The Edwards Lakebed Landing

A small silver saucer lowered three landing gear and settled on the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. One telling puts it at about thirty feet across. A military camera crew filmed it there, the tellings say, before it retracted its gear and departed at high speed. Another telling adds that its door opened and closed before it took off. The film, every telling agrees, was sent to Washington and never seen again.

The man who told the story was the astronaut Gordon Cooper. He said he saw the negatives. He told it in a 1978 letter to the United Nations, in his memoir Leap of Faith in 2000 and in Disclosure Project testimony.

What is on the record

Two claimants are resolved: Gordon Cooper and the camera crew he described. The public record names the two photographers as James Bittick and Jack Gettys, who were setting up an Askania cinetheodolite on the lake. Cooper was not an eyewitness to the landing. The photographers were.

Some tellings need correcting. One has Cooper stationed at Muroc as a major. In 1957 he was a captain, and the base had been Edwards since its renaming in 1949. Cooper's own recollections sometimes place the event in 1958.

The public record says Cooper phoned a Pentagon office and the film was developed but not printed. It went to Washington by locked courier pouch. No Project Blue Book record of the incident has been located. There is no official explanation. Sceptics including James Oberg note that no file and no film has ever surfaced, and that the account rests on Cooper's retelling decades later.

Why it sits where it does

Seven videos across four channels carry this case to L3. All of them lead back to one man retelling what others filmed, and no second source confirms it. What the Edwards photographers filmed is not resolved here.