Dr Tom Ellis talks about the myth of the Lost Cosmonauts, why this symbol has had such staying power, and what it tells us about Western perceptions about the Soviet Union and its space programme. Topics include: -American reactions to Yuri Gagarin’s flight -The secrecy of the Soviet space programme breeding rumours and myths -The idea of the ‘communist mind’ and communism as a ‘secular religion’ -Robert Heinlein and the Lost Cosmonauts -‘Yurimania’ and promoting Yuri Gagarin as a sex symbol -The Italian Battista brothers’ claims of recording lost cosmonauts -The Lost Cosmonaut image in film and art as a representation of memories of the Soviet state -Vladimir Komarov, the ‘real’ lost cosmonaut -Lost cosmonauts as a political idea vs a cultural idea LINKS Buy Me A Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/wideatlantic Tom Ellis on Twitter https://twitter.com/Tomsomol Tom Ellis’s Blog https://redskyatdawn.wordpress.com/ Gagarin And The Lost Moon https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v24g Tsar-Bomb album https://heimatderkatastrophe.bandcamp.com/album/hdk-68-bajkonur Imogen Knox’ article on Haxan https://terribleimaginations.wordpress.com/2021/04/24/haxan-rationalism-and-retrospective-diagnosis/ Bobcat Goldthwait’s American Bigfoot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTY8xinMrSI Conspiracy Culture, Peter Knight, 2000 https://www.routledge.com/Conspiracy-Culture-From-Kennedy-to-The-X-Files/Knight-Knight/p/book/9780415189781 Hermann Oberth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth Roadside Picnics Article by darmon Richter: Chernobyl and the Falcon Lake UFO Incident https://www.exutopia.com/chernobyl-ufos-falcon-lake/ The Space Suit Film, Gary Westfahl, 2012 https://books.google.ie/books/about/The_Spacesuit_Film.html?id=kej2ygAACAAJ&redir_esc=y Supposed Lost Cosmonaut Recordings http://web.archive.org/web/20180309024747/http://www.lostcosmonauts.net/man.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20180309024745/http://www.lostcosmonauts.net/wom.htm Sven Grahn’s Article about Torre Bert http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/Torre/TorreB.html Into The Silent Sea: Short Lost Cosmonaut Film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2rmTVKU37Y The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling, Andrew L. Jenks, 2012 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13226355-the-cosmonaut-who-couldn-t-stop-smiling