Gordon Cooper's Edwards AFB Saucer Landing and His UFO Letter to the United Nations

In 1957 Gordon Cooper was a USAF captain, a test pilot and project manager at Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California. He would later fly a Mercury capsule into orbit. It was not the first time he had seen something strange. In 1951, flying from Neubiberg Air Base in West Germany, he watched "many flights of them, of different sizes flying in fighter formation."

May 2, 1957, according to Project Blue Book documents. Cooper's memoir says May 3. At Askania Site #4, two civilian phototheodolite operators, James D. Bittick and John R. Gettys Jr., spotted something low in the northern sky just before 7 a.m.

It was golden and luminous. A domed saucer, with "holes or ports around dome." They put it at about 100 ft across and roughly a mile away. As sunlight struck it, it seemed to change from round to elliptical. Their supervisor, Frank E. Baker, took the radio report. The men photographed it with their Askania instrument. For about 25 minutes it drifted east. Then it disappeared at about 5 miles.

Cooper never saw the object. He saw the pictures. His crew, he said, filmed a "double lenticular shape [and] metallic" craft that hovered, stretched out three legs like landing gear and slowly set down on a dry lakebed, about 46 metres away. It made no sound. As the men walked toward it, it "Lifted off, put the gear back in the well, and climbed out at a very high rate of speed."

Cooper said the Pentagon told him to develop the film, make no prints and send the negatives to Washington by locked courier pouch. He never saw them again. The film has never surfaced.

Project Blue Book logged the case as BBU 4715 and suggested a weather balloon with a slow leak. An Edwards officer, Colonel Klein, rejected that after checking the actual balloon track and wind direction. The witnesses saw balloons released there often. They knew what balloons looked like. Physicist James E. McDonald later made it his Case #41. He was told some 30 photos had been confiscated by "Base military authorities" and never returned. NICAP gives the case its highest preliminary rating.

July 14, 1978. Cooper joined Grenada's Prime Minister Sir Eric Gairy, J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée and others at a meeting with Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. On November 9 he wrote to Grenada's UN mission. "I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on earth." He asked for "a top level, coordinated program" to study encounters worldwide. The letter was read into the record at a UN hearing on November 27. In December the General Assembly adopted Decision 33/426. It was never implemented, and the effort stalled after Gairy was overthrown in 1979.

Cooper's name does not appear in the Blue Book file, and the file records no landing. James Oberg said the photographers he interviewed "never knew Cooper had even BEEN at the base at that time." In his view the story had gradually changed into a landing tale, though he added: "Cooper tells entertaining stories to audiences who love to hear such stories, and I have no problems with this." Brad Sparks and Jan Aldrich suggest Cooper embellished secondhand information. Cooper told the Edwards story in his 2000 memoir, Leap of Faith, and on screen in Out of the Blue and James Fox's The Phenomenon.