Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov told the Zvezda television channel his version of the death of Yuri Gagarin. This was reported on the channel's website.
On March 27, 1968, on the day of Gagarin's death, Leonov was at the Kirzhach airfield in the Vladimir region, from where the world's first cosmonaut flew on a MiG-15UTI aircraft.
After a while an explosion was heard from the airfield. “We were standing near the control tower [control tower] and heard a double explosion and supersonic sound. The interval between the explosion and supersonic was one and a half to two seconds,”the astronaut said. Leonov and the other pilots who were present at the same time immediately decided that the source of the supersonic sound was one object, and the explosion was another.
In the official conclusion, the reason for the crash of the MiG-15 was called the rapprochement and sharp avoidance of another plane, but Leonov believes that the unknown plane is the real culprit. “The unambiguous cause of death was the pilot who sank below 400 meters under the clouds, turned on the afterburner and walked alongside, not seeing Gagarin. It was a Su-15 plane, it passed at a distance of 10-15 meters at the speed of sound, and flipped Gagarin's plane with an indignant stream,”the cosmonaut said.
Leonov also mentioned a letter written by the participants in the investigation. It asked not to advertise the circumstances of the tragedy, so as not to subject the Su-15 pilot, subordinate Andrei Tupolev, to reprisals.
The official conclusions of the commission that investigated this incident were as follows: the crew (Gagarin and instructor pilot Vladimir Seregin), due to the changed air situation (details were not specified), made a sharp maneuver and fell into a tailspin. Despite the attempts of the pilots to bring the aircraft into horizontal flight, the plane collided with the ground, the crew was killed. The lack of a coherent published official version and objective evidence gave rise to many assumptions and unofficial versions of the death of the pilots.