NASA-UAP-D002, Apollo 17 Transcript, 1972
Apollo 17 was the ninth crewed U.S. mission to the Moon, and the sixth to land astronauts on the lunar surface. This document is an excerpt from the Apollo 17 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription, December 1972, highlighting three periods in which astronauts reported observing unidentified phenomenon: a nine minute period on the first day, a three hour period on the second day, and a six minute period on the third day. • Day 00, Hour 03, Minute 34, Second 10 through Day 00, Hour 03, Minute 42, Second 29: o Command Module Pilot (CMP), Ronald Evans, reported observing “very bright particles or fragments” drifting and “tumbling” near the spacecraft as it maneuvered. Lunar Module Pilot (LMP), Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, described the phenomenon as looking “like the Fourth of July.” The astronauts speculated that the phenomenon may be attributable to ice or paint fragments dislodging from a separated component of the spacecraft (S-IVB) but characterized that assessment as a “wild guess.” • Day 02, Hour 18, Minute 42, Second 34 through Day 02, Hour 21, Minute 07, Second 05: o Mission Commander, Eugene A. Cernan, reported difficulty sleeping and described having observed “some sets of the streaks.” He also described an intense light flashing between his eyes, describing its intensity as comparable to that of a train headlight and characterizing it as “imposing.” Over the next three hours, Cernan described observing several flashing, rotating phenomenon that he assessed as corresponding to physical objects in space rather than a purely optical phenomenon. LMP Schmitt also reported observing similar phenomenon, though he again assessed the source of his observation to be a separated rocket stage (S-IVB). At 02:20:55:22, Cernan reported observing two additional distant flashing objects, though he assessed them as Spacecraft/Lunar Module Adapter panels (SLA panel), another separated component of the Saturn V rocket. • Day 03, Hour 15, Minute 33, Second 25 through Day 03, Hour 15, Minute 39, Second 46: o At 03:15:38:09, LMP Schmitt exclaimed that he had observed a flash on the lunar surface north of Grimaldi (crater).
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 999 words from pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of 16.
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CC Yes, we copied your VI and your EMS numbers, and we've got a number for you. Maneuver start time will be at 03 plus 33 plus 27. LMP Okay, we got you. Maneuver at 03:33:27. That's affirmative, Jack. LMP You guys didn't tell us we couldn't see anything going through the sunrise. (Laughter) Roger. craft SEP time of 03 plus 43. CMP Roger. We - we just got it, Bob. CMP Thank you. Roger. We're watching it. CMP Now we've got a few very bright particles or frag ments or something that go drifting by as we CC Roger. Understand. LMP There's a whole bunce of big ones on my window down there - just bright. It looks like the Fourth of July out of Ron's window. CMP Yes. Now you can see some of them in shape. 'They're very jagged, angular fragments that are
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CC Roger. They look like fluid of some sort? CMP Not to me. They look like pieces of something. CMP They're very bright. CC Jack, we'd like OMNI Charlie. CMP Bob, for the most part, these fragments are not - or are tumbling at a very slow rate. I tried a couple of pictures of them - different settings. You may get an idea of what, at least, the patterns look like. CC Roger. I've got you. We're all ears on these frag ments. Do you think you can figure out what they might be? ber of possibilities. If you had some kind of a - I got the impression maybe they were curved a little bit, as if they might be - off the side of the S-IVB. And that's a wild guess CMP - - ice chunks, possibly. Or maybe there's paint coming off of it. 00 03 37 34 Roger. I noticed on one trip up the elevator last weak near one of the flags. I thought it was on the S-II, but it might have been on the S-IVB. Looked like it was peeling. Maybe that's what you've got. 00 03 37 45 And the S-IVB maneuver is complete. CDR Okay. We'll set the old clock. CMP Okay. And the - with the maneuver complete, the fragment field is essentially static, except for very slight tumbling within the fragments.
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CMP Every once in a while, a fragment of considerably higher velocity than the others goes across my window. But that's very rare. CMP Hey, that's that field of view I saw out my window. Jack, do you see it now? CMP And, Bob. At least, there - there's no apparent relative motion between fragments. CC Roger. Understand. CMP I'll take two pictures about a minute apart if I can. And it'll be Frame 70. CDR And, Bob. This is Geno. My impression is that they are - flat, flakelike particles. Some may be 6 inches across. And, although there's no relative motion between the two, most of them seem to be twinkling. And I think, for the most part, they're all moving away from us. Roger, Gene. Thank you. Roger, Ron.
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00 03 40 01 CMP Okay. SECS LOGIC is CLOSED; SECS ARM are CLOSED; LOGIC POWER is ON. 00 03 40 38 CMP Okay. We'll ARM the PYROs. And we'll hit the GDC GDC? No. It's just ... It's kind of diddling. CMP Okay, check the covers. Okay. And check the other ones off. CMP Okay, I'm going to start the - My gr.,sh, look at the junk! Okay; there's 15 seconds. Pitch her up. Okay, we'll PROCEED on the - -
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02 18 4111 CDR Okay. Is that it? Yes, I can get that, Gene. CMP Okay, you want to take a picture of it first? CDR Say, Bob or Stu. Roger. Go ahead. I guess the first night I was in bed - I definitely saw some of these - because I had a hard time going to bed, to start with - I saw some of the same peripheral horizon-type things you said were not the type of data you were looking for; but I also saw a - some sets of the streaks. And probably the one most imposing thing I remember is - and the last one I remember before falling asleep - was the fact that there was a very bright spot that flashed right between my eyes like a very bright headlight - like a train coming at you, only with a flash. It's difficult probably to estimate the frequency of any of those because I was in a - sort of a sleep-hazy mode. CDR But then, as today, I saw some that flashed and lit up the horizon and some that lit up peripher ally; and I guess, as you say, that's a different kind of data, but I did see them there and they impressed me. CC Okay. We got all that, Gene. CMP And it might be interesting to know I've never seen it before today. CC Hey, Gene, we appreciate all the data. We were just trying to make the data fit the curve; you know the old trick.
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we saw them. That's all. CDR I will say one thing, though; no question in my mind but that they're there. Last trip I took, I guess I just wasn't looking for them or paying any attention to them. Maybe they were there and I ignored them because of other things. But they're LMP Okay, all you flash bugs down there - or flash bulbs I guess is the word - frame 50. I just took four pictures to show - two on the side and two on the bottom - to show the position of the ALFMED, and one of them of each set was focused on the ALFMED. The others were focused on the - the other set was focused on the struts. CC Roger, Jack. LMP And when you don't have anything else to do, why don't you have somebody predict where the S-IVB
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 #19 of 40 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #172 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (172 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 17 UFO Records - the 4-file Apollo 17 PURSUE cluster, including the triangular-formation lunar image and Schmitt light-flash debriefing. The cluster page walks through all 4 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 1972 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:
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Source: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/nasa-uap-d2-apollo-17-transcript-1972.pdf