DISCLOSURE / FILE
NASA-UAP-D023 is a November 1962 interview excerpt in which Walter Cronkite asks astronaut Gordon Cooper about unidentified flying objects and whether early Mercury flights could observe anything relevant.
NASA-UAP-D023, Interview Excerpt with Astronaut Gordon Cooper, 1962
NASA-UAP-D023 is a November 1962 interview excerpt in which Walter Cronkite asks astronaut Gordon Cooper about unidentified flying objects and whether early Mercury flights could observe anything relevant.
Cronkite frames the exchange around Cooper's earlier interest in unidentified flying objects. Cooper says qualified witnesses had reported objects without a logical explanation, then places that possibility inside a wider argument about habitable planets and possible human-like life elsewhere. He also says the Mercury flight profile was still too low and close to Earth to make useful observations about that question.
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You expressed interest at one time in unidentified flying objects, feeling that there might be
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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.
You expressed interest at one time in unidentified flying objects, feeling that there might be
something to all these stories.
Do you still feel that way?
Well, I feel that there have been a large number of fairly well-qualified, exceptionally
well-qualified, I should say, people who have seen objects that have not had any really
logical explanation other than this, I think that maybe in fact each and every one of them
does have an explanation.
But I think that there are so many possibilities, so many thousands of possibilities of other
planets out somewhere in the universe that would have a livable atmosphere, that I would
hate to rule out the possibility that maybe there are people or some type of human life
on some of these.
And if this is the case, then it's not too unfeasible to think that perhaps some of these
objects might have been something of this time.
You don't think that the comparatively short step out into space that the Mercury flight
will take you on is far enough out to make any observations in this area?
No, I think we're still in a fairly low order of getting out into space when you regard
when you speak of space and being millions of miles involved, and we're only getting
out 100 miles or so.
What about the so-called Glenn effect, Gordo the snowflakes, the fireflies, now both the
Charon Carpenter seem to feel that it's frost or some nature off of the capsule, but apparently
Glenn still sort of casts doubt on that theory.