Practically few people know today that Baikonur is not the first Soviet cosmodrome. The first was laid in the north of the Astrakhan region in the town of Kapustin Yar. But the fact that there was another cosmodrome - in the south of the Saratov region, called Krasny Kut - is known only to a few …
Krasny Kut was the landing site for the descent vehicles and, naturally, was in the shadow of the launch zone - Kapustin Yar. In the first post-war years, test launches of captured German "Vau" missiles were carried out here, and the infrastructure of the test sites formed at the same time served as the basis for the creation of the zone of the first Soviet cosmodrome on the Volga shores. It should be noted that initially both the launch of the first Earth satellite and the first manned flight into space were planned to be carried out from Kapustin Yar.
However, in 1954, rather strange events took place in the region of both zones, followed by the government's decision to suspend all space work in Kapustin Yar and to urgently build a second cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppes. Almost simultaneously, a directive was issued on the formation of a group for the registration of unusual phenomena on the territory of the Central State Test Site. The Archive of Unidentified Phenomena (ANYA) is being created under the Ministry of Defense.
However, Baikonur approached the first space flights of Gagarin and Titov unprepared, because The “fire” order of its construction did not allow to complete the construction of the landing zone in time. The landings, as you know, took place at the old Krasny Kut base near Saratov.
What was the Krasny Kut landfill?
It was founded in 1941 and existed until 1991, when the Ministry of Defense adopted a two-year program for the elimination of research facilities. But what will be the fate of the landfill archive, which is still classified as classified?
For the first time, the existence of this archive was mentioned in 1988, when two Englishmen, Jonathan and Eric, appeared in the area of the test site, who were sure of the existence of a Soviet analogue of the Pentagon's archive for registering UFOs. Indeed, such an archive exists and is stored in an underground bunker in the specialized village of Berezovka-2.
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Some of the documents are allowed to be published today. For example, what prompted the government to mothball the already finished Kapustin Yar cosmodrome.
In 1954, a UFO flight took place over the secret facilities of the Central State Polygon (Central State Test Range) located in the Saratov and Volgograd regions in the direction of the Kapustin Yar launch complex. According to the general opinion of experts, "the flight was made for reconnaissance purposes." After several attempts to force the object to land, it was attacked by a link of our military aircraft. At the same time, communication with the pilots was cut off, the planes themselves did not return to the base, the search for their traces did not lead to success.
All of this is stated in the act of the state commission investigating the circumstances of these events. By the way, the act reflects the dissenting opinion of a member of the commission Popov, who emphasizes that a completely similar event took place in 1938 near Moscow.
Perhaps, over time, it will be possible to read the entire archive of the Kapustin Yar test site, and the mystery of the abandoned cosmodrome will be solved.
A. Tsareva. "Talnakh Lights"