EXCLUSIVE! OUR INVESTIGATION INTO THE CAUSES OF GAGARIN'S CRASH

Unlike many repair, sales, and other organizations involved in the automotive industry, many of our employees have a background in aviation, not just automotive. Moreover, some even served in the Air Force for several years and have extensive experience in servicing and repairing aircraft, including in combat situations. Others participated in research, development, design, and testing of unmanned aerial vehicles, and even have inventions in the field of aircraft engines. In short, aviation has always been a topic close to our hearts and has always aroused our professional interest.

And so, by a twist of fate, several years ago, a specialist in aviation technology, aviation engineer, retired colonel, and war veteran Eduard Aleksandrovich Shersher approached us with a request to help prepare for publication some of his materials about his many years of work in the Air Force. Particular attention was given to the exclusive material collected by E.A. Shersher on the crash of Yuri Gagarin's plane, the investigation into which he had already participated in 1968.

When we conducted our own investigation into the causes of this disaster, gathering together all the known facts and theories surrounding Gagarin's death and discarding all myths and legends such as political assassination and alien abduction to attempt to analyze the remaining facts, we were struck by how much the actual facts diverged from the official version of Gagarin's accident presented by the investigative commission and the opinions of officials.

We were particularly surprised by some of the statements made by scientists who supposedly performed calculations—their results directly contradicted elementary physical laws. And this has been going on for over 40 years. Apparently, the political component remains paramount at all times—as opposed to the truth, which simply lies on the surface.

<--- Colonel E.A. Sherscher on a fragment of glass from Gagarin's plane (video from 2017)

The work we were conducting was generally familiar to us—today, we frequently conduct research into the causes of malfunctions and failures of internal combustion engines. And in our research, facts are sometimes subject to ambiguous interpretation. And we've often encountered "politically" biased investigations and experts willing to prove the most incredible things in one way or another to satisfy a "political" (today, this sounds more like a monetary) order. But a car with a broken engine is one thing, and an airplane crash in which people died—and none other than Earth's FIRST cosmonaut—is quite another. Nevertheless, we attempted to apply our limited knowledge and abilities to help the author piece together all the facts and versions, analyze them, perform some calculations, and, based on the results, draw conclusions about the real causes of Gagarin's death. And we can even say that we did succeed in some things...

In 2006, E.A. Shersher's book "The Mystery of Gagarin's Death" was finally published by the Minsk publishing house "Harvest." Unfortunately, it was not published in Moscow, where the most intimidated publishers had gathered, terrified by the discrepancy between the book's conclusions and the "officially approved" versions of Gagarin's crash. And, unfortunately, the book was published in a somewhat abridged version — it did not include some of our data on the plane's crash trajectory calculations, nor did it include some important facts supporting our version of Gagarin's crash. As a result, despite the fact that challenging our data is difficult, and sometimes impossible, the official press chose to ignore it.

That is, as before, every year on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's death, March 27, the same old "songs" continued, performed by the same official performers — about collisions with sounding balloons, with unidentified aircraft, sudden loss of consciousness, equipment failures, and other fantasies that had grown around this sad date thanks to the efforts of numerous officials and idle "researchers." And the unhealthy hype surrounding Gagarin's disaster continued to be fueled by the classified nature of the materials of the commission investigating the disaster.

And now, finally, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight, the ice has broken. On April 8, 2011, on the eve of the significant date, it was announced that the materials of the commission investigating the causes of the disaster had been declassified. In fact, the commission's findings have long been known and published, despite their classification. And all researchers on this topic have always explained these findings exactly as the commission tried to do: no one was to blame, it was a cloud or a balloon, simply some kind of force majeure, and the pilots couldn't have made a mistake, because they never could. But on April 8, 2011, it suddenly emerged that "human error" could have been the cause of Yuri Gagarin's death, a possibility that officialdom had completely ruled out for over 40 years. And this is likely the first and, so far, the only step towards the truth — in all the past decades.

<---Colonel E.A. Shersher on the causes of Gagarin's plane crash (2017 video)

Meanwhile, the very first media publications showed the opposite. As if given the command "sic!", the publishing fraternity, in a single day, had already exerted maximum effort to push the truth even further than it had been all these years. Newspapers and online publications were literally awash with headlines about Yuri Gagarin's possible culpability in the disaster. It was as if everyone had suddenly forgotten how, just recently, they had poured the same official, but then "unresolved" version of Gagarin's disaster from an "empty" corkscrew into "empty" balloons. From this version, they always drew the same conclusion — the First Cosmonaut's supreme piloting skill — and called the cause of this disaster "the mystery of the century."

We absolutely cannot agree with such a frivolous "change of course." Therefore, in order to help not only the writing community, but also numerous researchers and, perhaps, even officials, bring the truth about Gagarin's death closer rather than further away, we, with the permission of the author, E.A. Shersher, have decided to publish one of the chapters of his book in its original version on our website — with all the data and calculations, without any abbreviations. This chapter not only directly addresses the crash of Yuri Gagarin's plane and the work of the commission, but also describes in detail our own analysis of all known theories and concludes on the real, not imaginary, causes of the disaster.

Our work did not go unnoticed — its results attracted the interest of pilot Colonel Nikolay Konstantinovich Sergeev, who was conducting his own research into the causes of the Seregin-Gagarin plane crash. Colonel N. Sergeev's research is of significant value because it draws on the author's extensive flight experience, who has not only been an active pilot for over 40 years but has also participated in flight accident investigations.

Here is how N. Sergeev himself tells about this incident: "...When in Costa Rica, my student and I fell with a failed engine right in the center of the capital (San Jose) on a Cessna-172, then when the student asked: "Nikolai, what happened? What are we going to do now?", I could think of nothing else but: "Since you believe in our Savior, that is, the Lord God, then you will now read a prayer... in all likelihood, the last one in this life. Well, since I am not very familiar with our savior, then I will fight to save your life, my life, and the life of our plane."

<---Colonel N. Sergeyev's speech at the roundtable discussion dedicated to the 57th anniversary of Gagarin's space flight and the 50th anniversary of his death, which took place on April 12, 2018, at the I. Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute — watch our report.

Why was Colonel N. Sergeyev also interested in the mystery of Gagarin's death? Here's how he puts it:

"...When I was studying at the Gagarin Academy, a young man from my group was visited by the former flight commander of the No. 8 twin-engine cosmonaut team in which Gagarin and Seregin flew on their last flight. He was the one who told me how Gagarin died. I wrote an article about it in Argumenty i Fakty and The New York Times.

Of course, you can speculate as much as you like, but... I wrote down his story then, later added materials from the official investigations into this disaster, and the result was an article with some rather interesting thoughts.

The fact is that the then chairman of the State Investigative Commission, General Kulikov, directly writes that the pilots (Gagarin and Seregin) performed their piloting in the zone normally, Gagarin reported his release, then "On return, the plane entered clouds, and Gagarin lost spatial orientation, having not flown using instruments for a thousand years... Well, what about Seregin? He was a seasoned pilot. Well, clouds... especially during the day. Who among us hasn't flown in the clouds? It goes without saying..."

The participation of two aviation experts and specialists of such caliber in our investigation — colonels, an engineer, and a pilot — allowed us to form, as was done in 1968 in "that very" commission, two independent subcommittees — an engineering subcommittee and a flight subcommittee. This, in any case, undoubtedly makes the results of the investigation quite interesting, since there are significant differences between the versions being worked on by the subcommittees, despite the shared opinion on some issues. But it is all the more interesting to compare both versions, because, as the saying goes, truth is born only in debate. Of course, we don't claim to have the ultimate truth, but the fact that it's already very close is beyond doubt.

So, we present the results of the work of our subcommittees — the engineering and flight subcommittees — namely, two main theories surrounding the "disaster of the century" — that of engineer Colonel E.A. Shersher (from the chapter "Disaster of the Century" in E.A. Shersher's book "The Mystery of Gagarin's Death") and that of pilot Colonel N.K. Sergeyev (the article "Yuri Gagarin. The Death of a Legend. How It Was," prepared for publication in Argumenty i Fakty and The New York Times, as well as N.K. Sergeyev's book "Gagarin — He Could Still Live", published in 2016 in Germany). These versions are currently the most credible, and now it only takes a little time to determine what exactly happened to the Seregin-Gagarin plane — it's enough to find a few details in the stored wreckage and in documents that were recently classified. But that's a whole other story...

E.A. Shersher's book "The Mystery of Gagarin's Death"

Read the chapter "The Disaster of the Century" from E.A. Shersher's book "The Mystery of Gagarin's Death"

1. "And then there are those fuel tanks..."
2. Versions, versions...
3. The last minute
4. "The human factor"
5. 50 more versions?
6. The law of "conservation"
7. "Keep forever"?
8. Appendix
The main theories regarding the Seregin-Gagarin plane crash,
published in various sources.

N.K. Sergeev's book
"Gagarin – He Could Have Still Lived" Read N.K. Sergeev's article "Yuri Gagarin. The Death of a Legend. How It Happened"

Instead of a Preface
1. If you want to know how a king lives, ask the cook.
2. Where does the Motherland begin?
3. How are "wanderings" born in two pines?
4. Why was the airplane's control stick removed, and why did almost no one know about it?
5. Why do even experienced flight instructors, upon learning that Seregin had no control stick in the cockpit, immediately fall out of their chairs?
6. Too many cooks spoil the broth
7. The investigation is being conducted by "ZNATOKI" (Experts)
8. So how did it all happen on that fateful March day back in 1968?
9. Briefly, in one line for the average non-aviation reader...
10. Briefly about the main points. Or... What really killed them?
11. Hypnotized "Experts"
12. Instead of an Epilogue
13. Four Accidents
APPENDIX. Some important questions that aviation "experts" completely ignore.

Recently, Colonel N.K. Sergeyev, together with S.I. Grachev, a researcher in the Aviation and Cosmonautics Department of the Polytechnic Museum (Kyiv), published a new article, "Gagarin's Death: The Obvious and the Probable," in the magazine "Aviation and Time," issues 4 and 5 for 2019. In this article, all the main points of the colonel's theory are carefully and succinctly formulated, while the key to unraveling the cause of the disaster lies in that very same control handle in the rear cockpit.

As S.I. Grachev so aptly said about this control, "a removed control is like a brick—just insert it into the cube, and it immediately assembles, and all the inconsistencies and contradictions in all the known facts immediately disappear." Conversely, remove this brick, and the entire structure collapses, making it impossible to find any cause.

This version proved extremely dangerous and therefore completely unacceptable for official Russian cosmonauts. Thus, in 2018, Colonel N.K. Sergeev was invited to Moscow by the Roscosmos film studio to record an interview for a film dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's death. Not only was his hours-long interview recorded, but he was also invited to give a talk at the Cosmonautics Museum in front of a large audience (several hundred).

However, not a single frame of the recorded interview remains in the released film — as it turns out, "the authorities forbade it." It turns out that the "authorities" are quite willing to discuss theories about Gagarin's drunkenness and have no objection to outright slander, but they disapprove of the removed rear cabin handle. Apparently, out of fear of "what if something goes wrong."

But we don't care about the authorities, so we're publishing both parts of the article "Gagarin's Death: The Obvious and the Probable" in full — it's worth reading (to download the article in PDF format, click on the image below).

"Aviation and Time" No. 4, 2019, "Aviation and Time" No. 5, 2019

Just in case, please note that the rights to publish the chapter from E.A. Shersher's book, as well as N.K. Sergeev's article, belong exclusively to the authors, with whose personal permission we are posting them on our website. Therefore, those who enjoy easy money, freebies, and other ways to "make a buck" are asked to find suitable lawyers. For everyone else, please note that when copying these materials or individual parts thereof, a link to our website is required.