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Apollo and Skylab crews describe an unidentified object and light flashes in NASA debriefings

July 1969 – September 1973 · Houston, Texas (NASA Manned Spacecraft Center) · Sighting · Original document

In the confidential technical debriefing of 31 July 1969, the Apollo 11 crew described a bright object they watched on the way to the Moon. Through the monocular it looked L-shaped, "like an open suitcase," and in the sextant it seemed to tumble like a hollow cylinder. Mission Control told them the S-IVB rocket stage was about 6,000 miles away, and the crew said they had no conclusion about its size, distance or nature. Aldrin also described flashes of light inside the dark cabin, sometimes double, which he guessed were particles passing through the spacecraft. Later crews reported similar things: Apollo 12 described lights streaming away from lunar orbit, Apollo 17 a field of bright tumbling fragments and frequent light flashes, and Skylab astronauts flashes with their eyes closed and a rotating reddish object they tracked for several minutes in 1973.

Era: Project Blue Book · Themes: Military and police witnesses, Scientific study

Why it matters (3/5)

Recorded in NASA's own debriefings, still widely cited, and the light flashes became the subject of an in-flight experiment.

The other side

The crews themselves offered conventional explanations: Collins suspected the Apollo 11 object came from their own spacecraft, Apollo 12 first thought of their water boiler, the Skylab crew took the reddish object to be a satellite in a similar orbit, and several astronauts attributed the flashes to cosmic particles. Apollo 17 tested the flashes with blindfolds in its light-flash experiment. The released records are short excerpts; the full debriefings and NASA's later analyses were not examined.

Sources

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