Dolgov

Personal: Male. Reported killed in an orbital flight on October 11, 1960.

Astronaut Career

Astronaut Group: Phantom Cosmonaut.

The author of sensational 'stranger than truth' and flying saucer books of the 1960's listed Dolgov as dying in a Vostok space flight on 11 October 1960. He claimed that the flight was 'tracked for 20 minutes by stations in Turkey, Japan, Sweden, England and Italy'.

In fact Colonel Pyotr Dolgov was a real person and the only phantom cosmonaut actually associated with a space project. On his 1,409th parachute jump, on 1 November 1962, Dolgov leaped from a Volga capsule carried by a balloon to an altitude of 28,650 m. Dolgov was wearing the full-pressure suit used for the Vostok space project. As he exited the balloon his helmet visor hit an attachment and cracked. During the descent his suit depressurised through the cracked visor and Dolgov was found to be dead on landing.

4 May 1967 - Kamanin view on Phantom Cosmonauts.. According to a Tass report, 11 cosmonauts have died - Dolgov, Mikhailov, Grachev, etc. However these men were not cosmonauts, though Kamanin notes that they did work in 1961-1963 at the Institute of Aviation and Space Medicine.