From Orbit

OpenScott Carpenter reports white particles that look “exactly like snowflakes,” some seeming to move faster than his spacecraft.

OpenWally Schirra describes “little white objects” drifting off the capsule, then a burst of light in the window he can’t place; he guesses it lined up with sunset.

InterviewWalter Cronkite asks Gordon Cooper about UFOs. Cooper says “a large number of exceptionally well-qualified people” have seen objects without a logical explanation.

ExplainedCooper sees “John’s fireflies,” John Glenn’s name for them. NASA later traced them to frozen condensation shedding from the spacecraft.

OpenThe “Visual Sightings” section of the Gemini 4 debriefing, where James McDivitt and Ed White go through what they saw from orbit.

OpenFrank Borman reports an unidentified object to Houston, calling it a “bogey,” with comments from crewmate Jim Lovell.

OpenApollo 11’s crew debriefing: something sizable seen on the way to the Moon, flashes inside the cabin, and a bright light on the way home they tentatively took for a laser.

OpenAlan Bean watches particles and flashes of light “sailing off in space” through the lunar module’s telescope and calls them “escaping the Moon.”

OpenA photo from the Apollo 12 landing site with five areas of unidentified phenomena marked above the horizon.

ExplainedThe Apollo 12 crew describe streaks of light while trying to sleep. NASA later determined the flashes were internal to their vision.

ExplainedApollo 14’s crew debrief the “light flash phenomena,” since traced to cosmic rays passing through the eye.

OpenApollo 17’s crew watch bright, tumbling fragments Harrison Schmitt compares to the Fourth of July; their paint-or-ice explanation is, in their words, a “wild guess.”

Case openThree dots in a triangle in the lunar sky. A Department of War case is open, and the original mission film is under review.

OpenSkylab’s crews report light flashes, a satellite sharing their orbit, and another object with a “reddish hue.”

OpenSpace Shuttle Columbia, 1996: the first of three frames showing an unidentified object beside the Earth’s limb.