The Russian State Archive published on Monday the first ever photographs of the site where the world’s first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, died.
The space pioneer was killed in a jet catastrophe 55 years ago alongside Vladimir Seregin, a renowned test pilot and WW2 veteran. The two were piloting a trainer jet, the Mig-15UTI, which crashed on March 27, 1968, in Russia’s Vladimir Region during a routine flight.
They were killed at the scene, with the aircraft disintegrating upon impact. The official cause of the crash has never been officially announced, leading to a wide array of theories ranging from a piloting error or a collision with a weather balloon to KGB involvement and even a UFO encounter.
The previously-unseen photos, taken by the investigating commission the next day, show mangled pieces of the plane scattered at the crash site – but they hardly shed any more light on the tragic death of the first cosmonaut.
The plane was torn apart in the crash, with the silhouette of the two-seater plane hardly recognizable in the mangled debris.
The freshly-released photos also include a picture from Gagarin’s funeral. Both the cosmonaut and his co-pilot were buried in Moscow’s iconic Red Square by the Kremlin, receiving the best state funeral possible in the Soviet era.
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