NASA-UAP-D001, Apollo 12 Transcript, 1969
Apollo 12 was the fourth crewed U.S. mission to the Moon and the second to land astronauts on the lunar surface. This document is an excerpt from the Apollo 12 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription, November 1969, highlighting two periods in which astronauts reported observing unidentified phenomenon: a one hour period on the fifth day, and a two minute period on the sixth day. These transcripts contain contemporaneous observations by the flight crew reacting to unidentified phenomenon. • Day 05, Hour 19, Minute 14, Second 58 through Day 05, Hour 20, Minute 12, Second 14: o At 05:19:27:25, the pilot of the Lunar Module (LMP-LM), Astronaut Alan L. Bean, described observing particles and flashes of light “sailing off in space” via the onboard Alignment Optical Telescope (AOT). He characterized these phenomenon as “escaping the Moon.” • Day 06, Hour 00, Minute 21, Second 42 through Day 06, Hour 00, Minute 23, Second 33: o Mission Commander, Charles “Pete” Conrad, described observing floating debris outside the lunar module, which had been illuminated by the module’s onboard tracking light. At 06:00:21:51, Conrad assessed that the tracking light had burnt out because he could no longer see the debris from the module.
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
Text of the document
Machine-extracted from the PDF war.gov published (its text layer or OCR), so expect errors, especially in names, numbers and handwriting; the PDF is the authoritative copy. Lines that did not extract as readable text are left out. Showing about 693 words from pages 1, 2, 3, 4 of 4.
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05 19 16 37 If you will give us P0O and ACCEFT, we'll give you a CSM state vector and RLS update. 05 19 20 09 Yankee Clipper, Houston. Loud and clear. 05 19 20 22 cc Morning, Dick. We are fine. How are you? 05 19 20 27 CMP Well, pretty good. I hope you would like to have some company for a change. sure do; got everything in order; ready to go towards the LM and bring back . . . That's quite a chore; keeping this thing clean. 05 19 20 53 Roger. You got a couple of coal miners coming up to see you. Break. Yankee Clipper, if you will go POO and ACCEPT, we have an uplink. 05 19 23 14 CDR-IM Houston, you got the lift-off time for me? 05 19 23 39 Intrepid, Houston. Your lift-off time is
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05 19 24 11 CMP Okay. And Jerry, will you find out what they want to do about this battery charge, be~~use . I'm using the bus tics during the rendezvous? on terminating the battery charge at LOS? before lift-off. That way it might take it all the way up. 05 19 25 33 Clipper, Houston. We prefer that you terminate at LOS on this pass. 05 19 25 41 cc Roger. That would be one less thing for us to keep track of prior to lift-off. 05 19 27 25 IMP-LM Roger. When you look out the AOT in the dark quadrant? You can see these lights - particles of light. flash~s of light just seem to come from - in this case, I'm looking in quadrant 1 which is the left one. It's coming :from behind me, the left, and they're just sailing off in space. I was thinking they're dropping from my water boiler. but it looks like some of those things are escaping the Moon. They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars.
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evaluation before we do anything with it. 05 20 09 34 IMP-1..M Got sort of an interesting thing going on AGS right now. I didn't notice earlier, but it may just be because the lights i:,.re brighter now. I'm getting an all 81s flash on both the address and the information registers at about one- fifth the brilliance of the normal numbers. And a - It's pulsing every second. little bit, it's not noticeable. hot fire? 05 20 11 39 Roger, Al. Fredo is here. He and I have both seen that phenomena on your DEDA during t estin:', of most a.11 the spacecrafts up at Bethpage, and it's probably an EMI. 05 20 11 56 CDR-LM That's what ve've been talking about, but we thought we'd just tcucb in on it. 05 20 11 59 IMP-IM When you go to your roll rate, roll lef't, pitch 05 20 12 11 CDR-IM Here yo~ go, Houston, with roll, pitch, and
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okay. Your blinking light's Just not blinking, that's all. 06 co 21 51 CDR-IM Hey, Houston. It looks like our tracking llght's burned out. Dick hasn't been able to find us in this sextant. And on the first nightside pass we had little bits and pieces floating along vith us and we could tell that the tracking light va.; flashing on them. And we still have, I've presumed to think, bits and pieces floating along and nothing's flashing on them, so I'm pretty sure it burned out. ( and aft go? 06 00 22 33 CDR-LM It's getting much cleaner in here running this way; and, also, Yankee Clipper informs me he bas the television all set up. When we come around the hor~1, ·we' 11 come around with the television on in VOX. .0 6 00 22 53 CDR-IM Who knows, you may get to see the first the current indicates that your tracking light is on. 06 00 23 11 CDR-IM Okay. Now ve just turned it off. How does the current show that? air b~ckward3, then, Pete, because I don't see 06 00 23 33 CDR-LM Well, my ball tells me I'm pointed at you, Dick, ) • and so does my radar.
Where this file fits in the PURSUE archive
This file is one of NASA's 40 files in the Trump PURSUE disclosure. Within the NASA agency block it ranks #18 of 40 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #171 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (171 of 450 by score), typical of investigative-record style files where the report is paper-based rather than instrumented.
For the broader cluster context, this file is part of Apollo 12 UFO Photos - the 6-file Apollo 12 PURSUE cluster. The cluster page walks through all 6 member files with regional grouping, sensor breakdown, and standout analysis.
Anomalousness Index: 59/100
Evidentiary weight that this encounter remains unexplained after conventional analysis. Not a probability of extraterrestrial origin - that number is not honestly computable from the released files and this tracker refuses to publish it.
🤖 AI-ASSISTED SCORING · methodology
The six rubric components break down for this file as follows. Each component has a weighted contribution to the final score; the per-component explanation below describes what this file's particular value on that component means in the rubric's framework.
No sensor, camera, or instrument backs this observation - it is testimony, relayed through NASA, and scored on the rubric's lowest sensor-quality tier for that reason. That doesn't bear on the witness's credibility (a separate axis); it reflects only that nothing beyond human perception recorded the event.
This 1969 account comes from an astronaut on the official federal record - NASA's highest-credibility witness tier in the rubric, spanning debriefings and mission transcripts from Mercury through Apollo. It's one of six score components, not a standalone verdict; the astronaut-witness files that also score highest on sensor quality and disposition are the eight tied at the archive's top score of 72.
On corroboration, this file from NASA - like every single-tier file in the PURSUE archive - is a single-witness or single-instrument capture per the released metadata. The rubric doesn't infer multi-witness confirmation the summaries don't actually establish; this score reflects the honest limit of what was released, not a judgment about the underlying event.
The released file contains no speed, acceleration, or vector data precise enough to score on the kinematic axis - and that's true archive-wide, not specific to this file. The rubric declines to infer kinematic anomaly from a witness's narrative estimate of how fast something moved; that itself says something about what PURSUE actually released: descriptive accounts, not flight-path telemetry.
Every file in the archive, including this one, scores this tier: a conventional explanation was considered in the released record but isn't treated as dispositive. That's a pattern in how war.gov's own summaries are written - they consistently hedge against strong conclusions either way - and the rubric takes that hedging at face value rather than resolving it for them.
This file was released as open by NASA after a formal review process concluded - not simply logged and left pending. That's a stronger disposition signal than 'unresolved, no review': a review actually happened, and remaining open is NASA's own published conclusion from it, not an absence of one.
Bottom line on the score: the Anomalousness Index of 59/100 reflects evidentiary weight that this specific file's encounter remains structurally unexplained by the rubric's six axes - it is not a claim that the underlying event involved anything non-conventional, and it is not comparable across rubrics that use different weights. For the full per-axis weights and the rubric JSON, see /methodology.
Related files in NASA
Other PURSUE files in the same category, ranked by Anomalousness Index.
NASA-UAP-D024, “Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing”
NASA-UAP-D025, “Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing”
NASA-UAP-D026, Apollo 14 Debriefing, 1971
NASA-UAP-D027, Apollo 14 Debriefing (Continued), 1971
NASA-UAP-D028, Apollo 17 Crew Medical Debriefing, 1972
NASA-UAP-D029, Apollo 17 Crew Medical Debriefing (Continued), 1972
Verification
SHA-256:
This hash is the SHA-256 of the file body war.gov served on the verification date above. War.gov has re-processed some file bodies since first release (re-compression + OCR, no content removed - see /changes); we re-verify and record the change rather than silently serve a stale hash. How to check this yourself →
Source: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/nasa-uap-d1-apollo-12-transcript-1969.pdf