Just what the crew actually did see has never been revealed by the Russians. Probably it never will be. Komarov can no longer help unravel the mystery as he was killed in April 1967 when his Soyuz-I capsule plunged into the earth under unopened parachutes. But he is by no means the only astronaut to sight, and even photograph inexplicable objects in space .. . . . objects which are unlike anything ever put into orbit by Russia or the West. Indeed, some of them are so huge that there was not rocket gear in existence at the time which could have hurled them into space. They are the mystery satellites orbiting the earth and no nation will officially discuss them. The United States even set up its own special committee in the 1960s to gather facts about them but its findings, if any, were never released.
These objects are not to be confused with those often referred to as Bagby's Phantom Moonlets, which according to Bagby have been charted orbiting our planet since about 1947 [see his paper: 'Terrestrial Satellites: Some Direct and Indirect Evidence' pub. 1969 ]. But it was in February 1960 that the first discovery of a mystery satellite first caused a sensation in the U.S. Department of Defense. It was hardly surprising, for the North American Air Defense System's radar tracking facilities had locked on to what appeared to be a satellite weighing at least 15 tons -- far in excess of anything capable of being place into orbit in 1960.
It was quickly established that the satellite had not been launched by either the United States or Russia. For a start, it was in the wrong kind of orbit. The mystery object's path took it over the North and South poles, whereas the orbits of satellites fired from the then Soviet Union were invariably inclined at 65deg. to the equator -- taking them over South America and North Africa. The February 1960 revelation marked the first of a whole series of strange space phenomena which left scientists baffled.
On September 3, 1960, seven months after the first sighting, it was revealed that a unidentified object had been photographed in the sky over New York by a tracking camera at the Grumman Aircraft Corporation's Long Island factory. The object, which appeared to give off a reddish glow, had been seen and tracked several times in the space of two weeks. It was apparently following an east-west orbit, in direct opposition to most satellite launches of the period and its speed was estimated at about three times that of America's Echo I metal balloon satellite.
After this, the mystery satellites inexplicably disappeared until three years later when on May 15, 1963, a Mercury capsule carrying Major Gordon Cooper blasted into space from Cape Canaveral on a 22-orbit journey round the earth. During his final orbit, the astronaut informed the tracking station at Muchea, near Perth in Australia, that he could see a "glowing, greenish object" ahead of him. It seemed to be approaching his spacecraft and was travelling very fast. Whatever Cooper saw, it was solid -- because it too registered on Muchea's tracking radar, travelling east to west. Cooper's sighting was reported by NBC, who were covering the flight step by step. But when the astronaut landed, reporters were barred from questioning him about the incident. No official statement about it was ever made and another mystery was consigned to File 13 where it was soon forgotten.
Two years later, in June 1965, US astronauts Edward White -- who was later to die tragically in the Apollo capsule blaze -- and James McDivitt were passing over Hawaii in their two-man Gemini spacecraft when they saw a weird-looking metallic object some distance away. The thing appeared to have long arms sticking from it. McDivitt took pictures of the object with a cine camera -- pictures that were never released.
The official U.S. Air Force explanation was that the astronauts had seen America's Pegasus satellite 2 which was equipped with broad, protruding arms to register hits from micro-meteorites. However, the Air Force had forgotten one crucial thing; when White and McDivitt passed over Hawaii Pegasus had been more than a thousand miles away. So what did the two astronauts see? One NASA specialist, in an unguarded moment, did let slip to reporters that the object photographed by McDivitt "looked like no satellite launched from earth".
In December 1965, Gemini astronauts James Lovell and Frank Borman also saw something strange in space, during the second orbit of their record-breaking 14-day flight around the world. Borman reported that he had located an unidentified spacecraft some distance away from the Gemini capsule. Gemini Control at Cape Kennedy suggested that perhaps he was seeing the final stage of the huge Titan booster rocket which had hurled him and Lovell into orbit earlier that day. Borman confirmed that he could see the spent rocket all right, as it was shining brilliantly in the sun. But what he was looking at was something entirely different. He had never seen anything remotely like it.
A little publicized announcement in 1969 hardly made the pages of many newspapers but its significance in relationship to the above accounts is interesting. Heinz Kaminsky, director of a space tracking station at Bochum in Germany, reported during March that a third object which remained unidentified had orbited along with the recent Russian Soyuz-4 and 5 spacecraft.
NASA has ensured in recent years that such accounts are now very rarely released into the public domain, unless by accident and never commented upon officially. The sophistication of its technology is such that few actually get to penetrate beyond this veil of secrecy. It is rewarding, then, when we learn that a private video exists which purports to show inexplicable activity in space during the docking and undocking procedures carried out by America's STS-84 and Russia's orbital space station Mir.
The taped material was acquired by a private US citizen with an interest in radio/astronomy that was matched up until that time by total indifference to UFOs. Using his own satellite equipment and armed with a little knowledge, he patched into NASAs live downlink audio/visual feeds and proceeded to tape events as they happened. As well as recording an occasional satellite flyby, the camera in space also picked up images of flashing or blinking lights which drifted and manouevred about Mir, sometimes executing angular changes in direction of up to 40deg.
Subsequent to this event, I understand that NASA has suddenly encountered "technical difficulties" in providing live feeds for general consumption. As a result, its current equipment and coverage continues to be encoded and can no longer be viewed or recorded by even the most sophisticated of technical equipment operated by amateurs.
Mysterious Satellites of Earth
On October 12, 1964 Voshkod I was scheduled to orbit for at least five days. Why did it return to earth after 24 hours? Recordings of radio transmissions between Voshkod and ground control indicate that the spacecraft's crew had seen something strange and inexplicable in orbit -- something that terrified them so much that they made a hasty and unscheduled descent from space.
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