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This is a NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project transcript of astronaut James A. McDivitt, interviewed by Doug Ward at Elk Lake, Michigan, on 29 June 1999. McDivitt talks about flying F-86s in Korea, test pilot work at Edwards, and his first class at the Aerospace Research Pilot School. He also covers turning down Dyna-soar, joining NASA in 1962 and learning to be an Apollo Program Manager. He describes the Change Board and says decisions were not second-guessed.
“Mission Control”9 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-45 WARD: Your Gemini IV flight had one other occurrence that is remembered by some. And that is a report, from you I believe, that you had encountered an object in orbit whose origins you were not certain of. And of course, the UFO [Unidentified Flying Object] buffs immediately thought you had seen an alien spacecraft. MCDIVITT: The story of how I became a UFO expert! Well, what happened was that we were low on fuel and the spacecraft was just tumbling through space, end over end and sideways and all over. Ed was asleep. We were taking turns sleeping. And Ed was asleep, and I was doing something in the spacecraft. I looked outside, just glanced up, and there was something out there. It had a geometrical shape similar to a beer can or a pop can, and with a little thing like maybe like a pencil or something sticking out of it. That relative size, dimensionally. It was all white. And I’d—we had all of our rocket engines shut off. I mean, we had the electronics form shut off. We were a battery-powered spacecraft, so we were trying to save electrical energy. And I immediately reached up and turned on the—pushed in the circuit breakers, because I thought I might have to maneuver around this thing, whatever it was. I couldn’t tell how close it was, how big it was. I grabbed a camera and took a picture. It was just floating there. I grabbed it and took it a picture. I grabbed another one and took a picture. And then the spacecraft rotated around where I couldn’t see it. Finally the rockets warmed up. The electronics warmed up. Remember, these were the Dark Ages. It takes a while to warm up! And so, by the time they got to where they’d worked, I didn’t have any attitude indicators. We had all the instrumentation shut off, too. So—and we were looking at the black sky; I had no reference whatsoever. So, I tried to fly the spacecraft back down to where I thought it was. And I never did see it again.
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