What Really Happened To Yuri Gagarin

Odds and Sods

After over 40 years of secrecy, the real cause of death of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin has been made public. Soviet pilot Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) became the first human to journey into outer space on April 12, 1961. Gagarin died in 1968 when the MiG-15 training jet he was piloting crashed.

Aleksey Leonov, the first man to conduct a spacewalk in 1965, has been struggling to gain permission to disclose details of what happened to Gagarin in March 1968. Back then a State Commission concluded that Gagarin and instructor Vladimir Seryogin tried to avoid a foreign object by carrying out a maneuver that had led to a tailspin and, finally, collision with the ground. Both pilots died in that test flight. But now it seems that everything went down differently.