This entire program was a state secret and the rest of the world would have never heard about it but for the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in Turin, Italy. They were obsessed with radio and for them radio broadcasts where the internet of the day and were begging to be hacked into. They captured and recorded several Soviet transmissions and had them translated. This included S.O.S signals from soon to be dead cosmonauts whose bodies never returned to Earth. They also knew that Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space before then President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, did.

One of these dead cosmonauts has theoretically been hurtling at 18,000 miles per hour away from Earth for the last 45 years. Where will he end up? Staggeringly, I would imagine that the odds are that even with all that travel, his body still won’t encounter a living thing and may not ever collide with another object. Ever being a relative term to the existence of humanity. Maybe he’ll be recovered by an alien race and resurrected long after the rest of us are dead and gone. He is frozen after all. Can you imgaine what would happen if an alien craft crashed on Earth with a dead alien in it? Maybe it already did.

Statistically his odds of intercepting an inhabited planet with intelligent life are probably negligible, but what if?

There is an astounding article on this at Fortean Times.

∞ Arenas

Last October, Eric York, a 37 year old Park Ranger in the Grand Canyon found a deceased Mountain Lioness with no sign of trauma save a bloody nose. Lacking the facilities to do a proper necropsy, he carried the poor beast to his garage where he began one himself. On November 2nd, he was found dead. Was he killed instantly by a cloud of escaping bacteria from her carcass? It turns out to be the pneumonic plague.

This particular story recounts how United States Pilot, Milton Torres, was scrambled to intercept and shoot down an unidentified flying object the size of an aircraft carrier and traveling at over 7,600 Miles Per Hour. The picture is from another event in Barcelona that is unrelated, but was among the 800 MegaBytes of data released today by the British Ministry of Defence.