For a third of a century, Moscow ran its side of the Space Race from behind a curtain of secrecy, attempting to orchestrate world opinion by an unrelenting campaign of propaganda and coverup. And for that entire period, amateur space sleuth James Oberg probed and penetrated the Russian information barriers, and speculated and interpolated about what lay behind. He produced a series of books, hundreds of magazine articles, media interviews, and even a NOVA miniseries on the subject. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in an orgy of candid 'glasnost', and long-hidden memoirs, photographs, and other historical material poured out. But surprisingly, the need to still sleuth out Russian space secrets didn't become obsolete, since commercial and diplomatic rationales have again motivated Moscow to be less than fully truthful -- and at times, to again brazenly lie -- about its space activities. And this time, they have help.

How did we used to find out so much about the space disasters covered up so strenuously -- but clumsily -- by the Soviet Union? Why did Russia lose the Moon Race in the1960s, and how did they fool many Westerners into thinking they had never been in the race? What grisly disasters did they conceal? Where are their secret space bases, and why are their official claims for 'space flight records' fraudulent? What really happened to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and to many of his teammates who vanished from official records and were airbrushed from group photos? While denouncing Reagan's "Star Wars" plans in the 1980s, did Gorbachev secretly give the go-ahead for a hundred-ton Soviet "Death Star" launching? Why and how (and how much) did the Soviets copy our space shuttle design? How much has really changed?

This highly popular lecture -- surprising, informative, and entertaining -- reflects Oberg's original research in figuring out what the USSR was (and Russia is) hiding about its past, present, and future activities in space, and in actually prodding them to grudgingly reveal hitherto restricted information. His private sleuthing has proven to be remarkably successful, as even Russians now admit: they've put his groundbreaking books "Red Star in Orbit" and "Uncovering Soviet Disasters" on display in their top space museums!

Recent disclosures have validated his decades-old techniques, and recent non- disclosures have reaffirmed that such sleuthing activities remain vital to ferreting out continuing secrets and distortions of Russia's space program. Now Moscow, for different reasons but using traditional methods of deception, is hiding safety-related information about their hardware intended to serve on the International Space Station (such as previous fires aboard their space stations, failures of modules they are selling NASA, collisions with off- course spacecraft). They deny deficiencies at their Baikonur Cosmodrome, now in independent Kazakhstan. They conceal the massive corruption of their space officials and their secret million dollar mansions (and have warned Oberg to his face not to discuss this). When their nuclear-powered Mars probe crashed to Earth over the Andes Mountains in late 1996, both the US and Russia clung to the false cover story that it had safely fallen into the ocean, while withholding warnings from the areas in Chile and Bolivia that were endangered by debris.

Sleuthing Russian space secrets goes on, more important than ever!!

Details:

Recent official Soviet disclosures have touched on some of their greatest space secrets, such as the "Nedelin catastrophe" of 1960. Then, 165 men died in a pad explosion caused by politically motivated safety violations, but for decades their memory was denied. Then Oberg's step-by-step publication of the story allowed the Russian cosmodrome museum director to at last put the whole story on display, and thank Oberg face-to-face. Thirty years after the coverup of the Nedelin launch disaster, Oberg stood at the secret mass grave of the fallen scientists and soldiers.

Next he shows forged photographs where cosmonauts fallen from favor were airbrushed out ('before'/'after' views always brings down the house with tumultuous laughter). Publication in the West caused such mockery that Moscow was forced to tell the whole truth about these casualties of the early space age. As it turned out, such Soviet secrecy may have cost American lives, as they made mistakes which NASA, unwarned, later repeated (e.g., the Apollo- 1 fire followed by six years a similar Soviet tragedy). During the filming of the recent PBS NOVA mini-series on Soviet space history (for which he was chief consultant and on-screen host and explainer), he met (and was photographed with) one of the formerly missing spacemen, and visited the grave of another.

Especially amusing is the way Moscow often "camouflaged" military space and missile activities, visible to the Soviet population, as "flying saucers". Oberg's debunking of this 'maskirovka' trick forced them in 1983 to admit the existence of a supersecret space base north of Moscow (called the Plesetsk cosmodrome). Flying saucer fever still grips Russia: he later found an exhibit on the topic at their Kosmos Pavilion in Moscow, with artists' renderings of missile launchings misperceived as UFO's. The secret military origin of Plesetsk remained officially taboo for years afterwards until publication of translated articles of his, in Russian newspapers, forced a final official admission and a revelation of horrible disasters.

This leads to "phony geography" in which space-related locations are mis- named, mis-placed, and mis-represented (with a gradual official evolution toward admitting reality). Oberg has been to the space center at Baikonur several times, has walked its streets alone, talked directly to its people in their own language, and returned alive and with a harvest of history data.