Gemini 11 "Wingman" Photographs

Gemini 11 lifted off on September 12, 1966, with Command Pilot Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr. and Pilot Richard F. Gordon Jr. aboard. Both were US Navy officers. The three-day mission would set an altitude record. The sighting came the next day. September 13.

The spacecraft was going into sunset. Off to the left, something was keeping pace. "We had a wingman flying wing on us going into sunset here, off to my left," the crew reported. "A large object that was tumbling at about 1 rps."

Its distance was impossible to judge. "I say fairly close to us, I don't know, it could depend on how big he is." It could have been anything "from our ELSS to something else." The ELSS was their spacewalk chest pack. "We took pictures of it."

Three Hasselblad frames survive. S66-54659, S66-54660 and S66-54661. They show bright, haloed shapes. In conversations and letters with space journalist James Oberg, the astronauts described "attached booster stages" around the object's waist, "like the triangle-tipped stages of a Titan-3."

The next day the CAPCOM had news about "the object sighted by Pete Conrad over Tananarive yesterday on the 18th revolution." NORAD identified it as the Soviet satellite Proton III. "Since Proton III was more than 450 kilometers from Gemini 11, it is unlikely that any photographs would show more than a point of light." Proton 3 decayed on September 16. Three days after the sighting.

In 1968 the Condon Committee's report, in a chapter by Franklin E. Roach, accepted the identification. But enlarged 100 times, the film showed more than a point. "Four distinct objects can be distinguished," the report said, spread across as much as 3.55 kilometres at 450 kilometres. Roach concluded they were "multiple pieces of Proton III including possibly its booster plus two other components." Critics noticed the tension between the promised point of light and the several objects that appeared.

Physicist Bruce Maccabee, of the Naval Surface Weapons Center, reopened the case in 2000. The image on the film measured about 0.5 mm. Proton 3 at 450 kilometres should have left about 0.001 mm. If it was Proton 3, he argued, it "must have been within 2 km." His verdict: the images and testimony "are not consistent" with the satellite. For Maccabee, the object remained unidentified.

Oberg weighed it differently. The "booster stages" matched Proton 3's triangle-tipped solar panels. Yet he could not get the orbital timing closer than five or six minutes. He gave Proton 3 a 65% chance and another manmade satellite 30%. "I could not PROVE it had been Proton-3," he wrote.

On the Metabunk forum, members including Mick West looked closer to the capsule. Paint flakes, ice, insulation, or the food waste and equipment the crew had jettisoned earlier. A small tumbling fragment could explain the changing shapes between frames. The crew's own words, "anything from our ELSS," left room for exactly that.

No one has accused the crew of a hoax. In 2021 The Black Vault republished the NASA scans, with an animated sequence by researcher William Johnson showing the object tumbling. A separate Gemini 11 saucer image, frame S66-54585, is another story. Mick West found the original NASA frame and there was no saucer on it. The wingman itself has never been settled.