NASA-UAP-D006, Apollo 17 Technical Crew Debriefing, 1973
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 Crew Debriefing on January 4, 1973, in which astronaut Harrison Schmitt reported seeing light flashes. • Page 24-4. [Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt]: “We had light flashes just about continuously during the whole flight when we were dark adapted. I had one which I thought was a flash on the lunar surface. That one period of time when we had the blindfolds on for the ALFMED [Apollo Light Flash Moving Emulsion Detector] experiment there were just no visible flashes, although that evening, that night, before I went to sleep, I noticed that I was seeing the light flashes again.”
The summary above is sourced from the released file metadata as published to war.gov. The analysis sections below are original to this tracker.
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 #23 of 40 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 334-file archive it ranks #145 of 334.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (145 of 334 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 1973 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-d6-apollo-17-technical-crew-debriefing-1973.pdf