NASA-UAP-D016, Preliminary Gemini 4 Crew Debriefing, Part I, 1965
This document is a preliminary transcript (Part I) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Astronaut Ed White recounts seeing “sparkles” during the flight.
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, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12 of 340.
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GT-4 FLIGHT CREW DEBRIEFING TRANSCRIPI' Prepared By Spacecraft Operat ions Branch Flight Crew Support Division This material contains information affecting the national defense of the United States within the Section 793 and 794, the transmission or revela tion of which in any manner to an unaut horized person is prohi bi ted by law. Group 4: Downgrade at 3 year intervals I Declassified after 12 years NOTICE: This document may be exempt from public disclosure under the Freedom of lnfor• lec1~e to persons outside the U. S. Government should be handled under the provisions of
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This preliminary transcript was made from voice tape recordings of the GT-4 flight crew debriefing conducted aboard the recovery ship, the USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Although all the material contained in this transcript has been edited, the urgent need for the preliminary transcript by mission analysis personnel precluded a thorough editorial review prior to its publication. Errors in this transcript will be corrected as soon as possible and an official transcript will be published at a later date. This document contains a transcript of the first part of the debriefing, during which the crew described the mission generally from an operational viewpoint . A preliminary transcript of the re mainder of the debriefing will be published by June 23, 1965. It will cover systems operations, operational checks, visual sightings, experiments , pre-mission planning, mission control, and training.
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1.1 Crew Insertion White The only problem during insertion was that I fogged up again in my suit before we got the fans on. I think I'm just going to always fog up in that suit of mine. We turned the fans on quick, but with the visors closed it doesn't go out. McDivitt We did have a problem with crew insertion on the Wet Mock and I think we had that probably pretty well taken care of. They put us on the suit loops and didn't turn the fans on. Normally you wait for a clearance from the 1:t>acecraft Test Conductor before you throw any switches. Well, after we almost "died" of carbon dioxide poison ing during this +,est~ we got this matter clarified. As soon as we got in the spacecraft and one of us was on the suit loop, we would go ahead and cut the switches on to put us on two fans. We did this during insertion in the Wet Mock. It really went well. White We really went for a long time in Wet Mock. I was beginning to wonder if I was going to have to open my visor. I was really uncomfortable.
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McDivitt But everything worked out okay on this one. White Yes. McDivitt The timing was excellent , I thought. I didn't think we had any problem at all. White No. I don' t believe they missed a stroke on the White I think the communications were pretty well worked out, Jim? McDivitt Right. One thing, the last three minutes or four minutes, we got a little confused about who was talking to who . I was getting the Spacecraft Test CJnductor, the Booster Test CJnductor and the CAP COM at the same time. White We got a split count, too, on lif't--off. McDivitt The first three or four minutes I was hearing the B)oster Tast C?nductor. I heard what was going on on his loop , and I was listening to him get checks in f rom all of the guys . I really wasn' t getting a clue as to what was going on. I was supposed to be getting the booster clues from the test conductor. I was supposed to find out when the engines were going to gimbal and when they
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were going to open the prevalves and stuff. I wasn't getting it from him. We were getting a lot of other information that made a lot of sense to the Booster Test C:>nductor, but not an awful lot to us . There were call -outs likeVSequence 05003 complete." Well, this just didn' t mean any thing to us . On top of this we had the Spacecraft ~est Conductor calling out the times , and super imposed on all of this was Al Shephard, the Cape CAP COM, calling out events that he was reading off that went on at certain specified times . He called out','Stage 1 prevalvesVand we could hear the fuel gushing downstairs and the whole booster you could hear the same thing all over again. I thought t hat was a lot more meaningful than the test conductor comments. White I think that was wrong, the way they were doing it. I think we weren't supposed to be on any loop except CAP COM at that time. McDivitt Well, I think what happened was that we got this thing over-coordinated. Al was going to give us all this information, but then as a result of GT-3, (Gus and Jolm said they didn' t get enough
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information about the boosters) they put this in formation on the test conductor' s loop too . We ha.d too many guys talking. I think if just CAP COM talked from three minutes on down we would be all right . White This is the way I thought it was going to happen, and then from three minutes on down it really got busy with the yak, yak, yak of everybody talking. McDivitt I don't lmow whether we got off the Booster ~st C)nductor's loop or not, but at final countdown, from the Spacecraft Test C~nductor but it turned 01·.t that they were a second out of sequence on the countdown and Al was giving me 10 and our Spacecraft Test Conductor was giving me 9. So it went ten-nine, nine-eight, eight-seven. They were at the same t ime . All I knew was that we were getting close to engine ignition and then it started. So, we got a little over-communicated there . I think t hey kept us adequately informed
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 #33 of 40 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 450-file archive it ranks #186 of 450.
That places it in the lower-scoring band of the archive (186 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 Gemini 4 UFO - the three classified Gemini 4 debriefings (D016/D017/D018) documenting McDivitt's 1965 encounter with an unidentified orbiting object near Hawaii. The cluster page walks through all 3 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.
Reported by a witness with no instrumented record. The lowest tier in the rubric's sensor axis. Eyewitness perception in field conditions, even when the witness is highly credentialed, scores below capture by any instrumented modality. This report reached the federal record through NASA.
Astronaut witness on the official federal record - the highest tier in the rubric's witness-credibility axis. It applies to NASA crew debriefings, mission transcripts, and astronaut interviews across the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Witness credibility is only one of six components; the astronaut-witness files that also rank high on the sensor and disposition axes are the eight tied for the archive's top score of 72 - the Gemini 7 Borman audio, the Gordon Cooper interview, and the Apollo 14, 16, and 17 crew debriefings.
Single-witness or single-instrument capture. This is the corroboration tier for the overwhelming majority of the PURSUE archive on the released metadata - the rubric records the honest limit of the underlying record rather than inferring multi-witness corroboration that the released summaries do not establish. A small number of files with an independent second witness or instrument score on the multi-witness/multi-instrument tier above this one.
No kinematic measurements - speed, acceleration, vector - are published in the released file with sufficient precision to score on the kinematic axis. The rubric does not infer kinematic anomaly from narrative observer estimates. Every file in the archive carries this value, which is itself an observation about the disclosure: kinematic-grade telemetry was not part of what was released.
A conventional candidate explanation has been considered but is not dispositive. Every file in the archive scores this way - reflecting that the underlying release metadata systematically caveats strong determinations in either direction. The released summaries warn against reading them as conclusive analytical judgments, and the rubric respects that.
Released as open after formal review by the originating agency. The file passed through a review process and was published in that posture - a stronger disposition signal than 'unresolved with no review,' because review has occurred and the open status is the agency's published conclusion.
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-D003A, Gemini 7 Audio Excerpt, 1965
NASA-UAP-D023, Interview Excerpt with Astronaut Gordon Cooper, 1962
NASA-UAP-D030, STS-80 Unidentified Object Image 1, 1996
NASA-UAP-D031, STS-80 Unidentified Object Image 2, 1996
NASA-UAP-D032, STS-80 Unidentified Object Image 3, 1996
NASA-UAP-D003, Gemini 7 Transcript, 1965
Verification
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