Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [110]
The evidence for this mysterious second aircraft in the area was supported by one of the air-traffic controllers on duty that day, Vyacheslav Bykovsky, who told the commission that he had seen two other target blips on his radar screen, one of which was approaching from the east. Apparently that signal continued to register on his screen for at least two minutes after Gagarin had crashed. In fact, the timing of the crash was hard to define. Seismometers in Moscow registered a signal at 10.31 in the morning, consistent with an aircraft impact, but Bykovsky says, ‘To this day I don’t believe Gagarin fell at that time, because we lost contact with him on the radar at forty-one minutes past, not thirty-one.’ Then he contradicts himself, saying that the MiG’s chronometer was found among the wreckage, jammed at 10.31. ‘Who knows what all this means? There are so many possibilities. Maybe the people in Moscow recorded some other shock before the crash. I don’t know. I went to Star City a year after Gagarin’s death, and the tour guide said he died at 10.41. A year afterwards they said he died at 10.31. There’s a big difference.’
Immediately after the crash, Bykovsky and the other controllers in his station were placed under security, and their evidence at the time was carefully filtered. Today he says, ‘There were two other planes in the area. We knew about them. The generals on the commission gathered us all together and we explained to them what we’d seen, but we were segregated and we didn’t work again for more than a week. People were questioned about the other plane [the plane which may have interfered with Gagarin’s and Serugin’s flight] and many said they’d seen it.’
As Bykovsky demonstrates, the testimony about radar signals is complex and ambiguous. He readily admits that the tracking equipment was unable to keep simultaneous tabs on both the positions and altitudes of nearby aircraft. ‘Either the blips on the screen appear or they disappear. If a plane changes altitude, it disappears for ten seconds, so the signal on a radar screen isn’t always constant. At forty kilometres’ distance from the airbase the signals disappear altogether.’
Leonov says that Bykovsky’s report of at least one – and possibly two – additional target on his radar screen was discounted by the commission. ‘It was attributed to his lack of experience. They took him away somewhere, and I don’t know exactly what happened to him. In any case, none of this appeared in the subsequent documentation. The fact that I provided this information [about the two bangs] and spoke to people who saw the other plane – this wasn’t enough for the commission. That’s why no one knows about the other plane, except its pilot and his conscience.’
In fact, a second MiG pilot, Andrei Koloshov, emerged from obscurity in April 1995 to admit that he was indeed flying in the area at the time. In the journal Argumenti i Fakti (Arguments and Facts) he said, ‘The cause of Gagarin’s death was that he was reckless in taking an unjustifiable risk. He and Serugin deviated from their proper flight pattern.’11 Koloshov suggested that the two men agreed to fly away from their designated zone in search of clearer weather, so that they could at least try out some basic manoeuvres. He presented absolutely no evidence to support his theory. Perhaps he had a guilty conscience. The original traffic-control voice tapes (finally unearthed by Leonov and Belotserkovsky in 1986 after a long battle with the authorities) show that, far from flying recklessly, Serugin had cut an intended 20-minute training session down to five minutes because