Skylab 3 "bright reddish object" sighting and photographs

Skylab 3 launched on July 28, 1973. Aboard America's space station were three men. Commander Alan L. Bean. Science pilot Owen K. Garriott. Pilot Jack R. Lousma. By September 20 they had been in orbit for 55 days. About a week remained before splashdown.

It was about 1635 GMT, revolution 1863. Lousma was at the wardroom window. "Jack first noticed this rather large red star out the wardroom window," Garriott later told NASA. "Upon close examination, it was much brighter than Jupiter or any of the other planets. It had a reddish hue to it, even though it was well above the horizon."

The light was not steady. Its brightness rose and fell with a period of "almost exactly 10 seconds," as if it were slowly rotating. It stayed close to the station. The crew tracked it for about 5 or 10 minutes. Bean called it "a great satellite." Then: "Huge one." Lousma later said he saw one "that was not like one you would see on earth." As Skylab approached sunset, the object turned more reddish.

At about 16:46 GMT the station crossed into Earth's shadow. The light followed about 5 seconds later. From that delay the crew estimated it was not more than 30 to 50 nautical miles away. Four photographs were taken. Three show a point of light. One shows a strange squiggle.

The crew debriefing came on October 4, 1973. There the astronauts described the object as a satellite "in a very similar orbit to our own." The SkyLab III Photographic Index reportedly filed it as an unmanned satellite. There is no report that NASA or NORAD tracked anything near Skylab. Garriott never got an answer. "What satellite it was and how it happened to end up in such a similar orbit, no one ever explained to us."

By 2007, Bruce Maccabee and Brad Sparks had studied Soviet satellite candidates and treated the squiggle frame as the true image. Their conclusion: "there was no man-made satellite that could explain this sighting and hence the object was truly anomalous." In 2010 the site Latest UFO Sightings called it "a highly credible case." It argued that contradictions in NASA's records "muddle and even conveniently eliminate… very important evidence."

James Oberg saw it differently. In 2011 he argued the object was debris shed by Skylab. Similar small debris had been seen on all three Skylab missions. The wardroom window looked down-sun, where "the station was casting an invisible umbra extending hundreds of meters down-sun." A sighting lasting several minutes, he said, ruled out an unrelated satellite. Skylab passed directly across Africa during the pass, and an object as large as the anomaly case proposed should have been seen from there. No matching reports were found. To Oberg, the squiggle was "a camera or processing artifact."

The case made the top 10 of Paul Kimball's 2007 documentary Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings. Bean's in-flight diary appears in the book Homesteading Space. Then, on May 8, 2026, the Pentagon's PURSUE programme released the debriefing excerpts as NASA-UAP-D7. The same file holds accounts of light flashes from the Skylab 2 crew and flashing lights seen by the Skylab 4 crew. Fifty-three years on, the red star the three astronauts saw has still not been identified.