NASA-UAP-D4, Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, 1969
Document
NASA-UAP-D4, Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, 1969 is indexed as a source record. Apollo 11 was the third crewed mission to the Moon and the first to land Astronauts on the lunar surface. This document is an excerpt from the Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing (Volumes 1 and 2) from July 31, 1969. The document highlights three observations: one, an object on the way out to the Moon; two, flashes of light inside the cabin; and three, a sighting on the return trip of a bright light tentatively assumed by the crew to be a laser. Page 6-33 (Vol. 1). [Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin]: The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was 1 day out or something pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it. The crew speculated that it could have been the S-IVB stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle. Page 6-37 (Vol. 1). [Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin] The other observation that I made accumulated gradually. I don t know whether I saw it the first night, but I m sure I saw it the second night. I was trying to go to sleep with all the lights out. I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart Page 21-1 (Vol. 2). [Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin] I observed what appeared to be a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser.
Notable / anomalous element
- sunlight, because the window covers leak a little: bit of light no matter how tightly secured. (OCR text, page 7)
- At least that's my guess, without much to support it; some penetration of some object into the Z spacecraft that causes an emission as it enters the cabin itself. (OCR text, page 6)
Details
- And there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size. (OCR text, page 4)
- We were grossly mislead because with the sextant off focus what we saw appeared to be a cylinder. (OCR text, page 4)
- But we don't have any more conclusions than that really. (OCR text, page 5)
- TONEDENTA a4 ALDRIN The other observation that I made accumulated gradually. (OCR text, page 6)
- I couldn't explain why my eye would see these flashes. whine transearth coast, we had more time and I devoted more opportunity to investigating what this could have been. (OCR text, page 6)
- At least that's my guess, without much to support it; some penetration of some object into the Z spacecraft that causes an emission as it enters the cabin itself. (OCR text, page 6)
- Sometimes it was one flash on entering. (OCR text, page 6)
- Possibly departing from an entirely different part of the cabin, outside the field of view. (OCR text, page 6)
Tags: Lights, Lunar observation, Apollo, Moon, Astronauts