 Every good myth or conspiracy has a tiny nugget of truth. When it comes to stories of phantom cosmonauts, that tiny nugget is in the form of Ivan Ivanovich. Before we start, we need a little bit of context. Early 1961 was arguably the closest point in the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both nations were fighting to be the first to put a man into space. In the United States, this was going to be a suborbital flight with a Mercury capsule on a redstone rocket, and in preparation, NASA was launching chimpanzees and unmanned missions to test every element of the spacecraft and rocket before launching a man on that suborbital flight. In the Soviet Union, cosmonauts were going through equivalent training as their American counterparts, while engineers and launch instructors and everyone else involved were running tests of hardware to make sure that the spacecraft was ready for a manned mission. These missions were all part of the Karaval Sputnik program, known simply in the west as advanced Sputnik missions, and while they didn't have a man on board, they did have biological payload and an anthropomorphic dummy. This was Ivan Ivanovich. Ivan's first flight was as the pilot of Karaval Sputnik 4, known simply as Sputnik 9 in the west, but he wasn't alone in his spacecraft. He was accompanied by a menagerie of animals. He launched with a dog named Chernushka, or Blackie, as well as 40 black mice, 40 white mice, guinea pigs, reptiles, plant seeds, human blood samples, human cancer cells, microorganisms, bacteria, and fermentation samples. All of that was crammed into an early Vostok spacecraft, with Ivan Ivanovich outfitted in a simple white sheath underneath his bright orange so-called space suit, wedged into the pilot seat and strapped in, just like a cosmonaut would be on a real mission. Ivan's first flight was on March 9th of 1961, and it was relatively simple. He launched, completed one orbit, and then landed exactly as a human cosmonaut would, meaning he ejected and landed by personal parachute, while the spacecraft landed some 160 miles away from his own landing spot. Ivan flew again weeks later on March 25th. This was another simple single orbital mission, only this time Ivan had a voice of sorts. To test the communications relay between the spacecraft and the ground, he was armed with a recording of a choir singing, as well as a spoken recipe for cabbage soup. This was broadcast from the spacecraft to make sure it could be picked up by the ground, and also selected because it wouldn't tip the Americans off to anything that the Soviets were doing. Ivan landed safely, just like a human cosmonaut would, ejecting from his spacecraft and landing by parachute. Only this time, villagers from the nearby city of Perm were there to witness it. Snowfall in March in the Soviet Union meant that rescue crews had to enlist villagers to help them actually traverse the snow to get to Ivan's landing spot, and many of them were pretty freaked out when they saw what looked like a lifeless body lying in a field, and no one seemed concerned about the man's well-being. It was only after one of the officials pointed out that Ivan had a placard in front of his face with the word maquette written on it, which is Russian for dummy, they realized that he wasn't a real man. Still, some of them were a little bit wary. One brave villager reportedly went up to Ivan and poked him in the face, feeling that his rubbery skin was not exactly skin, it was just a rubber covering, and then they finally believed it. Stories of humanoid dummies being launched into space in lieu of a man likely fed this rabid fascination with phantom cosmonauts in the West. The idea permeating the United States was that the Soviet Union was deeply secretive, and there were stories that the Karapasputnik program as a whole was actually the first attempt to launch men into space, and it was given this designation under Sputnik, not as its own Vostok program, because everyone had either died or been driven mad in space, or some technical malfunction left them orbiting the earth, eventually suffocating to become a lifeless corpse orbiting in a space tomb. These strange stories were perpetuated by science fiction writers and also politicians using them as scare tactics, but really, the closest the Soviet Union ever came to having a dead man in space was Ivan Ivanovich, the humanoid dummy. Admittedly, this is just scratching the surface on this weird history of phantom cosmonauts, so let me know in the comments what stories you've heard about phantom cosmonauts, or just weird things about dead people in space, because this is actually a really fun one to dig into. And of course, any other questions, comments, or things that you'd like to talk about in the comments, leave those as well. As always, be sure to follow me on Twitter and Instagram for daily vintage-based content, and with new videos going up every single week, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.