DISCLOSURE / FILE
An audio excerpt index card for NASA's Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) flight on May 15, 1963, in which pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. describes sunrise over Earth and small luminous white particles drifting near the spacecraft.
NASA-UAP-D011, Mercury Atlas 9 Audio Excerpt, May 15, 1963
An audio excerpt index card for NASA's Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) flight on May 15, 1963, in which pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. describes sunrise over Earth and small luminous white particles drifting near the spacecraft.
This NASA file (NASA-UAP-D011, released May 22, 2026) documents an audio excerpt from the final Project Mercury flight, Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7), flown by L. Gordon Cooper Jr. on May 15, 1963 in low Earth orbit. Cooper describes the blue of sunrise beneath the atmospheric haze layer and small, luminous, brilliant white particles drifting away from the capsule. The description identifies these 'fireflies' as appearing after Cooper deployed beacons, spherical mission-related equipment fitted with xenon strobe lights. The underlying asset is audio or image-only, so no source page text was extractable for verbatim quotation.
Extracted text · Page 1
Page 1 · audio transcript
And I'm going to get the brilliant blue of sun rising in the east.
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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 I'm going to get the brilliant blue of sun rising in the east.
The bright blue band underneath all this haze layer.
I can see the haze layer.
And the bright band of light theme arcation coming underneath it.
Quite distinctive.
As a faint, good, is where there are clouds apparently.
After a while, I face 7, ready and loud and clear.
After a while, I face 7, ready and loud and clear.
Roger, understand. Roger, I'm just small and forward, 180-degree approaching sun rise over.
Roger.
Small in and as the particles drift away from you, small in and forward, in a flight they appear brilliant white without being all in them.
They appear to move on out, turn around, back to the flight path.
Come in here, I don't think. Roger, you haven't seen the bacon at this time.
Negative, I still haven't seen the bacon. Sure.
There was considerable noise, though, that something were departing.
Again, sir, there was considerable noise of the little doors, like those doors blowing open, so I assume the bacon has departed.
Roger, understand.
Hey, I'm Lux, real good on the ground. All right, Roger.
Okay, you confirm TV control switch to off. Roger, TV control is off.
Roger, TV control is off.
We have a slight decrease in the pool links on the DC current, all we do go through.
All right, you're DC current. Roger, main bus is 24.
Roger, lady, 28.5. Roger.
Hey, good. A girl is wired. Did you ever hear me?
I'm not getting that yet. I'm planning to do shortly here, though.
All right, your information systems last computations on fuel at Y, give you 88 auto 98 manual, which is somewhat better than you're indicating on board.
Roger, on board, I'm indicating 9.6 and 1.0.2.
Oh, boy, what a beautiful shot of Florida.
Roger, let's get them here one more, too.
Roger, the old state is clear. I can see just about off.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
There's been a beautiful view coming over Florida.
It is below me. It's quite a brownish, reddish-brown, and a set of altitude above the ground.
Got my fiery-pitched-down thruster. I get a shower of these little fireflies.
It is a lot. It's quite bright, quite discernible.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, right.
Here's to be about ten to twelve miles away.
I'm keeping it directly in the window.
I have to order a second magnitude star now.