[FPSPACE] Komorov and space urban legends

[Dwayne Allen Day]

Jim Oberg has written here and elsewhere about how a number of people have
come up to him in the US and claimed to have worked for the US National
Security Agency or the Air Force and heard Cosmonaut Komorov's last words
as he fell in his Soyuz-1 space capsule after the parachutes failed to
open.  Oberg has said that these people usually say that Komorov cursed
the designers and said that he loved his wife and then the radio went
dead.  Jim said that he has heard the story so many times that he no
longer believes it is true--not everyone could have heard these last
words.

I was just reading Bart Hendrix's wonderful JBIS paper on the Kamanin
diaries and he discusses Komorov's flight.  It is clear that there were NO
transmissions from the spacecraft after retrofire and that the audio
flight recorder was destroyed in the crash.  In other words, Komorov did
not make the transmissions that people have told Jim Oberg that they
heard.

However...

We know that the US routinely intercepted Soviet manned spacecraft
telemetry.  (I thought it was a big deal when I came across CIA documents
referring to Alexei Leonov's heart rate during his spacewalk.  But it
turns out that an American military doctor had intercepted some of the
same information with his home radio set.)  It is clear from Kamanin's
diary, as well as other places, that Soyuz-1 was a trouble-plagued flight.

It strikes me as entirely possible that Komorov did a lot of complaining
about his problem-plagued spacecraft during his flight and that these
complaints were probably intercepted by US intelligence services.  Then
Komorov dies in the crash.  After that, the rumors start to spread (rumors
do indeed spread in top secret organizations) that the US intercepted
Komorov's dying words.

Thus, while it is unlikely that the people who tell Oberg about these
things are telling the whole truth, there may be a kernel (see:  corn) of
truth to their stories.  Some may have heard about the tapes.  Or some may
have actually heard portions of the tapes (perhaps Komorov telling the
designers that they had really messed up).  These stories then got
exagerrated and personalized.

There have been a few books written on urban legends and how they
spread.  One of their traits is that people hear them, think they are good
stories, but worry that they will not be believed if they repeat them.  So
they tend to say "I heard this myself" instead of "I heard somebody tell
me about this."  I think that is a characteristic of this story.  And it
might be worthwhile for Oberg to grill the next person who tells him that
he heard Komorov's dying words--maybe he can find out more about how these
stories perpetuate themselves.



DDAY