DISCLOSURE / FILE
Cooper Reports Glenn Fireflies Mercury Atlas 9 1963
A NASA audio excerpt from the Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) mission of May 15, 1963, in which pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. reports seeing 'John's fireflies' in low Earth orbit.
DISCLOSURE / FILE
A NASA audio excerpt from the Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) mission of May 15, 1963, in which pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. reports seeing 'John's fireflies' in low Earth orbit.
NASA-UAP-D010, Mercury Atlas 9 Audio Excerpt, May 15, 1963
A NASA audio excerpt from the Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) mission of May 15, 1963, in which pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. reports seeing 'John's fireflies' in low Earth orbit.
About one hour and 41 minutes into Mercury-Atlas 9, the final and longest flight of Project Mercury, Faith 7 pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. notes that he sees 'John's fireflies,' invoking John Glenn's term from the earlier Mercury-Atlas 6 mission. NASA later attributed the 'fireflies' to frozen condensation separating from the spacecraft body, with the white, green-hued appearance produced by sunlight reflecting off that frozen condensation. The file is an image or external audio asset released by NASA on May 22, 2026; no transcript text was extracted. The document does not assert an anomalous origin for the phenomenon.
Extracted text · Page 1
Page 1 · audio transcript
and now I have one hour at this time I have one hour and 21 minutes and I am
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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.
and now I have one hour at this time I have one hour and 21 minutes and I am
observing John's fireflies, lifting away from me, I can observe them
sort of aided parting from the spacecraft and drifting out to the rear
I can see some of them look at a set of old distance out to the rear
just coming up behind me I'm going to get the glow on the cloud
fireflies appear to be white, very whitish with almost a green like rail
fireflies. [Music]
clouds on the earth the lower changing color are getting quite light
I am there on the day side, decided not yet quite out
and I am observing stars, the earth is light below me, the sun is still behind me
the sky looks dark above me and I can see stars very distinctly