Apollo 12, 1969

This photograph was taken at the Apollo 12 landing site in November 1969, looking across the lunar surface toward the horizon. It is one of five Apollo 12 images in the first PURSUE release, each published with highlighted boxes showing where to look. This one has the most: five areas, labeled Area 1 to Area 5, all in the black sky above the horizon.

What the boxes mean — and do not

The release is careful about its own markings. The highlights were added to point viewers to the spots in question; they were not part of the original image, and the government says they are not an analytical judgment or a conclusion about what the features are. NASA describes what is inside them only as unidentified phenomena, with no measurements or candidate explanations.

That leaves the reader with an annotated picture and no analysis. The release does not say how the features might have arisen, or whether any analysis of this frame is planned.

The Apollo 12 set

The four companion images, NASA-UAP-VM001 to VM004, show the same kind of scene with one or two highlighted areas each. By contrast, the government has opened a formal case on an photograph from the last Moon landing showing three dots in a triangle and has promised an analysis of the original film. No such commitment is attached to the Apollo 12 pictures. The crew’s spoken reports of particles and flashes on this mission are in the Apollo 12 transcript.