Quick facts
What it is: An astronaut photo of unidentified lights seen from the moon
Where it is: Above the horizon on the lunar near side
When it was taken: During the Apollo 12 moon landing, Nov. 19-20, 1969
In mid-November 1969, a trio of NASA astronauts launched to the moon on the Apollo 12 mission and would soon become the second group of humans ever to set foot on the lunar surface.
Now, more than half a century later, the crew’s historic mission is capturing the public’s attention again — not because of what the astronauts did, but because of what they saw.
On Nov. 19, mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. and lunar module pilot Alan L. Bean descended to the lunar surface in a landing craft dubbed Intrepid. (The third crewmember, Richard F. Gordon, spent a lonely 31 hours piloting the empty command module through lunar orbit.)
While looking through the lander’s alignment optical telescope — a small, periscope-like device that offered a narrow, unmagnified view outside the spacecraft — Bean saw something that perplexed him.
“You can see these lights — particles of light, flashes of light… just sailing off in space,” Bean told mission control, according to a transcript of the communication. While this transcript has been publicly available for decades, it was resurfaced among a tranche of declassified UFO-related files released by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on Friday (May 8).
Bean initially thought the particles were leaking from the lander’s water boiler, but he soon added, “It looks like some of those things are escaping the moon. They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars.”
Newly released images from the crew’s lunar excursion may reveal what they were seeing. In a series of lightly altered photographs — declassified Friday along with roughly 150 other files, videos and images of alleged UFO sightings from various government agencies — unidentified lights dance in the sky over the lunar horizon, as seen from the Apollo 12 landing site.
The lights, which look bluish in some of the images, appear on their own or in small groups; one particularly packed photo highlights the unidentified lights in five separate regions of the sky.
Like the transcripts, these astronaut images have been publicly available since the Apollo era. But in the newly released versions, NASA has highlighted and zoomed in on the light sources, hinting that they were once the subject of an agency investigation. (NASA has made no conclusions about the source or nature of these lights.)
An Apollo 12 photo of the moon showing strange lights in five regions of the sky.
(Image credit: NASA)
Later in the transcript, mission control asks the astronauts if the strange flashes could be electromagnetic interference — unwanted signals emitted either from human-made technology or sources of cosmic radiation, like solar flares. The astronauts agree this is possible and leave the investigation at that.
This case, along with all the other newly declassified files, remains unresolved due to poor-quality data. Scant scientific information can be gleaned from these blurry, decades-old images and off-the-cuff remarks.
“It looks like some of those things are escaping the moon. They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars.”
Alan L. Bean, lunar module pilot
NASA maintains that unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP, the government’s preferred name for UFOs) are real but they have nothing to do with aliens. The space agency has been hunting for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence for decades, using the most advanced and expensive telescopes ever created, and so far, they’ve turned up nothing. Some dancing lights on the moon won’t overturn decades of scientific research.
The more likely sources of UAP are far more mundane: airborne debris, photo defects (like glare) and optical illusions are all common, according to a 2022 DOD investigation. Down on Earth, birds, weather balloons and foreign spy craft are regular culprits.
These NASA-altered photos may not be a giant leap for UAP studies, but their declassification — decades after being snapped — is a small step for government transparency.
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