DISCLOSURE / FILE
Apollo 17 Bright Angular Particles Near S-IVB 1972
A NASA Apollo 17 audio excerpt from December 7, 1972 in which the crew report and describe small drifting lights seen outside the spacecraft during transit to the moon.
DISCLOSURE / FILE
A NASA Apollo 17 audio excerpt from December 7, 1972 in which the crew report and describe small drifting lights seen outside the spacecraft during transit to the moon.
NASA-UAP-D009, Apollo 17 Audio Excerpt, December 7, 1972
A NASA Apollo 17 audio excerpt from December 7, 1972 in which the crew report and describe small drifting lights seen outside the spacecraft during transit to the moon.
This is an image-or-audio-only NASA file (no extracted page text) covering Apollo 17, the final crewed Apollo mission, on December 7, 1972. Commander Gene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans report seeing small bright lights, described as jagged, angular particles or fragments, drifting near the spacecraft and the separated Saturn S-IVB stage in cislunar space. The crew themselves speculate the lights are likely paint chips or ice chips, noting they twinkle and move away from the S-IVB stage. The documents do not assert an anomalous origin; the crew's own working explanation is mundane debris.
Extracted text · Page 1
Page 1 · audio transcript
After you, uh, very bright particles are fragmented, there's something that, uh, go drifting by as we've been over.
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Concatenated page-by-page transcript. Born-digital pages came through pdf.js; scanned pages were transcribed by Claude vision OCR. Pages marked unreadable failed multiple OCR retries (heavy redaction, microfilm artifacts, or blank separators) and are kept in place for audit.
After you, uh, very bright particles are fragmented, there's something that, uh, go drifting by as we've been over.
I do understand.
There's a whole bunch of big ones on my window there. It's just bright. Looks like the 4th of July out of Ron's window.
Yeah, and they see some of them in shape. They're very, uh, jagged, angular, uh, fragments of their tumbling.
Do they look like fluid or some certain?
Not too many. They look like pieces or something now.
Oh, Roger.
They're very bright.
Jack, we like comedy, Charlie.
[sound of a machine running]
[sound of a machine running]
[sound of a machine running]
Well, for the most part, these fragments are not, uh, they are tumbling at a very slow rate.
I've tried a couple pictures of them, uh, different settings. You may get an idea of what, uh, leaves the patterns look like.
Roger, I got you. We're all ears on these fragments. Do you think they can figure out what they might be?
Well, you know, I don't know. I have a number of possibilities. If you had some kind of, uh, I got the impression maybe they were curved a little bit as if they might be, uh, off the side of the S4B. That's a wild guess.
They are just, uh, much a good choice. I can't move possibly, and maybe there's paint coming off of it.
Right, I noticed on one chip that the elevator last week, uh, one of the flags, uh, I thought it was an S2, but it might be an S4 look like we're stealing, maybe that's what you got.
And the S4B maneuver is complete.
Okay, well, so two o'clock. Okay, and the, um, maneuver complete. The fragment field is, uh, since we static, except for very slight tumbling within the fragments.
Roger, cover that.
Every once in a while, a fragment, uh, considerably higher velocity than the others goes, uh, across my window. But that's very rare.
Roger.
Okay, that's that, uh, field of view, I saw, um, I wouldn't back, you see it now.
Yeah.
And Bob, uh, at least there's no apparent relative motion between fragments.
I didn't see it.
I'll take, uh, two pictures about, uh, minute apart if I can, and it'll be frame 70.
Okay, frame 70.
And Bob, uh, his genome, my impression is that they are, uh, flat, flake-like particles, some, uh, maybe six inches across.
And, uh, although there's no relative motion between it to, uh, most of them seem to be, uh, twinkling.
And I think, for the most part, they're all moving away from us.