THE DOCUMENT
(Unchanged from deployed: extracts from the Skylab Technical Crew Debriefings, Training Office, Crew Training and Simulation Division, NASA Johnson Space Center; second crew 30 June 1973, third crew 4 October 1973, fourth crew 22 February 1974; FOIA handling notice, no security classification; PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov.)
Why this one is worth your time
Of all the sightings filed under “even the astronauts saw them”, this is the one with the most complete paperwork. It is not a blurry gun-camera frame, and it is not a story told secondhand decades later. It is a bright red object that paced a crewed space station for ten unbroken minutes while a crew of trained scientists watched it, timed it and measured it. And for the first time, what they said about it can be read through a traceable .gov channel, declassified in PURSUE Release 01.
So let us do the most rewarding thing a UAP reader gets to do. Climb into the wardroom, look out of the same window, and read what they saw in their own words, with nobody standing between you and the crew.
What the file says
The setup. Skylab was the first US space station, and three crews lived aboard it across 1973 and 1974. Each crew was debriefed after its mission, which is the gift in this release: not one look at the sky, but three, recorded separately. Skylab was a science station, and the man at the centre of the famous sighting, Owen Garriott, was a physicist flying as science pilot.
The ten minutes. About a week before splashdown, the pilot Jack Lousma noticed something out of the wardroom window: a bright reddish object, much brighter than Jupiter, holding its red colour even when it climbed well above the horizon. The crew did not shrug it off. They went to work on it.
They timed its brightness as it pulsed, and clocked a rotation period of almost exactly ten seconds. They bounded its distance by watching how quickly it chased them into the Earth’s shadow, five to seven seconds behind their own sunset, and from that delay put it no more than 30 to 50 nautical miles away. They tracked its drift, just ten to twenty degrees across the window in a full ten minutes, which meant its orbit nearly matched their own. It is beautiful observational work, done live, in orbit, by eye and stopwatch. Sit in it for a moment; the conclusion can wait.
Garriott’s own conclusion. Then the science pilot gives his reading, unprompted and plain: “It was obviously a satellite in a very similar orbit to our own.” That sentence is in the debrief, and it stays here in full. The measurements above are his crew’s; the conclusion is his own, offered on the record.
The other two crews. The release holds two more cases. The second crew describe faint flashes seen with their eyes closed, entrance and exit streaks across the vision, and reason on the spot to a cause now well documented in spaceflight medicine: cosmic-ray particles, more frequent over the South Atlantic Anomaly. The fourth crew’s commander, Gerald Carr, reports lights moving outside the station and offers his identification in the same breath, “we presumed that they were other pieces of Skylab, or possibly other satellites”, reading the apparent tumble as light flashing off a rotating surface. Three crews, three sightings, three identifications, all logged by the crews themselves.
What the file does not say
The crew asked, twice, which satellite they had been watching. In the released pages, no answer ever reaches them. If a match was made on the ground, it is not in this file, and the object’s catalogue identity stays blank on this paper. That is a loose end a determined reader could chase with a 1973 orbital catalogue and an afternoon.
The release is also extracts, not the full debriefings; whatever sits outside the extracts is not part of the record here.
From the record
“It was obviously a satellite in a very similar orbit to our own.” Owen Garriott, science pilot, third crew debriefing, 4 October 1973
“We presumed that they were other pieces of Skylab, or possibly other satellites.” Gerald Carr, commander, fourth crew debriefing, 22 February 1974
Read it yourself
The three debriefings are hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 01, dated 30 June 1973, 4 October 1973 and 22 February 1974. The famous ten minutes is in the third crew’s debriefing.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
(Related wiki entries and References: unchanged from the deployed page.)