"The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.
“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.
They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index – the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face – to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.
“It seemed so simple but no one else had thought of it. Somehow, we’d managed to crack America’s top secret!” Achille said. "
Great article. I'd forgotten all about the Fortean Times which I used to read about 15 years ago. I always admired their ability to talk about wierd and wacky things without having to take sides and devolving into propaganda. They're kind of like "The Economist" of weird.
Apparently, the brothers had just recorded evidence that a manned Soviet spacecraft somehow got off course and left Earth's orbit, permanently. </quote>
This single sentence is enough to discredit the whole story.
It is technically impossible for manned spacecraft to leave Earth's gravity by accident.
It's unlikely, but far from impossible. The delta v to get to low-earth orbit is about 10 km/s (more depending on drag), while the delta vs from low earth orbit to the Lagrangian points, low lunar orbit, or even earth escape velocity are of the order of just 3-4 km/s.
"The Americans were due to put a man into space on 20 February 1962, 10 months after Gagarin. The Judica-Cordiglia brothers were desperate to listen in, but NASA kept the wavelength secret for fear of Soviet interference.
“We came across a photograph of an unmanned NASA Mercury capsule being recovered from the ocean,” said Gian. John Glenn was going to fly in the same craft. In the photograph they could see the antenna. “If we could accurately determine the length of this antenna then we’d have the frequency.” But the brothers lacked a scale.
They told their father, a lecturer in legal medicine at Milan University, who had a solution. In the picture, four frogmen were sitting in a boat. He used the bizygomatic index – the distance between the right and left cheek bones in proportion to the width of the face – to calculate what 1cm (0.4in) represented on the photograph.
“It seemed so simple but no one else had thought of it. Somehow, we’d managed to crack America’s top secret!” Achille said. "