What Happened to Vladimir Alexandrov?

This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the name your price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Hey. It's Ren. Just a quick thing before we start. This is a special bonus episode of ThruLine. Every month, we make exclusive episodes just for our very special ThruLine Plus supporters that take listeners behind the scenes of our work. But this month, we thought we'd give everyone a chance to listen. If you're already a Plus supporter, thank you so much. It means a lot to us, and you got first access to this episode in your Plus feed. But if you're not a Plus supporter yet, we hope you'll consider joining. It's a great way to support NPR and public media. Go to +.npr.org slash through line to join now. Earlier this year, I worked with producer Christina Kim Hey, Rend. On an episode about nuclear winter theory, which is the idea that if every world power that had nukes started to actually use them, the world would descend into nuclear winter. Think the end of the world a la the end of the dinosaurs. It was a theory popularized by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and other scientists in the nineteen eighties. Some credit the theory with helping to avert nuclear war at the height of the Cold War. A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. Sagan was the scientist of the time, in large part because he hosted this public media show called Cosmos that made science accessible and, well, human. He was part scientist, part poet and 100% magnetic. We are one planet. You should check out the episode if you haven't already. But we're telling you all this because while Carl Sagan was bringing nuclear winter theory to US audiences, he had a Soviet counterpart. Vladimir Alexandrov. Vladimir Alexandrov. He was handsome and young, and he spoke decent amount of English and, had a sort of a fluency that let him befriend many American scientists. This is Andrew Revkin. We interviewed him for the original episode because he wrote a big cover story for Science Digest magazine about nuclear winter theory in 1985. And that's when he told us that over the course of covering the nuclear winter story, something happened that the global scientific community couldn't explain. Not long after my my piece ran in March 1985 in Science Digest magazine. And it was just, a month or two later, I started getting emails and, I think, a call from some of the scientists I had interviewed saying that one of their Soviet colleagues, appeared to have vanished. And this was Vladimir Alexandrov. At the height of his scientific career, Vladimir Alexandrov had disappeared. Ever since I heard this story, …