Gemini 4's object

Gemini 4 flew in June 1965 with James McDivitt and Ed White aboard. On the second day of the four-day flight, 4 June, McDivitt reported an object near the spacecraft; the tellings have him saying he had something up here with him. According to the tellings the archive holds, he was in drifting flight with most systems off and his partner asleep when he saw a white cylindrical object with a pole or arm protruding from one end. He compared it to a beer can with a pencil sticking out of it. It looked like a rocket upper stage, and one telling has it appearing to move toward the spacecraft. He photographed it with two cameras before it disappeared as sunlight hit the window. NORAD radar, the tellings say, showed nothing that should have been near him.

What is on the record

Two claimants are resolved from six videos on one channel: McDivitt and White. The roster carries one telling's slip and lists the command pilot as Edward McDivitt. The six tellings do not agree with one another. One says the film disappeared at NASA. Another says the photographs were developed and showed only sun reflections on the window. A third describes a bright egg-shaped object leaving a propulsion trail, released by NASA as a photograph. One of the folded records dates the event to 1966; the mission flew in 1965.

The file now holds primary documents. The first is the crew's preliminary debriefing from 1965, in two parts. In it McDivitt speaks of "this satellite that I saw over around Hawaii". He says they were closing on it and that he checked the power switch to see whether he could manoeuvre. He could make out its shape in the 30 or 40 seconds he had it, and could not say whether it was five miles out or fifty. Then the sun came across the window and he lost it. White's contribution is that the windows were coated with a white film. Later in the debriefing McDivitt says he observed three satellites and that they were covered earlier. A 1967 experiment debriefing is also linked; a search of its text finds no return to the object.

The other primary record is the Condon Report's chapter on astronaut sightings. Its astronomer spoke to McDivitt in October 1967 and records a white or silvery cylinder with an antenna-like extension. It was not a point of light, and it seemed to be closing in, as if a collision might need avoiding. One still and some movie frames were taken. McDivitt told him the pictures NASA released were not of the object, and that on inspecting the film himself he found it, seen only hazily. McDivitt thought it probably an unmanned satellite. NORAD suggested Pegasus B, then some 1,200 miles away, and McDivitt doubted that. The astronomer judged Pegasus too distant to show arms and listed the sighting first of three astronaut reports he could not adequately explain. Nothing in these records supports a propulsion trail. A 1998 bundle of congressional and White House UFO correspondence is also linked, carried as reporting rather than corroboration.

Why it sits where it does

The case now grades L4, witness plus primary document. The documents show that McDivitt reported a closing object with a visible shape at the time, and described it in more detail two years later. They do not show what it was, and McDivitt's own word for it in 1965 was satellite. The two names on the sheet do not make two pairs of eyes either. The tellings say White was asleep, and in the debriefing passage on the object he speaks only to the dirty windows. The sighting rests on one man. What passed the window of Gemini 4 is not resolved here. McDivitt himself guessed at a satellite and said the famous photograph was not his.