Why the contention around the US landing a man on the moon in 1969? Was it real? Why did Neil Armstrong disengage from the world after that?

Yet, the Soviets also have their hidden story too. Did they lose their first woman in space back in 1961? Do the Soviets and US have a secret deal to stay quiet regarding what they did or did not do in space?

First Russian Woman Into Space?

One morning in July, 1963, the top brass of the Soviet Union lined up on Lenin’s tomb alongside the five young men who have survived Soviet shots into space, and the sixth member of this unique group — a pretty young girl named Valentina Tereshkova.

Miss Tereshkova had just completed a superb orbital flight around the earth. It was a dangerous trip and in some ways a difficult journey, but she performed well and was being given the cheers she so richly deserved.

There was one major omission in the paeans of praise being heaped upon Miss Tereshkova. She was NOT the first woman into space — she was the first woman to come back from space. There is a difference — and the difference is grim.

While the Soviets were beating the drums for what they called “the first woman into space” — and while the news services around the world were dutifully repeating that propaganda statement, there were many scientists both in and out of the Communist countries who knew the truth ... that the first woman into space never came back.

On the morning of February 17, 1961, a giant Soviet booster blasted off from the Russian base at Baikonur near the Aral Sea. A few minutes after take off, tracking stations outside the Soviet Union had detected the launching and were tracking the flight of the Lunik capsule. This much was routine.

Word had leaked out that the next Soviet space effort would be a manned orbit of the moon, and that may well have been the purpose of the shot on February 17, 1961. If it was intended for a moon shot it failed, because it never attained sufficient speed to escape from the earth’s gravitational pull. It turned into just another orbital launch — and that in turn developed into a tragedy when the Russians were unable to bring the capsule back from orbit.

Tracking stations around the globe recorded the voices of a man and a woman who occupied the luckless capsule. For seven days and nights the doomed pair reported at regular intervals to their space bases inside the Soviet Union. Listeners outside Russia, were puzzled at this prolonged flight — and at Russia’s strange silence about it. Although it exceeded anything that had been accomplished up to that time, the Soviets never mentioned it.

Time after time, day and night, the pair in the capsule that was to be their sepulchre radioed down the cryptic message: “Everything satisfactory. We are maintaining the prescribed altitude.”

The climax to this eerie venture came in the early evening hours of February 24, 1961. Tracking stations at Uppsala, in Sweden, Bochum, in Germany, Turin, in Italy and Meudon, in France ­ all recorded the final broadcast from the two ill­starred cosmonauts.

After that customary statement that conditions were good and that the capsule was maintaining the prescribed altitude, there was a brief pause.

Then the male voice:

“We can read the dials. The signals are not clear, however. We see nothing.”

Then followed a silence of about five seconds, after which a woman’s voice interjected:

“I’ll make it and hold tight with my right hand! Only this way can we maintain equilibrium. Look out the peephole! Look out the peephole! I have it...”

A few seconds later the male voice exclaimed:

“Here! Here there is something! THERE IS SOMETHING! It’s difficult...” After a pause of several seconds, he continued, “If we do not get out, the world will never hear about it. It is difficult...”

At that point a Soviet transmitter broke in to announce that it was 8 pm Moscow time.

When the station had ceased transmitting the time, the signals from the Lunik capsule had vanished into the silence of outer space — and they were never resumed.

Miss Tereshkova, therefore, was preceded into space by the hapless woman in that capsule which was launched on February 17, 1961.

What happened to that first lady space flier and her companion will probably never be known, for it is highly probable that the Soviet’s themselves do not know. We can only hope that whatever fate befell them was merciful and swift.

­ Courtesy: Stranger Than Science ­ Frank Edwards

Let us trust that in Russia today, we can have closure on this unsettling story, and the question - were they taken by ET's?