Apollo 14 Debriefing, 1971

This recording, about an hour and a half long, is the first of two segments from a post-mission debriefing of the Apollo 14 crew — Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell — held at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. The topic NASA flags is the “light flash phenomena,” the streaks and points of light many Apollo astronauts reported seeing, usually with their eyes closed.

What the debriefers were after

At the time, the flashes were new and poorly understood. The value of this session is in the questioning: the debriefers try to pin down the flashes’ characteristics — in effect, to separate one kind of flash from another — so that the observations could be compared with theory. NASA’s description now calls the effect well documented, caused by high-energy cosmic rays passing through the eye and striking the retina, but that conclusion was still being built when this tape was made.

The segment overlaps with its continuation, NASA-UAP-D027, so some passages are heard twice.

Why the crew is of interest

Edgar Mitchell, the lunar module pilot on this mission, later became one of the best-known former astronauts to argue publicly that the government knew more about UFOs than it said. Nothing in NASA’s description of this tape connects him to that; the recording is about cosmic-ray flashes, an effect of biology and physics, not sightings of objects. For the earlier crews’ accounts that started the research, see the medical debriefing of the previous crew to land.