NASA-UAP-D023, Interview Excerpt with Astronaut Gordon Cooper, 1962
In November 1962, journalist Walter Cronkite interviewed astronaut Gordon Cooper. In this excerpt from that interview, Cronkite asks Cooper about his views regarding the nature of unidentified flying objects, having previously expressed an interest in the subject. Cooper opines that “a large number of exceptionally well-qualified people have seen objects” without a “logical explanation” and speculates on the existence of other planets with “a livable atmosphere” and that maybe there are “some type of human life” out there. Interview was conducted in November 1962.
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 #2 of 40 by Anomalousness Index. Across the entire 334-file archive it ranks #2 of 334.
That score is the highest in the PURSUE archive - one of eight files tied at the top score of 72 (the Gemini 7 Borman audio, the Gordon Cooper interview, and the Apollo 14, 16, and 17 crew debriefings).
For the broader cluster context, this file is part of Gordon Cooper on UFOs - the 1962 Walter Cronkite interview clip, tied for the archive's highest score at 72. The cluster page walks through all 1 member files with regional grouping, sensor breakdown, and standout analysis.
Anomalousness Index: 72/100
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.
This file from NASA is a single-sensor military capture - one instrumented platform, one modality, time-stamped and recoverable rather than a witness account. The rubric scores it below a multi-sensor capture because cross-modality confirmation (the same object seen by two independent sensor types at once) is the higher bar on this axis, and that confirmation isn't present here.
This November, 1962 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 72/100 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.
📝 Transcript (Whisper-generated)
Automatic speech-to-text transcript generated with OpenAI Whisper from the released audio. Machine-generated - expect occasional errors on proper nouns and radio-garbled passages. Verify anything load-bearing against the source file above.
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-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
NASA-UAP-D007, Skylab Technical Crew Debriefing 1973
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 (DVIDS): https://www.dvidshub.net/video/1010337/nasa-uap-d023-interview-excerpt-with-astronaut-gordon-cooper-1962
Direct video file: https://d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net/video/2606/DOD_111764959/DOD_111764959-1920x1080-9000k.mp4