Mostly for KRJALK

[cheshirenoir]

Conspiracy AND spaceflight
The Italian Brothers who recorded the Russian spaceshots (and also the accidents)
(Via Unca Warren)
Please note this is a Fortean Times article, and thus is not exactly the most trustworthy of all sources.

Comments

[krjalk.livejournal.com]

I was calling bullshit on that article right from the word go. It would have been impossible for them to record as much of Glenn's mission as they claim, especially the parts after the end of radio blackout during reentry - they would have had no line of sight. The implication that a frozen cosmonaut reached solar system escape velocity and is now somewhere beyond Pluto is gobsmackingly ludicrous. And on it goes.

James Oberg and some of his friends have tried to address all of this. They're not overly impressed.

Mind you, some of the amateur groups listening in on the Soviets did some real, verified work of amazing quality. Google or Wiki for Geoff Perry and the Kettering Group. I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Perry back in the 80s. Truly amazing stuff, done with the help of school kids, simple radio gear and stopwatches. They deduced the existence of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome by determining the orbital elements of one of the first satellites launched from there. They regularly released info to the press that the US already knew about but was keeping classified. Must have pissed them off no end.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Why do you diss the Fortean Times? The research seems to be about as good as you are ever going to get on those events, as is often the case with the Fortean Times -- the difficulty in verification lies with the subject, not the source.

[krjalk.livejournal.com]

The research seems to be about as good as you are ever going to get on those events

The research seems to have begun and ended with a handful of interviews, overly credulous ones at that. The recordings described by the brothers are flat out physically impossible, and their claims about lost cosmonauts show no knowledge of the strictures of spaceflight, such as delta-v limits. There are any number of obvious howlers apparent to someone with a modicum of on-topic knowledge. *cough*

the difficulty in verification lies with the subject, not the source.

Not really. They are hardly the only group of amateurs to have tracked early Soviet missions. Geoff Perry, who I mention above, is way, way more credible that the Judica-Cordiglias, and he certainly never reported anything like what they claim. The link I provided above from Oberg's site fisks the entire FT article.

FT don't fact check their articles, they make a point of providing a forum for alternate viewpoints that are then left to sink or swim on their merits. David Percy, one of the big moon hoax claimants I mentioned at Swancon, generated a hell of a lot of mail when he wrote the feature article for an issue in 1999 explaining his theories. Almost all of the responses were extremely negative, and were accompanied by a fairly high degree of criticism aimed at FT for publishing the rubbish in the first place. They ended up doing a follow up feature article a few months later that presented a much more balanced version of events.

Most of the time the articles are better researched, but problems can arise when testimony is accepted uncritically on the assumption they do indeed know what they are talking about.