It's forbidden to mention anything positive about USSR/Russia in Western media. It comes to the point that the first man in space now is Alan Shepard, not Yuri Gagarin (according to the US media).
The only top search results for Alan Shepard which claim he was first in space are fanfic alternative history, which I guess is popular. I feel it’s quite popular to hypothesize that a Russian secretly preceded Gagarin but didn’t survive.
