
Lost in Space - nickb
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/1302/lost_in_space.html
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Hexstream
My highlight:

"The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months
after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but
NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.

“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being
recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same
craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately
determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the
brothers lacked a scale.

They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who
had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used
the bizygomatic index – the distance between the right and left cheek bones in
proportion to the width of the face – to calculate what 1cm (0.4in)
represented on the photograph.

“It seemed so simple but no one else had thought of it. Somehow, we’d managed
to crack America’s top secret!” Achille said. "

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ZeroGravitas
Great article. I'd forgotten all about the Fortean Times which I used to read
about 15 years ago. I always admired their ability to talk about wierd and
wacky things without having to take sides and devolving into propaganda.
They're kind of like "The Economist" of weird.

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arrrg
see also: <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4115> (Skeptoid Episode)

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d0mine
_Apparently, the brothers had just recorded evidence that a manned Soviet
spacecraft somehow got off course and left Earth's orbit, permanently._
</quote>

This single sentence is enough to discredit the whole story.

It is technically impossible for manned spacecraft to leave Earth's gravity by
accident.

~~~
pc
It's unlikely, but far from impossible. The delta v to get to low-earth orbit
is about 10 km/s (more depending on drag), while the delta vs from low earth
orbit to the Lagrangian points, low lunar orbit, or even earth escape velocity
are of the order of just 3-4 km/s.

Neat Wikipedia graphic that shows this:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Del...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Deltavs.svg/590px-
Deltavs.svg.png)

