Hi, I'm Tara Schmidt, a registered dietician and host of On Nutrition, a podcast from Mayo Clinic

where we dig into the latest nutrition trends and research to help you understand what's health

and what's hype. There's a lot of wild stuff out there so we'll be keeping it science-based,

research-informed, and practical. Mayo Clinics on Nutrition,

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Conditions growing worse. Why don't you answer? We're going slower. The world will never know about us.

These are words attributed to a small team of Soviet-era spacecraft pilots, cosmonauts.

Some of the last words received from them in an ill-fated orbital mission.

And were it not for a pair of Italian brothers with a fascination in Ham radio, the world might not

know about these doomed pilots, nor several others.

For while the world sat spellbound by the technological display of the Soviet U.S. space race,

apparently we were all of us deceived.

The Soviets had a much more commanding lead on getting people in space than they led on.

But getting them back down from space, well, one out of two ain't bad.

Yuri Gagarin holds the distinction of being the first person in space,

but perhaps that should be amended to the first person to return from space alive.

Failure was not an option for the Soviet space program, and any mission not executed perfectly

was wiped from history, which is why eyes began squinting when whispered names of vanished

pilots creeped into the public. Rumors of doctored photographs erasing whole people from

history started appearing and mysterious recordings

purported to be the last moments of some brave but frightened people's lives

have washed up on the shore of the internet. Not only was Gagarin not the first in space, he was not

...