was a young boy when World War II broke out. After the war, he was accepted into Air Force training school and graduated as a fighter pilot in 1957, the same year Sputnik was launched. He impressed everyone he met with his competence, likability, and persistent smile. Those traits certainly helped him in 1960, when the farm boy was chosen to make history.
When Gagarin ejected from the Vostok on April 12, 1961 and parachuted back down to Earth (something the Russians didn’t reveal until 1971), Gagarin was ill-prepared for what was waiting for him on the ground. He was propped up by the Communist Party as a superstar, a propaganda tool and a man whom a nation should look to as inspiration. This wasn’t easy for Gagarin.
These letters made Gagarin “realize that the Soviet Union was far from perfect”
“He received a huge number of letters from ordinary people, many of them asking for help of one kind or another,” Piers Bizony, co-author of Spaceman: The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, told Popular Mechanics. These letters made Gagarin “realize that the Soviet Union was far from perfect.” As a 1999 Air & Space article explains, the cosmonaut soon became more symbol than man, ferried around the world as proof of Soviet Union’s superiority. He began to drink, womanize, and take wild risks, to the point that one friend wrote in his diary in 1968 that it was all “steadily erasing his charming smile from his face.” And then, about a year before his own crash, Gagarin’s good friend died in a fiery accident of his own, one Gagarin became convinced was totally avoidable.
By 1968, though, Gagarin had stopped drinking, trying to prove to others-and himself-that he could be a pilot once again. “The superstar business had exhausted him,” Bizony said, “and he was very keen to prove to cosmonaut colleagues that he was still in the game.” He wouldn’t get the chance.
Out From Behind the Curtain
With the Soviet Union in the rearview mirror, we’re learning all kinds of new things about the space program behind the Iron Curtain, and that including what happened the day Yuri Gagarin died.
In 2003, a secret KGB investigation was uncovered that pointed to the failure of the ground crew to properly communicate information to the pilots as the cause of Gagarin’s crash. According to the report, those crew provided wrong weather reports and failed to tell Gagarin and Seryogin they had wing-mounted fuel tanks, which made the maneuvers they were doing especially dangerous.
In 2010, Russian researchers told Air & Space they believed a faulty air vent led to a quick descent and a crash. According to their findings, the pilots discovered an open air vent in the cockpit midflight. In an attempt to rectify the situation, Gagarin followed the exact procedures set forth in the airplane’s operations manual. It called for a rather extreme descent to 6,500 feet, but since rate-of-descent limits was not known yet (in 1975, it was clarified to be 164 feet per second), Gagarin dove too fast. This caused both men to black out and the plane to crash. “It was not their fault,” a retired Soviet Air Force Colonel told the magazine, “They were following the instructions to the letter.”
But the most recent and perhaps the most convincing development happened in 2013, when prominent Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov came forward with his version of events. He was at the military airbase that fateful day, in charge of parachute training. Recruited to work on the investigation, he had access to all the findings, but was never able to explain publicly what he knew.
The truth, according to Leonov, was that a Soviet Su-15-a much larger aircraft than Gagarin’s MiG-15-violated the smaller plane’s airspace, causing it to roll and the pilots to lose control. Simulations have verified that Leonov’s conclusion is possible. Other recently released Soviet-sponsored reports do, too. Bizony told us that Leonov’s account is legitimate, “It was essentially a very ordinary accident,” he said. “The authorities may well have been embarrassed by the failures in close-range air traffic control, but that’s about as far as any ‘conspiracy’ notions can be stretched.”
Today there are more than 500,000 man-made things in space, ranging from satellites to junk to an International Space Station. On April 12, 1961, there was just one: Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok 1. While the truth about why he came crashing down to Earth may never be fully revealed, for many, Gagarin is still among the stars.
