Documents / Official release
This 1998 NASA file holds UFO-related letters from constituents that were forwarded by members of Congress, together with NASA's handling records. Senator Olympia Snowe forwarded letters from Maine residents, including a 12-year-old who asked for Roswell documents and listed a number of reported sightings. Senator Charles Grassley forwarded a question about astronaut UFO sightings. NASA's reply says it has no UFO program and has not withheld anything. The reply enclosed a NASA fact sheet and James Oberg's article, which explains the Gemini-4 McDivitt object as the spacecraft's own booster.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Released with redactions. This collection of documents, primarily from 1998, contains draft and final correspondence from the White House and the offices of members of Congress responding to constituent inquiries about Unidentified Flying Objects, or “UFOs.” These inquiries cover a diverse range of topics, including alleged UFO sightings by NASA astronauts, questions regarding the authenticity of photos collected during U.S. missions to Mars, alleged improper withholding of information by the U.S. Government, questions regarding the appropriateness of “UFO-related” governmental spending, and calls for congressional hearings regarding the nature and existence of “UFOs.” The official responses consistently state that, circa 1998, the U.S. Government is not aware of evidence supporting the existence of extraterrestrial technology, and that NASA does not actively investigate “UFOs.” The collection includes references to materials of both confirmed and unconfirmed authenticity, as provided by constituents, as well as references to historical, scientific literature addressing specific “UFO” sighting claims.
!.iinc:l' all thf" m:ill.'riill ll;m.lcr used to ..prove" the r xistcncc Qf the inddcnts werl.' public information ( Harder could have read it in Saga, which is hardlr a top scc;rrt )!O\'crnmcnt r:!port), his rdcrcnce to a co\·eruμ and to sr.cret inside informatiu,1 were clearly only gimmicks t\1 impre~r; the news, media with the value of his •'information". NASA, meanwhile, says that no such UFO event took place. The lights, according to Dale Myers (Associate Administrator for Manned Space flight: quoted in a letter dated Feb. 5, 1973 to Mr. Donald Ratsch of APROj, were spacecraft fragments: "During all of our Apollo lunar missions. objects have been sighted by the various crews. Subsequent to the crew sightings, the flight controllers determined the observations were probably either the S-IVB booster, the spacecraft lunar adapter (SLA) panels, or smaller objects such as mylar foil particles. Because of their large size and highly reflective surfaces, the S-IVB and SLA panels should be visible at great distances in the space emironment..." Astronaut Conrad, as quoted earlier, claimed that the flash ing lights were obviously SLA panels but that he was 'joking with the ground. He denounced the Saga story explicitly and gave his opinion that Harder was a "kook". Astronaut Gordon has publicly stated that he has never seen a UFO on any .;pace flight. Alan Bean, the only one of the three still on active NASA duty, issued a statement soon after Harder's latest charges went out over the news media late in 1975. In a UPI dispatch: "Astronaut Alan Bean...said that at no time during his mission did he ever see an unidentified objecL Bean said that there were some metallic parts which floated behind their sp:>r.e craft after the Apollo-12 !Uf'l.?r module lifled off from t~•• r:~oon. He said these small p:.- ...•!:onauts) made an engine burn 'f':c: metallic objects wer~ par ts er locity simply because they had no form of propulsion to do so. But Conrad saw one of the "SLA panels" (on Nov. 15th ) suddenly leave its position at a " high rate of sμccd ... an i:11;,ossib1lity, unless it really was a m.lal!uvcrable spacec raft of some ::-ort. nut where docs one find a maneuverable spacecrait nearly 150,000 miles from the earth? The :inswer: (excepting ,\ pollo 12 itself) in November of 19C9 th~re weren't any. The conclusion is inescapable: One (possibly two) maneuverable spacecraft not of man-made origin were following our Apollo 12 on November 14 and 15, 1969." To anyone familiar with the flight plan of an Apollo moon flight, Conrad's words imply nothing of the sort. Two facts must be brought to mind. First, Apollo and the Capcom were discussing the present position of the SLA panels based upon their initial separation velocities from the spent S-IVB rocket stage. Second,. the SLA panels break free after the Apollo pulls off from the booster; the astronauts then perform a maneuver called the "turnaround" the Command Module returns to the booster to dock with the now-exposed Lunar Module, before pulling the LM free from its "garage". Striking the UFOlogist's punctua tion and clarifying words from the communication, and putting it in proper perspective, what Conrad was saying was: Apollo: That could be true (that the SLA panels were flying off at one or so feet per second), but gee whiz, when I turned around (right after they flew free, thirty-three hours ago) I saw one of those SLA panels leaving the area (of the LM "garage") at a high rate of speed, and it looked to me that it was leaving us pretty...at a pretty rapid clip, like it got a lot more than a foot per second or so. The UFO believers' reasoning-and the entire basis for Harder 's and for the Saga article's Apollo-12 UFO sighting-is phony. The most generous description of it would be a mistake, a misreading of the transcript's meaning in an attempt to "prove" a UFO incident that never really happened outside of the fertile imaginations of certain UFO believers. Conrad's statement, Gordon's statement. Bean ·s statement. and the NASA letter must stand validated on this case: Apollo-12 was not followed by a t;FO on its to the moon. But how about on the way back? "A light of indistinct shape" was spotted just prior to re-en try, 52
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 86 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.