The USSR landed a probe on mars, the unimagetivelly called Mars 3, it's mission was aborted in less than 2 minutes due to communication failure, but it acchieved a successful landing, and was actually the first one to do so succesfuly.
Its predecessor, Mars 2 reached mars, but crash landed, but have the honor of being the first man made object to land on mars surface.
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.
The USSR landed a probe on mars, the unimagetivelly called Mars 3, it's mission was aborted in less than 2 minutes due to communication failure, but it acchieved a successful landing, and was actually the first one to do so succesfuly.
Its predecessor, Mars 2 reached mars, but crash landed, but have the honor of being the first man made object to land on mars surface.