Mercury Atlas 9 Audio Excerpt, May 15, 1963

This is the longer of two Faith 7 clips in the release, and much of it is simply Gordon Cooper describing the view. Cooper flew the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9, on May 15, 1963, and this roughly eight-minute excerpt captures him approaching an orbital sunrise.

What Cooper describes

He talks first about the colors — a brilliant blue beneath the haze layer of the atmosphere as the Sun comes up. As the light grows he reports tiny, brilliant white specks floating off the capsule.

The recording then links the particles to a specific moment: Cooper mentions seeing fireflies after deploying a beacon. NASA’s note explains that the beacon was a piece of mission equipment, a sphere carrying a xenon strobe light, released from the capsule so the pilot could test how well he could see and track a flashing light in orbit.

Where it fits

The clip places the particles in a specific setting — sunrise, and the release of a piece of equipment — though it does not draw any conclusion from either. For the shorter clip in which Cooper uses the nickname “John’s fireflies,” and NASA’s conclusion that they were frozen condensation, see NASA-UAP-D010. Cooper later became one of the best-known astronauts to speak publicly about UFOs, as in his interview with Walter Cronkite.