Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing

Between Apollo missions, the scientists running each experiment would brief the astronauts on what the last flight had produced. This recording, a little over an hour and a half long, captures one of those sessions in Houston: principal investigators presenting early Apollo 16 results so that the Apollo 17 crew would know what to look for and how to make their own observations more useful.

The flash

The part that earns the recording its place in the PURSUE release begins at 25:15, when a “flash” comes up that, according to NASA’s description, had not been reported before. The description does not say who saw it, where — in lunar orbit, on the surface or in an instrument’s data — or what kind of flash it was. Listeners have to rely on the recording itself for those details.

How it fits the Apollo record

Flashes come up repeatedly in the Apollo files: crews saw light flashes with their eyes closed, which NASA traced to cosmic rays, and Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt called out a flash on the lunar surface (see his technical debriefing). The description does not link the flash in this recording to either. A separate recording from the same Apollo 16 debriefing series, NASA-UAP-D025, is in the release for a one-line joke about an “alien starbase.”