The first director of the UK’s iconic Jodrell Bank Observatory has claimed that the Soviet Union tried to kill him with one of their own radio telescopes.

Bernard Lovell says he believes the USSR tried to kill him on a visit to a telescope near the Black Sea, possibly because Jodrell Bank was being used to watch for Soviet missile launches.

“They tried to remove from my memory the fact that they had taken me to their own defence nucleus on the Black Sea coast, because they did not want news of what they had brought back to this country,” he said in an interview with the BBC earlier this week. “I was very thankful to see the lights of London on one return.”

“I think they had an extremely powerful transmitter of the type we had on the telescope for planetary research. And the radiation from this telescope here was so dangerous that we would never use it at an elevation below about 15 degrees, [to avoid] endangering people’s brains.”

In the interview Lovell described to the BBC how he was called by the Ministry of Defence after the launch of Spunik and asked to use the telescope at Jodrell Bank to detect missile launches.

See also

Professor Sir Bernard Lovell ‘was target of Cold War assassins’ – Times

Sir Bernard Lovell claims Russians tried to kill him with radiation – Telegraph

Image: archive photo of Bernard Lovell / Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester