THE DOCUMENT
Extracts from the Skylab Technical Crew Debriefings, prepared at NASA’s Johnson Space Center: Skylab 1/2, dated 30 June 1973; Skylab 1/3, dated 4 October 1973; and Skylab 1/4, dated 22 February 1974. The covers credit the Training Office of the Crew Training and Simulation Division on the first two and of the Crew Training and Procedures Division on the third. The documents carry a Freedom of Information Act handling notice and no security classification. Released in 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 about ten 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. They flew as Skylab 2, Skylab 3 and Skylab 4, the station itself having gone up unmanned as Skylab 1, which is why the debriefing covers are headed 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4. 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 on Skylab 3, the second crew to fly.
The ten minutes. About a week before splashdown, on 20 September 1973, 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 Skylab 2 crew, the first to fly, 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 Skylab 4 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, Skylab 3 debriefing, 4 October 1973
“We presumed that they were other pieces of Skylab, or possibly other satellites.”
Gerald Carr, commander, Skylab 4 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 Skylab 3 debriefing, the middle of the three.
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
References and further reading
- Primary documents: Skylab 1/2, 1/3 and 1/4 Technical Crew Debriefings, Training Office, NASA Johnson Space Center, 30 June 1973, 4 October 1973 and 22 February 1974, excerpts in PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- The Skylab 3 sighting is dated 20 September 1973 in NICAP’s case file for it, www.nicap.org; the debriefing itself says only “about a week before splashdown”, and the crew came down on 25 September 1973
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 17, on the Apollo 11 crew debrief and the cosmic-ray light-flash phenomenon
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 8, on the Apollo 17 transcript and astronauts identifying their own hardware
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 15, on what a document’s marking does and does not certify
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 1, on PURSUE Release 01 as a whole and the evidence tier system