Astronaut Gordon Cooper's 1962 UFO Audio — First NASA Astronaut Testimony in PURSUE

The third PURSUE release contains a small file with outsized significance: NASA-UAP-D023, a 2 min 03 sec audio excerpt from a 1962 interview with Mercury-program astronaut Gordon Cooper. It is the first time an astronaut's own audio testimony has been published in the PURSUE catalog.

Why this clip is unusual

Cooper was one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts and one of the most senior figures in U.S. crewed spaceflight to have publicly discussed unidentified objects during his career. Most prior PURSUE NASA records have been textual: Apollo mission transcripts, Gemini debriefing PDFs, the Apollo 12 and 17 lunar imagery. The Cooper audio is the first time the program publishes a recorded astronaut voice on the topic.

Released alongside

• NASA-UAP-D024 — Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing (audio, 96 min 32 sec)
• NASA-UAP-D025 — Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing (audio, 55 min 41 sec)
• NASA-UAP-D015 through D022 — Astronaut Scientific Debriefings (1962–1963), Gemini 4 Crew Debriefings Parts I & II (1965), Gemini 4 Experiment Debriefing (1967), Gemini 5 Technical Debriefings Parts I & II (1965), Gemini 7 Technical Debriefing (1965), Gemini 9 Debriefing (1966)

Combined, Release 03 adds roughly 2.5 hours of NASA audio plus eight separate Mercury and Gemini debriefing PDFs to the public record.

The full Release 03 inventory is in the SkyLens overview. Cooper's clip is on war.gov/ufo.