THE SOURCE
Two NASA items from PURSUE Release 01. First, NASA-UAP-VM6, a colour photograph taken during Apollo 17 in December 1972, reported to show a triangular formation of dots in the lunar sky. Second, NASA-UAP-D2, an Apollo 17 air-to-ground voice transcript from the same mission. Both published by the U.S. Department of War at war.gov/ufo.
Why this one is worth your time
Two NASA items from one mission travelled into this release together: a photograph that picked up a formal investigation, and a transcript in which an Apollo crew watches strange lights and talks them through in real time, on the record. Few files in the release let you listen to trained observers think out loud. This one does it twice, in two media, and the photograph’s question is, on the released paper, still standing.
What the files say
The photograph, NASA-UAP-VM6. The image is a lunar surface panorama from December 1972. The foreground is what you would expect: grey regolith, rolling hills on the horizon, the reseau cross marks NASA cameras printed onto every frame for measurement, the slightly green cast typical of these scanned Hasselblad transparencies. In the dark sky above the hills, the release flags a small cluster, and an inset enlarges it: two or three faint bluish points arranged in a rough triangle. At native resolution the cluster is a handful of pixels in a noisy region of the frame, and a single photographic frame carries no distance, no size and no motion.
What the release adds is the paperwork. The inventory notes that VM6 carries its own formal NASA investigation case: the relevant office logged the frame as a question rather than waving it through. On everything released here, that case shows no conclusion. Logged as a question; on this paper, still one.
The transcript, NASA-UAP-D2. This is the running air-to-ground record between the three-man crew and Mission Control in Houston. The release highlights several passages in which the astronauts describe bright objects in space, and in each case the crew’s own identifications sit a few lines from the sighting.
Early in the flight, during a spacecraft manoeuvre, the command module pilot reports “a few very bright particles or fragments or something that go drifting by as we maneuver”, and the lunar module pilot adds: “It looks like the Fourth of July out of Ron’s window.” The command module pilot reasons aloud in the same exchange: the fragments might be “off the side of the S-IVB”, the spent third stage of their own launch vehicle, “ice chunks, possibly. Or maybe there’s paint coming off of it.” Mission Control offers a matching memory of peeling material near a flag on the booster, and the crew note that once the manoeuvre stops, “the fragment field is essentially static.”
Later in the flight, the commander describes a single bright flashing object, careful and specific: “definitely not a particle that’s nearby”, “obviously rotating because it’s flashing”, “way out in the distance” at perhaps “10 or 12 Earth diameters”. The commander notes its rhythm, “a very bright flash; and then you get a dull flash”, and the lunar module pilot names it: “That’s the side and - of the S-IVB - and then the engine bell, Gene.” Later still the commander reports “two of those flashers out there” and offers “they could be SLA panels”, the adapter panels jettisoned during the same flight. Across the Apollo programme record, crews tracking their own jettisoned hardware is well documented.
A third set of lines covers the Apollo light flashes, brief points or streaks the astronauts saw, sometimes with eyes closed, including “a very bright spot that flashed right between my eyes”. These were being studied at the time under the ALFMED experiment, which this same transcript repeatedly shows the crew stowing; the standard attribution since is cosmic-ray particles passing through the eye. The transcript also captures the crew distinguishing this “different kind of data” from the objects outside the window.
Reading them together. Same mission, same agency, same tier. One file leaves a question standing in the record; the other carries its answers in the crew’s own voices, lines apart from the sightings. Between them, they show the full range of what a primary document can hold.
What the files do not say
The released record does not show the VM6 case closing. If a closing memo exists, it is not here: the frame is known, the mission is documented to the minute, and somewhere there is either that memo or a gap where one should be. That is a loose end a determined reader can chase.
The frame itself does not say what the dots are. No distance, no size, no motion survives in a single exposure, in either direction.
The transcript’s identifications are the crew’s own, made in flight. The release attaches no later analysis confirming or contradicting them, and neither file speaks to the origin of anything described.
From the record
“Now we’ve got a few very bright particles or fragments or something that go drifting by as we maneuver.”
Command module pilot, Apollo 17 air-to-ground transcript, 1972
“It looks like the Fourth of July out of Ron’s window.”
Lunar module pilot, same exchange
“Might be - off the side of the S-IVB. And that’s a wild guess … ice chunks, possibly. Or maybe there’s paint coming off of it.”
Command module pilot, same exchange
“That’s the side and - of the S-IVB - and then the engine bell, Gene.”
Lunar module pilot, on the distant flashing object
“A very bright spot that flashed right between my eyes.”
Crew member, on the light-flash phenomenon
Read it yourself
Both items are hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 01: NASA-UAP-VM6 (the photograph, with its inset) and NASA-UAP-D2 (the full transcript, with every highlighted passage in context).
Read the files. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- NASA-UAP-VM6, Apollo 17 photograph, December 1972, hosted at war.gov
- NASA-UAP-D2, Apollo 17 air-to-ground voice transcription, December 1972, hosted at war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, www.aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Background on the Apollo light-flash phenomenon and the ALFMED experiment, NASA Apollo programme records
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 1, on how to read PURSUE Release 01 and the evidence tier system