UNCLASSIFIED // PUBLIC RELEASERELEASE 02 · MAY 22, 2026
PENTAGON UFO FILE · AUDIO · NASA-UAP-D010Mercury Atlas 9 Audio Excerpt, May 15, 1963
This audio clip catches a small moment of continuity in early spaceflight. About an hour and 41 minutes after launch on Faith 7, the last and longest Mercury mission, Gordon Cooper tells the ground he can see “John’s fireflies.” He is borrowing a phrase from John Glenn, who had described luminous specks around his capsule on the earlier Mercury-Atlas 6 flight. The clip runs about three minutes.
What Cooper reports
The interest here is less the sighting than the shorthand. By May 1963 the drifting specks had been seen on more than one Mercury flight, and Cooper treats them as a known phenomenon with a nickname rather than something alarming. NASA’s note gives their color as white with a green tint.
The explanation NASA reached
According to the release, NASA later concluded the fireflies were frozen condensation breaking away from the outside of the spacecraft, glowing because they caught the sunlight. The longer Faith 7 excerpt has Cooper describing particles as the Sun rose, and Scott Carpenter’s “snowflakes” on Aurora 7 belong to the same family of reports. The clip itself contains no claim that the particles were anything other than debris from the spacecraft.
The official description
From war.gov/UFO, released May 22, 2026, quoted in full
Approximately one hour and 41 minutes into the final and longest flight of Project Mercury, Mercury-Atlas 9 mission (MA-9) Faith 7 Pilot L. Gordon Cooper Jr. notes that he sees “John’s fireflies,” referring to John Glenn’s term from the Mercury-Atlas 6 mission. NASA later determined that the “fireflies” are attributable to frozen condensation separating from the spacecraft body. The white, green-hued appearance of this phenomenon results from sunlight reflecting off frozen condensation.