Tragic Real Story Of Laika- First Dog In Space

In her last moments, Laika was confused and afraid—and if the facts of history had been different, she just might have returned home. Laika had a brutal and painful death that we had ever known.

Before the space program, Laika had no home. She was a mongrel dog, found wandering the streets of Moscow.

Strays, like Laika, were sought out by the Soviet Union. While the Americans preferred to send monkeys into space, the Soviets found dogs easier to train. They had a team that gathered strays off the streets. The hardship these mutts endured, they believed, made them tough enough to handle the harsh conditions of space.

She wasn’t the first stray the Soviets had strapped inside a rocket. Another dog, named Albina, had already flown halfway into orbit and made it back alive. She would be Laika’s backup.

Another dog named Mushka would be used to test the life support. Mushka, like Laika, was a stray, but the hardships of the space program were too much for her. During training, Mushka became so terrified that she wouldn’t touch her food.

Unlike Albina, Laika wasn’t going to come back. The satellite they’d built wasn’t equipped for a safe reentry. They knew that she would not survive the trip home. Laika would spend a few days in orbit above the Earth. Then, she would be euthanized with poison in her dog food.

Outside of the Soviet Union, Laika’s doomed mission was an outrage. The British, in particular, campaigned to stop the mission. The Daily Mirror ran an article with the headline, “The Dog Will Die, We Can’t Save It.” The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals urged people to call the Soviet embassy and complain. Others held a moment of silence each day at 11:00 AM in quiet protest.

The Soviets didn’t understand why they were so upset. “The Russians love dogs,” they responded in a statement. “This has been done not for the sake of cruelty but for the benefit of humanity.”

Laika, however, may have been chosen because of the cruelty of the mission. According to some, Albina was the first choice, but she was kept on the ground out of respect. Albina had already done her job. Laika went into space so that Albina could live.

Laika’s death was avoidable. In the original plan, Laika was to come home. The Soviets had boasted that she would have all the comforts she needed to survive and return home safely.

All that changed, though, because of Khrushchev. Khrushchev viewed Laika’s journey as a piece of propaganda, and he wanted it timed to perfection. He wanted Sputnik 2 to blast off on the 40th Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he ordered the scientists to rush the job so he could get the date right.

The original plans for a return mission had to be scrapped. The scientists now had four weeks to make the first spacecraft capable of sending a living thing into orbit. It was enough time to do it, but not enough to make one that could come back.

“All traditions developed in rocket technology were thrown out,” one of the scientists, Boris Chertok, said. “The second satellite was created without preliminary design, or any kind of design.”

Sputnik 2 was little bigger than a washing machine. Inside, Laika wouldn’t even have enough space to turn around, and, to make sure she didn’t, she would be chained in a single spot. She would have the freedom to sit and to lie down and to do nothing else.

To get her ready, Laika and the other dogs were put into smaller and smaller cages. She would be left locked up in claustrophobic conditions for up to 20 days. Then she’d be pulled into an even tighter space.

Trapped in the cages, the dogs became constipated. They refused to relieve themselves, even when the scientists fed them laxatives. The only way they could get them to adapt to these spaces, the scientists learned, was to make them live through it, and so the dogs stayed in their cages until they’d forgotten they’d ever been anywhere else.

The day before the launch, Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky brought Laika home. For the last four weeks, he had been closer to her than anyone. He had led the team the picked Laika after the streets, he’d trained her, and he’d personally chosen her to go into space.

Dr. Yazdovsky brought her home so that his children could play with her. For one last moment before her last day on Earth, he let her experience life as a domesticated dog with a loving family. “I wanted to do something nice for her,” Dr. Yazdovsky said. “She had so little time left to live.”

In the morning, she would be put into a rocket, sent into space, and would never return. Dr. Yazdovsky brought her to launch site and the team said their goodbyes.

“After placing Laika in the container and closing the hatch, we kissed her nose and wished her bon voyage,” one of the men later said, “knowing that she would not survive the flight.”

Laika wasn’t launched that day. For the next three days, she was grounded inside the spacecraft, waiting on Earth. There had been a malfunction that had to be repaired, and so Laika was kept in freezing cold temperatures, unable to move.

The scientists did their best to take care of her. A hose from an air conditioner was set up to keep her warm, and Dr. Yazdovsky had his men keep a constant eye on her. Finally, on November 3, 1957, Laika took off.

As the spacecraft blasted off of the Earth and into space, Laika panicked. Her heart rate and breathing speed up to three times their normal rate as the small, confused dog tried to understand what was happening to her.

When Laika became weightless, she started to calm down. For the first time in Earth’s history, a living thing was floating in space, seeing the Earth and the stars from outside of its atmosphere. Her heart slowed, and she became to relax, but she would never again calm down to the heart rate she had on Earth.

For years after the mission, the Soviets claimed that Laika survived her first day in space. They claimed that she drifted in orbit around the Earth for days. At last, she ate the poisoned food they’d prepared for her and passed peacefully onto the other side with the Earth below her.

The truth didn’t come out until 2002, when one of the scientists, Dimitri Malashenkov, revealed the brutal fate Laika really met. Laika died within seven hours, sometime during her fourth circuit around the Earth, in excruciating pain.

The temperature control system on the hastily built satellite malfunctioned. The shuttle started getting hotter and hotter, soon going well past 40 degrees Celsius (100 °F) and rising into sweltering extremes. Laika, who had calmed down when she’d become weightless, began to panic once more.

On Earth, Laika had handlers who calmed her when the training became stressful. Now, though, those scientists could only watch the information tick in. They saw Laika’s her heart racing faster and faster until they couldn’t pick up any heartbeat at all.

After five months and 2,570 orbits around the Earth, the satellite that had become Laika’s coffin fell down to the Earth. It streaked across the sky while people around the world watched, creating a small panic in the United States.

“Shortly after midnight on April 14, 1958, UFO sightings were reported by reliable witnesses along the east coast of the United States,” one report said. “They reported a brilliant bluish-white object moving high across the sky at incredible speed. According to reports, it suddenly turned red, and several small objects detached from the main object and fell into formation behind it.”

The UFO was Sputnik 2, and the detached objects were the pieces of the capsule being torn apart on reentry. Laika and the capsule disintegrated as they rushed toward the Earth. Her body never touched the ground.

Mushka, the dog who’d been kept on Earth as a “control dog,” followed Laika into space a little later. She was sent up in a rocket with a menagerie of dogs, guinea pigs, rats, mice, fruit flies, and plants, meant to study the effects of cosmic radiation.

Mushka was to come home. During reentry, however, the retro-rocket meant to slow her craft down malfunctioned. She fell off trajectory and started to crash down toward the Earth. The Soviets had no way of knowing where she would land, and they feared it would be into American hands.

In press reports, the Soviets claimed that Mushka’s spacecraft was burned up on reentry. The truth, though, was that there were explosives onboard. Fearing that their secrets would land in enemy territory, the Soviet scientists detonated the ship, killing every animal onboard.

“The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it,” said Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists on the team. “We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.”

Her trip into space was more symbolic than scientific. It proved that a living thing could be sent into space and survive, and, more importantly, that the Soviets could be the first to do it. The decision not to bring her back, though, weighed on the group and on the public. One Polish scientist called her death “undoubtedly a great loss for science.”

Laika, however, invigorated a world’s imagination for space travel. She paved the way for the future of space travel. Less than four years after her launch, Yuri Gagarin would become the first man in space, and he would come home safely.

Summerwind- Most Hounted House

Located on the shores of West Bay Lake, in the far northeast regions of Wisconsin, are the ruins of a once grand mansion that was called Summerwind. The house is long gone now, but the memories remain ... as do the stories and legends of the inexplicable events that once took place there. Summerwind is perhaps Wisconsin’s most haunted house, or at least it was, before fire and the elements of nature destroyed her. Regardless, even the ravages of time cannot destroy the haunted history of the house.

The mansion was built in 1916 by Robert P. Lamont as a summer home for he and his family. Nestled on the shores of the lake, the house caught the cool breezes of northern Wisconsin and provided a comfortable place for Lamont to escape the pressures of everyday life in Washington D.C., as he would later go on to serve as the Secretary of Commerce under President Herbert Hoover.

But life was not always sublime at Summerwind during the years of the Lamont family. For those who claim that the ghost stories of the house were "created" in later years, they forget the original tale of Robert Lamont’s encounter with a spirit. Legends of the house say that Lamont actually fired a pistol at a ghost that he believed was an intruder. The bullet holes in the basement door from the kitchen remained for many years.

 Upon the death of Robert Lamont, the house was sold ... and sold again. It seemed that nothing out of the ordinary really happened there, save for Lamont’s encounter with the phantom intruder, until the early 1970's. It was in this period that the family living in the house was nearly destroyed ... supposedly by ghosts.

Arnold Hinshaw, his wife Ginger, and their six children, moved into Summerwind in the early part of the 1970's. They would only reside in the house for six months, but it would be an eventful period of time.

From the day that they moved in, they knew strange things were going on in the house. It had been vacant for some time ... but it had apparently been occupied by otherworldly visitors. The Hinshaws, and their children, immediately started to report vague shapes and shadows flickering down the hallways. They also claimed to hear mumbled voices in darkened, empty rooms. When they would walk inside, the sounds would quickly stop. Most alarming was the ghost of the woman who was often seen floating back and forth just past some French doors that led off from the dining room.

The family wondered if they were simply imagining things but continued events convinced them otherwise. Appliances, a hot water heater and a water pump would mysteriously break down and then repair themselves before a serviceman could be called.

Windows and doors that were closed would reopen on their own. One particular window, which proved especially stubborn, would raise and lower itself at all hours. Out of desperation, Arnold drove a heavy nail through the window casing and it finally stayed closed.

On one occasion, Arnold walked out to his car to go to work and the vehicle suddenly burst into flames. No one was near it and it is unknown whether the source of the fire was supernatural in origin or not, but regardless, no cause was ever found for it.

Despite the strange activity, the Hinshaws wanted to make the best of the historic house so they decided to hire some men to make a few renovations. It was most common for the workers to not show up for work, usually claiming illness, although a few of them simply told her that they refused to work on Summerwind ... which was reputed to be haunted. That was when the Hinshaws gave up and decided to try and do all of the work themselves.

One day they began painting a closet in one of the bedrooms. A large shoe drawer was installed in the closet’s back wall and Arnold pulled it out so that he could paint around the edges of the frame. When he did, he noticed that there seemed to be a large, dark space behind the drawer.

Ginger brought him a flashlight and he wedged himself into the narrow opening as far as his shoulders. He looked around with the flashlight and then suddenly jumped back, scrambling away from the opening. He was both frightened and disgusted ... there was some sort of corpse jammed into the secret compartment!

Believing that an animal had crawled in there and died many years ago, Arnold tried to squeeze back in for a closer look. He couldn’t make out much of anything, so when the children came home from school, he recruited his daughter Mary to get a better look. Mary took the flashlight and crawled inside. Moments later, she let out a scream ... it was a human corpse! She uncovered a skull, still bearing dirty black hair, a brown arm and a portion of a leg.

Why the Hinshaws never contacted the authorities about this body is unknown. Was the story concocted later to fit into the tales of "haunted" Summerwind? Or was their reasoning the truth ... that the body had been the result of a crime that took place many years ago, far too long for the police to do anything about it now.

Had they been thinking things through, they might have realized that this body might have been the cause of much of the supernatural activity in the house ... removing it might have laid the ghost to rest, so to speak.

Regardless, they left the corpse where they found it ... but it will figure into our story once again.

Shortly after the discovery of the body in the hidden compartment, things started to take a turn for the worse at Summerwind.

Arnold began staying up very late at night and playing a Hammond organ that the couple had purchased before moving into the house. He had always enjoyed playing the organ, using it as a form of relaxation, but his playing now was different. His playing became a frenzied mixture of melodies that seemed to make no sense, and grew louder as the night wore on. Ginger pleaded with him to stop but Arnold claimed the demons in his head demanded that he play. He often crashed the keys on the organ until dawn, frightening his wife and children so badly that they often huddled together in one bedroom, crying and cowering in fear.

Arnold had a complete mental breakdown and at the same time, Ginger attempted suicide.

Were the stories of strange events at Summerwind merely the result of two disturbed minds? It might seem so ... but what about the children? They also reported the ghostly encounters. Were they simply influenced by their parents questionable sanity ... or were the stories real?

The family’s connection with the house would continue for years to come.

While Arnold was sent away for treatment, Ginger and the children moved to Granton, Wisconsin to live with Ginger’s parents. Ginger and Arnold would eventually be divorced when it looked as though Arnold’s hopes for recovery were failing. Ginger later recovered her health, away from Summerwind at last, and she married a man named George Olsen.

Things seemed to be going quite well for her in her new peaceful life, until a few years later, when her father announced that he was going to buy Summerwind.

Raymond Bober was a popcorn vendor and businessman who with his wife Marie, planned to turn the old mansion into a restaurant and an inn. He believed that the house would attract many guests to the scenic location on the lake.

They had no idea what had happened to their daughter in the house.

Ginger was horrified at her parent’s decision. She had never given them all of the details about what had happened during the six months that she had lived in the house and she refused to do so now. What she did do was to beg them not to buy Summerwind.

Bober’s mind was made up however. He announced that he realized the house was haunted, but this would not deter him. He claimed that he had spent time at the house and knew the identity of the ghost that was haunting the place.

According to Bober, the ghost was a man named Jonathan Carver, an eighteenth century British explorer who was haunting the house and searching for an old deed that had been given to him by the Sioux Indians. In the document, he supposedly had the rights to the northern third of Wisconsin. The deed had supposedly been placed in a box and sealed into the foundation of Summerwind. Bober claimed that Carver had asked his help in finding it.

Bober wrote a book about his experiences at Summerwind and his communications with Carver through dreams, trances and a Ouija board. The book was published in 1979 under the name of Wolffgang von Bober and was called THE CARVER EFFECT. It is currently out-of-print and very hard to find.

Shortly after Bober bought the house, he, his son Karl, Ginger and her new husband, George, spent a day exploring and looking over the house. The group had wandered through the place and as they were leaving the second floor, George spotted the closet where the secret compartment was hidden. He began pulling out the drawers and looking behind them, although Ginger begged for him to stop.

George was confused. He had simply been curious as to what might be in the drawers. Up until then, Ginger had never told anyone about finding the body behind the closet. Sitting in the kitchen later, she would tell them everything.

After hearing the story, the men rushed back upstairs and returned to the closet. Ginger’s brother, Karl, climbed into the space with a light and looked around. In a few moments, he climbed back out ... it was empty!

Bober and George also inspected the small space and found nothing. Where had the corpse gone? Had it been removed, either by natural or supernatural forces?

Or, most importantly, had it ever really been there at all?

Toward the end of that Summer, Karl traveled alone to the old house. He had gone to get a repair estimate on some work to be done on the house and to check with someone about getting rid of the bats which were inhabiting the place. He also planned to do some yard work and to get the place cleaned up a little.

It started to rain the first day that he was there and he began closing some of the windows. He was upstairs, in the dark hallway, and heard a voice call his name. He looked around but there was no one there. Karl closed the window and went downstairs. He walked into the front room and heard what sounded like two pistol shots! He ran into the kitchen and found the room filled with smoke and the acrid smell of gunpowder ... apparently someone had fired a gun inside of the house!

Karl searched the place, finding the doors locked and undisturbed. There appeared to be no one inside and he returned to the kitchen. He began looking around the room and discovered two bullet holes in the door leading down to the basement. He examined them closely and realized that they were not new holes at all ... but old bullet holes that had worn smooth around the edges.

They were apparently holes left behind from Robert Lamont’s encounter with a ghost in the kitchen. Perhaps events from the past were replaying themselves at Summerwind!

No matter what the explanation, it was enough for Karl and he left the house that afternoon.

The plans to turn the house into a restaurant did not go smoothly. Workmen refused to stay on the job, complaining of tools disappearing and feelings as if they were being watched. Marie Bober agreed with their complaints. She was always uneasy in the house and frequently told people that she felt as if she was followed from place to place whenever she was inside.

Most disturbing to Bober however was the apparent shrinkage and expansion of the house. Bober would measure rooms one day and then find that they were a different size the next day. Usually, his measurements were larger than those given in the blueprints of the house ... sometime greatly larger. At one point, Bober estimated that he could seat 150 people in his restaurant but after laying out his plans on the blueprints of Summerwind, he realized that the place could seat half that many.

Photographs that were taken of the house, using the same camera and taken only seconds apart, also displayed the variations of space. The living room was said to show the greatest enlargement.

Bober compared his photos of the living room with those that Ginger had taken when she and Arnold moved in. Ginger’s photos showed curtains on the windows that she took with her when she moved out. The curtains were physically absent in the room that Bober photographed ... but somehow they appeared in his photos!

Like the incident involving Karl and the pistol shots, could Summerwind be a place where time inexplicably repeats itself? Perhaps the place wasn’t haunted at all, but instead, was a mysterious site where time was distorted in ways that we cannot understand. Perhaps the shadows and figures that were seen could have been people or images from the past (or the future) and perhaps the sound of someone calling Karl’s name would happen in reality ... several months later.

We will never know for sure now, but the idea is something worth considering.

Eventually, the project was abandoned and Bober would never see the dream of his restaurant and inn. Strangely though, despite his claims that he was an earthly companion of the ghostly Jonathan Carver, the Bobers never spent the night inside of the house. They chose instead to sleep in an RV that they parked on the grounds. Also strange was the fact that Carver (if the ghost existed) chose to manifest himself in such malevolent ways ... especially if he was looking for help in finding his deed.

Bober’s explanation for this was that Carver resented anyone living in the house or trying to renovate the place, at least until the deed was found. Bober spent many days searching the basement for where the deed might be hidden, chipping the foundation and peering into dark holes and crevices.

To this day, the mysterious deed has never been found.

In the years that followed Bober’s abandonment of Summerwind, a number of skeptics came forward to poke holes in some of Bober’s claims. Many of their counter-claims, however, have been nearly as easy to discredit as some of Bober’s original ones.

Obviously, we are never going to know for sure if Summerwind was really haunted. The house is gone now and we are left with only the claims, reports and witness accounts of Bober and his family.

We can examine the claims of the family, and the skeptics, and try to make sense of it all.

In 1983, a freelance writer named Will Pooley set out to gather the facts behind the story and discredit it. His research claimed that even if Bober had found Carver’s deed, it would have been worthless. He based these findings on the fact that the British government ruled against an individual’s purchase of Indian land and also that the Sioux had never claimed land west of the Mississippi River.

First of all, the land was not sold to Carver, it was given to him in return for assistance that he had given to the Indians, so British law would not have ruled against this. On the other subject, the Sioux Indians were not a single tribe, they were an entire nation, made up of many different tribes. It is possible, and very likely, that one tribe that belonged to the Sioux nation could have lived in Wisconsin. The white settlers pushed the Indians further and further west and as this particular tribe abandoned their lands, they could have deeded them to Carver.

Pooley also argued that the deed to the property had been located in the old land office in Wausau, Wisconsin in the 1930's and that it is unlikely that Carver even journeyed as far north as West Bay Lake.

But would he have had to have traveled to northern Wisconsin to hold a deed to the land? And why would there not have been another deed filed for that piece of land? Someone could have claimed it many years later, not even realizing that Carver already held the title to it.

He also argued that the deed could have never been placed in the foundation of the house anyway ... Summerwind had been built more than 130 years after Carver died. To this, it can only be argued that many events of the supernatural world go unexplained.

One man that Pooley did talk to however, was Herb Dickman of Land 'O Lakes, Wisconsin. He had helped pour the foundation for the house in 1916 and recalled that nothing had been placed in the foundation ... a box containing a deed or anything else. So, who really knows?

Apparently, Bober was not always the most credible person either. Residents who lived close to Summerwind said that Bober spent less than two summers at the estate. After abandoning plans for the restaurant, he tried to get a permit to operate a concession stand near the house but local ordinances prohibited this. Perhaps he was planning the idea of tours of the "haunted" house ... and idea that would come along a little later.

There was even some uncertainty as to whether or not Bober even owned Summerwind. One area resident told Pooley that Bober had tried to buy the house on a contract-for-deed but the deal had fallen through. The house had been abandoned and no one laid claim to it, save for the bank, and they never realized what Bober was up to out there. This story has never been verified however and it cannot be proven that Bober did not own the place.

So how much of the story that Bober wrote about in his book is true? Was the house really haunted, or was the story of the haunting merely a part of a scheme by Raymond Bober to draw crowds to a haunted restaurant?

Those who live near the house claim that the idea that it is haunted has all come from the fact that the mansion was abandoned and from Bober’s wild claims. But what else would they say?

These neighbors have often made it very clear that they resent the strangers who have come to the property, tramping over their lawns and knocking on their doors. They say that the chartered buses that once came and dumped would-be ghost hunters onto the grounds of Summerwind were also unwelcome. These are the last people to ask for an objective opinion on whether this house is actually haunted.

So there remains the mystery ... was Summerwind really haunted? No one knows and if they do, they aren’t saying.

The house was completely abandoned in the early 1980's and fell deeper and deeper into ruin. Bats had already taken up residence years before and the house became a virtual shell, resting there in a grove of pines. The windows were shattered and the doors hung open, inviting nature’s destructive force inside.

In 1986, the house was purchased by three investors who apparently thought that they could make a go of the place again. But it was not to be ... forces greater than man had other ideas. Summerwind was struck by lightning during a terrible storm in June of 1988 and burned to the ground.

Today, only the foundations, the stone chimneys and perhaps the ghosts remain ...

John Renie Gravestone- Puzzling The Devil

At the eastern end of St Mary's Priory churchyard in Whitecross Street, Monmouth, Monmouthshire, Wales, there lies a gravestone of JOHN RENIE, a house painter who died in 1832 at the age of 33. The gravestone comprises a rectangular carved 285-letter acrostic puzzle. From the larger H on the center square the sentence "Here lies John Renie" may be read in any direction.

It is believed that Renie may have carved the stone himself which contains 19 squares across and 15 squares high. It comprises a rectangular carved 285-letter acrostic puzzle. In each square is a letter. The center row, for example, reads “o J s e i L e r e H e r e L i e s J o.” You can make out some clear words. “Here” and “Lies” are in that in that string above, and you can see the start of “John.”

It is claimed that the sentence may be read a total of 46,000 different ways. It is likely that Renie carved the stone himself. Writer and cleric Lionel Fanthorpe has suggested that his intention may have been to confuse the Devil, so ensuring Renie his passage to heaven.