UFOs & the Space Race

Image courtesy NASA

If you were born before 1960, you not only knew about the Space Race, you were sitting there with your nose pressed against the boob tube as the Mercury Seven rocketed into space, followed by the new crew who manned the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft as they worked out the kinks involved in beating the Russians to the Moon.  What was less well known about American astronauts is that a number of them reported UFOs that they observed in space. 

On May 15, 1963, Astronaut Gordon Cooper, on the last US Mercury flight, reported to Mission Control that he saw a greenish object heading toward his spacecraft.  What’s even more incredible is that the tracking station near Perth, Australia that was monitoring the progress of his capsule confirmed the unidentified object on radar as well.   It wasn’t long before reporters picked up on the story.  NASA informed them that the astronaut would not answer any questions regarding the sighting upon his return from orbit.

It wasn’t until 30-years later, that Cooper made a telling comment of his own during an interview, “For many years, I’ve lived with a secret.  I can now reveal that every day in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of a form and composition unknown to us.  There are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public.  Why?”

The retired astronaut’s question is a valid one.  Even before he joined NASA, Cooper was privy to another UFO incident that he regularly spoke about on the lecture circuit.  This was one that was captured on film by Air Force personnel who had been sent into the field to document experimental aircraft that were scheduled to fly from Muroc Air Base.  When the pair of airmen set up their camera equipment, they were surprised to see not an aircraft, but a silvery disc-shaped vehicle that flew into view only to extend its landing gear and make a soft landing in the desert.  Not only did the pair capture the departure of the UFO on film, but there were traces left by the vehicle including the impressions made by its landing gear.  When the airmen scampered back to the air base and processed the film, Cooper was one of the officers who managed to see it before it was flown to Wright Field in Ohio.  

Gordo wasn’t the only US astronaut to admit to seeing UFO’s.  Not by a long shot.  Fellow Mercury 7 astronaut, Deke Slayton wrote about an encounter he had in 1951 while piloting a F-51 jet. 

"I was up about the middle of a nice sunny day wringing out this particular 51. I had just come out of a spin at around ten thousand feet over the Mississippi River, near Prescott, where the Mississippi and the St. Croix meet, about twenty-five miles from the Twin Cities. I was heading back to Holman Field when all of a sudden, I saw this white object at my altitude, at one o'clock.  My first thought was that it looked like a kite. But logic said nobody's flying a kite at this altitude. So, I started kind of watching it to see what it was. I was closing on it, but I still didn't think too much about it. The closer I got, the more it looked like a weather balloon, and I'm thinking; that's what it's gotta be. Then I flew past it a little high, about a thousand feet off. It still looked like a three-foot diameter weather balloon to me. I had plenty of gas, so I figured I'd make a pass on it. Burn some gas and have a little fun. I pulled into a turn.   But when I came out of the turn and headed straight at it, all of a sudden it didn't look like a balloon anymore. It looked like a disk on edge! I thought that's strange. Then I realized I wasn't closing on the son of a bitch.  This thing just kept going and climbing at the same time at about a forty-five-degree angle. I kept trying to follow it, but it just left me behind and flat disappeared. I wondered what it was, but I never saw it again. I turned around, headed back and landed, and didn't tell anybody about it for two days. I was afraid they'd think I 'd lost my mind.” 

Image courtesy flickr

Other NASA test pilots, including Joe Walker and Robert White, both reported encountering UFOs when they flew the X-15.  After climbing more than fifty miles above the Earth’s surface, Walker filmed five cylindrical objects cruising above his experimental rocket plane in 1962.  He also admitted that on an earlier flight the month before he had encountered a pair of disc-shaped objects.

His fellow X-15 pilot, Major White reported over the radio while flying nearly five times the speed of sound at an altitude of 317,000 feet, “There are things out there!  There ab-so-lute-ly is!”  In the interview that was published in Life Magazine following his historic flight, the Air Force major commented, “I have no idea what those objects were that I saw up there.  I looked out the left windscreen and saw what looked like a piece of paper about the size of my hand that was thirty to forty feet away.  It was grayish white and I looked at it for a full five-seconds before it moved away.  I still don’t know what it was.”

Three years later, astronauts Ed White and James McDivitt were passing over Hawaii in Gemini IV when they reported a UFO to Gemini Control.  Here’s how McDivitt explained the sighting on the Dick Cavett Show in 1973, “I was flying with Ed White. We were drifting in space with the control engines shut down, and all the instrumentation off when suddenly an object appeared in the window. It had a very definite shape — a cylindrical object — it was white — it had a long arm that stuck out on the side. I don’t know whether it was a very small object up close or a very large object a long way away.

Image courtesy flickr.com

“There was nothing to judge by. I don’t know how big it was. We had two cameras that were just floating in the spacecraft at the time, so I grabbed one and took a picture and grabbed the other and took a picture. Then I turned on the rocket control systems because I was afraid we might hit it. At the time we were drifting.  So, I had the rocket control engines going again and moved the spacecraft so that the window was in darkness again — the object was gone.”

On Gemini VII, crewed by Jim Lovell and Frank Borman both saw something trailing their spacecraft.  Below is the transcript of the conversation with Cape Kennedy.

Lovell: Bogey at ten o’clock high.

Capcom: This is Houston.  Say again, Seven.

Lovell: Said we have a bogey at ten o’clock high.

Capcom: Gemini 7 is that the booster or is that an actual sighting?

Lovell: We have several. Actual sighting.

Capcom: Estimated distance or size?

Lovell: We also have the booster in sight.

This was hardly the last report of UFOs by astronauts on orbit.  Gemini X reported spotting “two bright objects up here in our orbital path.  They look like we’re going right along with them.”  During Gemini XI, Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon described a cluster of objects next to their spacecraft.  Two months later, Buzz Aldrin reported seeing three glowing orbs that he then snapped fifteen photos of.  He would later be the second man to walk on the Moon.

Image courtesy flickr

Speaking of the Apollo XI mission, while most people remember that one giant leap for mankind, they are totally unaware of what the sole astronaut left in lunar orbit saw from his unique vantage point. During this historic mission, Mission control relayed a message from a group of German astronomers that had seen a strange light emanating from Aristarchus crater.  Since they knew Apollo XI was in orbit around the Moon, they asked the astronauts to take a look.  Not only did they confirm lights that had no place being in the bottom of a huge crater, but later in the mission while Neil and Buzz were on the Moon, Command Module pilot Mike Collins shot pictures of and drew a sketch of a veritable light show that took place in the crater.  While Neil and buzz got all the glory for being the first two humans to walk on the Moon, Michael Collins out of this world sighting has all but been forgotten to history.

While there were more UFOs reported during the Apollo and Space Shuttle era, US astronauts weren't the only ones seeing strange things in space.  Even cosmonauts who were famously tight-lipped during the Cold War, a began recounting unusual sightings and encounters in space as soon as Perestroika broke out.  During a 1990 radio interview  cosmonaut Gennadiy Mankakov revealed that during a recent mission he had seen a great silvery sphere hovering twenty to thirty kilometers over the north pole. Less than a year later, cosmonaut Mus Manarov captured footage of a cigar-shaped UFO that he spotted while approaching the Mir space station to dock.

Immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, western journalists and ufologists flocked to Russia to see what they could dig up.  One of the most incredible was a report that wasn't discovered buried in a dusty archive at the Kremlin, but a Russian newspaper article that was published in June 1980.  Rabochaya Tribuna reported that the Chief of the Cosmonaut Training Center, Vladimir Alexandrov came to the newsroom bearing a picture of a UFO along with an account of an incident that involved cosmonauts Valery Ryumin and Leonid Popov.  According to Alexandrov, the two cosmonauts were in orbit on Salyut-6 when they noticed a cluster of white luminous objects that climbed through the clouds below.  While they watched, the mystery objects proceeded above the altitude of the Salyut space station until they disappeared into the blackness of deep space.  While skeptics later claimed that all the cosmonauts saw was the launch of several missiles, the photo of the round glowing objects that lacked even a hint of a contrail such as a rocket would display was hard to deny.

What's more, it was also discovered that the Soviet Union had conducted their own official inquiry into UFOs much like our Project Blue Book.   Called Thread-3, their program collected eyewitness accounts, radar plots and trace evidence.  However, the powers that be in the Soviet Union were more open minded, at least within the Politburo.  Not only weren't they averse to admitting that some of the UFOs in all likelihood came from other planets or a parallel universe, they were much more pragmatic in admitting that their ultimate goal was to conduct wide-ranging investigations that would lead to the discovery of new principles of non-traditional propulsion.

When it came to the two superpowers owning up to what they had discovered during five decades of research into UFOs, I'll leave that to next week's episode called UFOs, Lies & Video Tape.

Want to learn more?  Visit the author's website to find more blogs, videos, books and more.