Documents / Document
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.
“Nevers”36 pages
Johnson Space Center Oral History Project James A. McDivitt 29 June 1999 12-46 The fact that I could see it was—pretty much meant to me that it was in our orbit. If it was in a different orbit, we would’ve—going 18,000 miles an hour, it would’ve went by us so fast that we’d have never seen it at all. I had no idea whether it was a little thing up close to the window or it was a big thing out a little bit further. It could’ve been the size of the Empire State Building for all I knew way out there. But I’m sure it was in the—in our orbit and it probably was a piece of ice that had fallen off the spacecraft someplace. Or maybe a piece of Mylar that had come out from behind the thing and come up in front. Nothing ever showed up on the photographs. I reviewed them all. They were probably out of focus and I didn’t have time to adjust anything. I didn’t—I couldn’t adjust the F-stops or the range or anything. I just grabbed the cameras and took a picture. So, anyway, that was it. And—but I got to be a world-renowned UFO expert over that! The thing that really exacerbated the problem was when we got back to—when the film got back to Houston, we were still out on an aircraft carrier. They printed up all the EVA film, which was of great interest because nobody had ever seen an EVA before, and had a huge press conference. All that stuff was shown at the press conference. Some reporter wanted to know about the UFO. NASA said they hadn’t printed all of the photos. They would print them later that night. He hung around and eventually they got them all printed. And I understand—many years later I figured this out, or at least I think I figured it out, this guy and a photo tech went through all the photos; and they picked out one that looked like a bunch of spacecraft from some foreign planet. They were disc-shaped things with a tail. I think there were three or four of them in an echelon formation. And then that got printed someplace. I never did see it until years and years later, when I started getting all these requests to appear on UFO shows. I went back and then I saw what the thing was. And really what it was, was a
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 110 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.