Judica-Cordiglia brothers

Achille (1933 - 2015) and his brother Giovanni Battista (born 1939) set up their own experimental listening station just outside Turin in the late 1950s. The brothers used a disused German bunker at a site named Torre Bert. Working with scavenged and improvised equipment, they claimed to have successfully monitored transmissions from the Soviet Sputnik program and Explorer 1, the first American satellite, using equipment that recorded flight information such as telemetry, voice recordings and visual data.

In the 1960s, the brothers released recordings alleged to be radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including the purported dying sounds of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut". In total the Judica-Cordiglia brothers released nine recordings over a period of four years. As compiled by Kris Hollington of the Fortean Times, a British monthly magazine that popularizes "anomalous phenomena", the quoted list of these is as follows:[1]

May 1960 Unnamed cosmonaut lost when his orbiting space capsule veered off course.

November 1960 The brothers picked up an SOS message in Morse code from a troubled spacecraft.

February 1961 Recorded the suffocation of a cosmonaut.

April 1961 Just prior to Yuri Gagarin’s flight, a capsule circled the Earth three times before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

May 1961 Weak calls for help from an orbiting capsule.

October 1961 A Soviet spacecraft veered off course and vanished into deep space.

November 1962 A space capsule bounced off the Earth’s atmosphere during re-entry and disappeared.

November 1963 Unnamed female cosmonaut perished on re-entry.

April 1964 Cosmonaut lost when capsule burnt up on re-entry.[1]

The November 1960 recording, from 28 November, was one of their most famous recordings; in it, after an hour spent listening to static, the two brothers purport to recognize an SOS signal that seemed to be moving away from the Earth. The story was picked up by a Swiss-Italian radio station and the brothers became the station’s space experts. In it, a faint SOS Morse Code signal has been purportedly sent from a troubled spacecraft leaving Earth's orbit.[2] In the May 1961 case, an orbiting spacecraft purportedly makes an appeal for help after going out of control. In the November 1963 case, the brothers said they recorded the voice of a female cosmonaut re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in a malfunctioning spacecraft; in the recording she is heard to have cried out, "I am hot" as it burnt up.

Since the 1960s critical analysis of the recordings has cast doubt on their provenance. For instance, audio transcripts reveal that none of the cosmonauts, who were supposed to be Soviet air force pilots, followed standard communication protocols, such as identifying themselves when speaking or using correct technical terminology.[3] Likewise, all the recordings contain disjointed sentences and grammatical errors (e.g. the meaningless "аша передача будет сейчас" and the "аша передача будет сейчас", which translates as "our transmission will now").

Though some of the transcripts record cosmonauts saying they are leaving Earth's orbit (i.e. heading into interplanetary or "deep" space), the crewed Vostok 3KAs could not reach escape velocity because their designs never contained secondary-burn propulsion units. This fact was inherent to the Vostok programme, a project to put the first Soviet citizens into low Earth orbit and return them to the surface of the planet safely. OKB-1 only required spacecraft with velocities that could reach Earth orbit (28,160 km/h or 17,500 mph), far less than the speed needed to break orbit (40,320 km/h or 25,050 mph). Propulsion units powerful enough to leave Earth's orbit did not begin to appear until the test firing of the RD-270 engine in 1969, and it was not until the N1 moon rocket (with the NK-33 engines) in 1974 that the Soviets built a spacecraft able to reach open space.[4][5] It is impossible to "accidentally" veer off into deep space without firing a rocket engine powerful enough to accelerate to escape velocity.

In 1964 they won the Italian TV quiz show Fiera dei Sogni ('The Fair of Dreams'), which enabled them to visit NASA as their prize.

Their 1963 recording of the female cosmonaut, intended to have been used in the video game Half-Life 2, was cut at some point during development. It can be heard in the leaked beta level "hazard01" and in the official teaser trailer "Psyche."

In 2007, the brothers were the subject of a documentary called I pirati dello spazio (known in English as 'Space Hackers').

Fortean Times published an article on the brothers and their recordings of lost cosmonauts in March 2008.[1]

A dramatization of the brothers' story, called "Listen Up" by Glen Neath, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in May 2009. In 2011, the brothers' story was featured on the Science Channel TV show, Dark Matters: Twisted But True.[2]

In later life, Achille became a cardiologist while Giovanni Battista worked for the Italian police providing phone-taps in criminal investigations.

• Escape velocity

• Dossier Sputnik. ...Questo il mondo non lo saprà... di Judica Cordiglia Achille - Judica Cordiglia G. Battista, 2006 ISBN 88-902027-8-5 ISBN 9788890202780

• Reader's Digest Article
• I Pirati Dello Spazio (Pirates of Space) on YouTube Italian film on Judica-Cordiglia Brothers
• The Lost Cosmonauts web site archived from 2018