Gemini 4: James McDivitt's "cylinder with a pole"

Gemini 4 lifted off from Cape Kennedy on 3 June 1965, with USAF Major James McDivitt as command pilot and Edward H. White II as pilot. On the first orbit, McDivitt tried to fly in formation with the spent Titan II second stage. It was venting leftover propellant and moving unpredictably. He burned nearly half his thruster fuel before giving up. A cylinder-shaped stage was now sharing their orbit.

4 June 1965. The 20th revolution. The spacecraft was passing over the Hawaiian Islands in daylight. White was asleep.

Then an object appeared in the window. McDivitt described a white cylindrical shape with a white pole sticking out of one corner of it, about three times as long as its diameter. Like a beer can with a pencil sticking out of it at an angle. And it was approaching the capsule.

"I don't know whether it was a very small object up close or a very large object a long ways away," he said, though he gave a rough estimate of 10 miles. Fearing a collision, he fired the thrusters. He moved the craft out of the sun glare and shot with both a movie camera and a still camera. Then sunlight hit the dirty window. After about 30 seconds, the object was lost.

Mission Control asked about it, but NORAD said no known objects were nearby. Its best candidate was the Pegasus B satellite, about 1,200 miles away. NASA held the film for four days, then released three or four pictures. McDivitt said they did not show what he saw. One, caption 65-H-1013, he very quickly identified as the Titan II second stage. "I am sure that this is not a photograph of the object which I described many times and which many people refer to as the Gemini IV UFO...."

He later put a set of blurry "tadpole" frames down to reflections off bolts in the window. In 2013, Scott McMan pointed to frame GT4-37149-039 in NASA's archive. Whether it shows the object is unconfirmed.

The Condon Committee took up the case. Astronomer Franklin Roach wrote its chapter on astronaut sightings and kept McDivitt's report among only three that stayed unexplained. Especially puzzling, he wrote, was "the daytime sighting of an object showing details such as arms (antennas?) protruding from a body having a noticeable angular extension." Roach rejected Pegasus. At 2,000 km it would span only about 1/20 of an arc-minute, far too small to show arms. Those 70 pages later went missing from the DTIC copy. In June 2020, The Black Vault recovered a complete version.

In 1981, James Oberg argued the object was the Titan II stage. The core of the Condon endorsement, he wrote, "has been demolished by the recognized presence of the beer can-shaped Titan-II stage." He added that degraded eyesight and a different viewing angle undermined McDivitt's denial. Philip J. Klass had received the same suggestion from NORAD.

McDivitt never accepted it. He always said it was not the booster. He thought it was human-made debris, or an unacknowledged satellite. What he saw that day has never been settled.

Six months later, Frank Borman on Gemini 7 reported "a bogey at ten o'clock high." Roach counted it among the unexplained too. Gemini 4 stays at the top of his list. A white cylinder. An arm. A window full of sun.