10 Conspiracy Theories People Actually Believe

Of all conspiracy theories, the Lost Cosmonauts theory is one of the easiest to believe, because it's exactly the sort of thing the Soviets would have done. The theory states that prior to the earliest reported human space flight made by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, the Soviet Union made failed manned mission attempts in which the cosmonauts did not return to Earth alive.

The idea of dead spacemen orbiting the Earth, or burning up on failed re-entry, has a grisly fascination which has kept the theory alive to the present day.

The most compelling evidence for the Lost Cosmonauts is a bunch of recordings made by a pair of Italian brothers and amateur radio enthusiasts claiming to be of Lost Cosmonaut missions. Apart from these, which show a shaky grasp of the Russian language and Soviet military procedures and were almost certainly made up, there's no documentary evidence of any manned missions, failed or otherwise, prior to Gagarin.

This is in spite of huge amounts of evidence for other scuzzy Soviet cover-ups emerging since the fall of the USSR and the sheer number of people that would have been involved.