Astronauts Who Reported UFOs: Gordon Cooper, Gemini, Apollo 11 and the ISS

An astronaut is the ideal witness: a test pilot with a science background, trained to observe and report, looking at the sky from above the atmosphere. So when a story says an Apollo crew was "warned off the Moon" or an ISS camera "cut away" from a craft, it carries the authority of the people who were there. The trouble is that the stories usually do not. The record of what astronauts actually reported is shorter, stranger and more mundane than the legend, and the men themselves have spent decades correcting it.

This article goes through the genuine reports, in order, and what became of each. It ends with the reason orbit produces so many unidentified objects, which is the explanation for most of them.

Leroy Gordon Cooper, one of the Mercury Seven, is the astronaut with the most UFO claims to his name, and almost none of them happened in space. He said that in 1951, as a fighter pilot stationed in Germany, he and his squadron watched formations of metallic, saucer-shaped objects fly over at altitudes their F-86s could not reach. He said that in 1957, at Edwards Air Force Base, a film crew recorded a saucer landing on a dry lake bed and taking off again, and that the film was sent to Washington and never seen again. In 1978 he wrote to the United Nations in support of Grenada's call for a UFO study, stating his belief that extraterrestrial vehicles were visiting Earth.

What he did not do was see a UFO on his own Mercury flight. The persistent story that a glowing green object approached Faith 7 over Australia in May 1963 and was tracked by the Muchea station was denied by Cooper himself, repeatedly, for the rest of his life. His 2000 memoir repeats the German and Edwards accounts and the denial in the same chapter.

The first orbital reports came from Gemini. In June 1965, James McDivitt on Gemini 4 saw through his window a white cylindrical object with what looked like arms or antennas, tried to photograph it, and lost it in the sun. NASA suggested it was the Pegasus 2 satellite, which McDivitt rejected because Pegasus was over a thousand miles away; he said it was probably an unmanned satellite and never claimed otherwise. The photograph NASA released, which shows a blurry blob with a tail, is not his object: it is sun glare on the window, and McDivitt said so.

In December 1965, Frank Borman on Gemini 7 radioed Houston: "We have a bogey at 10 o'clock high." Asked whether it was the booster, he replied that he could see the booster as well, and that this was something else, with "hundreds of little particles" nearby. The consensus since is that Borman saw debris shed from the Titan second stage, which was tumbling nearby; the crew's own transcript is where the exchange lives, and it is far less dramatic than the quotation usually makes it.

On the way to the Moon, the Apollo 11 crew saw a bright object pacing them at a distance, changing from an L-shape to a cylinder as it tumbled. Buzz Aldrin has described it in detail many times, including on television: they asked Houston, obliquely, where the discarded Saturn IVB stage was, learned it was six thousand miles away, and concluded the object was one of the four SLA panels that had enclosed the lunar module and separated from the rocket at the same time. The crew did not report it as a UFO because, Aldrin says, they did not want a transcript that would be quoted out of context for fifty years. It has been anyway.

The rest of the Apollo 11 legend, the "they were parked on the other side of the crater" quotations attributed to Armstrong, the hidden "two minutes of silence," the Soviet transcript, has no source. Armstrong never said it, the mission audio is public and complete, and Aldrin, who has answered the question thousands of times, gives the panel every time. In 2018 a viral story claimed a lie-detector test had "proved" he saw an alien; the company involved analyzed his voice on an old interview and made no such claim.

The astronaut who did believe was Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot of Apollo 14 and the sixth man on the Moon. Mitchell said publicly from the late 1990s until his death in 2016 that aliens had visited Earth, that Roswell was a real crash covered up by the government, and that he had been briefed by people in intelligence who knew. He told a radio interviewer in 2008 that "we have been visited on this planet." He was also clear that he had never seen anything himself, in space or on the ground; his conviction came from what he was told, mostly by people from Roswell, where he grew up.

NASA's response at the time was that it did not track UFOs and that Mitchell was "a great American" whose views were his own. He founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to study consciousness after a mystical experience on the return flight. He remains the source of most "Apollo astronaut confirms aliens" headlines, none of which involve an observation.

Story Musgrave, a six-flight shuttle veteran and physician, saw on STS-80 in 1996 a long white object that seemed to coil and uncoil as it drifted past; he called it a "snake" and, on reflection, debris, probably a strap or a length of insulation. The same flight's cameras recorded slow-moving lights that became one of the most-watched "NASA UFO" videos; the crew identified them as ice particles and debris lit by the sun against the dark limb. Leroy Chiao, on a spacewalk from the ISS in 2005, saw lights in a line moving past below him and later concluded they were fishing boats.

Cosmonauts have their stories too. Vladimir Kovalyonok reported from Salyut 6 in 1981 an elliptical object that appeared to split in two; Gennady Strekalov reported a sphere over Newfoundland in 1990. Neither was resolved. The Soviet program was less forthcoming than NASA about transcripts, which has let these accounts grow. Chris Hadfield, asked constantly, says that in his time on the station he saw nothing he could not identify and explains why: an orbiting laboratory sheds ice, flakes of paint and thermal blanket, and is passed by boosters and satellites, all of which catch the sun against a black sky.

A point of light in orbit has no scale and no reference. A flake of ice a few inches from the camera and a satellite a hundred miles away look the same, and each moves relative to the spacecraft in ways that look like intelligent flight: pacing, then dropping away as the orbits diverge. Sunlight arrives without an atmosphere to soften it, so anything reflective flares brightly and then vanishes as it turns. Add live streams that run for years and an audience that scrutinizes every frame, and the ISS produces UFO footage on a schedule. The feed cutting away during a "sighting" is the signal handoff between ground stations, which happens many times a day.

John Glenn saw the first of them in 1962: "fireflies" around Friendship 7 that turned out to be ice crystals shed by the capsule. Every crew since has seen the same thing. The astronauts who have looked hardest at the sky are, as a group, the least inclined to think they have seen a spaceship in it, and the ones who believe say they believe for other reasons.