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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 12-47 reflection of the bolts in the windows. The windows were made up of about three or four or five panes of glass, so that if one got broken we still had some pressure integrity. And these little things, when the Sun shined on them right, they’d multiply the images off the different panes. And I’m quite sure that that’s what this thing was. But anyway, I became a world- renowned expert in UFOs. Unfortunately. WARD: So, to the best of your knowledge at the time and years later, there’s nothing abnormal or unusual— MCDIVITT: No. There’s nothing unusual about this at all. It was just—it’s sort of like John Glenn talking about the fireflies. I mean, those were just pieces of ice crystals that were falling off the spacecraft. And the same thing with this. It was just something that I’m sure came off the spacecraft. WARD: Well, one of the things that with increasing experience in spaceflight and the extreme lighting conditions and so on that has come clear over the years is that a lot of times things that you might think are large objects far away really are, as you point out, small objects that are very close— MCDIVITT: Oh yeah. They could be right up here in front of you. They could be right on the outside of the window. WARD: —and, therefore, would be out of focus in any camera picture you tried to take and wouldn’t show up. MCDIVITT: Absolutely. Yeah. As a matter of fact later on, on Apollo 9, there was a big
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