UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 01 · MAY 8, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · DOCUMENT · NASA-UAP-D005Apollo 17 Crew Debriefing for Science, 1973
This file is a reminder that “unidentified” and “unexpected” are not the same thing. It comes from the science debriefing held for the Apollo 17 crew, where the scientists behind each experiment reported early results to the astronauts. The speaker is Dick Henry, an astronomer working on the mission’s ultraviolet spectrometer, which flew aboard the orbiting command and service module.
The puzzle Henry described
Henry walks through several findings. Before the excerpt NASA highlights, he explains that the team looked for ultraviolet light from ionized hydrogen in the Coma cluster of galaxies and did not find it, leaving “a real mystery” about what holds the cluster together.
His fourth point is the one in the release. Pointing the instrument away from the Milky Way, toward high galactic latitudes, the team still saw a spectrum resembling that of hot stars where none were in view. Henry offers the cautious reading first — starlight from the galactic plane bouncing off interstellar dust — then notes that some features do not fit, and that it might be radiation from beyond our galaxy. He stresses that detailed computer analysis would take a long time.
Why it is in a UAP release
Nothing in the passage concerns an object, a craft or anything seen by the crew; it is an open question in ultraviolet astronomy, phrased the way scientists phrase open questions. The release does not say why it was included under PURSUE, and nothing in the passage links it to UAP reports.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released May 8, 2026, quoted in full
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 Crew Debriefing for Science on January 8, 1973, in which Dick Henry, co-investigator on the ultraviolet experiment on Apollo 17, discusses seeing results that were unexpected. • Pages 119-120. “One of the most exciting results of X-ray astronomy was the fact that an X-ray background was observed over the sky that nobody had expected, and part of this is the gamma-ray background that Dr. Trombka talked about. In the UV, nobody knows, but you never know until you look. You do have to deal with this background of stars that we know is there. So, we did look at a large number of different points at high galactic latitudes, both north and south. The spectrum that we see is above this dark count. In other words, this abnormally high dark current did not, in fact, interfere with that experiment. The spectrum that we see looks like the spectrum of the hot star; however, we know that there were no hot stars within our field of view. Therefore, the most conservative interpretation, I think, is that what we're seeing is light from hot stars in the galactic plane going up out of the plane and reflecting off interstellar dust. There are certain characteristics of the spectrum, though, that don't fit that theory, and it's at least possible that this is extragalactic radiation. I'm looking forward very much to the detailed computer study of this, but it's going to take a long time.”