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“I witnessed how disappointed the scientists were when they did not find life on Venus. Two of them even said that their lives had been in vain as it was only this dream that had brought them into science in the first place... By the way, one of them later became a clergyman,” space journalist Vladimir Gubarev recalled in his book. The American scientific community was baffled by the Soviet attention to Venus. One of the pet theories at Los Alamos National Labs was that the Soviets were conducting atmospheric nuclear tests on the far side where Americans couldn't analyze them, which does a lot more to illustrate Cold War paranoia than anything else.