Gordon Cooper's green disc

Gordon Cooper flew Faith 7 in May 1963, twenty-two orbits over a day and a half, the last flight of the Mercury programme. The telling that anchors this file says he radioed that he was being approached by a greenish glowing disc travelling east to west. Two hundred staff at a tracking station, the telling says, saw it on their gear before it veered away into space. The fact sheet places the event in orbit near Perth. A second fragment says Cooper came forward to say he had seen UFOs while in space, and that Buzz Aldrin said he could not confirm it and had seen none himself.

What is on the record

One video on one channel carries the story, and the archive resolves two claimants from it. One is Cooper. The other is the two hundred tracking station personnel, a crowd nobody in the file names. There is no document behind the entry and no photograph in it, though the telling lists photographic evidence among its elements.

Outside the archive's holdings, Cooper denied this story. The greenish object with a red tail was repeated for years by writers including Hynek and Vallée, and Cooper said it rested on a misquotation of his post-flight report of the aurora australis. In a 1980 interview he said the only astronaut who ever saw anything that might have been a UFO was McDivitt on Gemini 4. Cooper's separate accounts of objects seen while he was a pilot at Edwards Air Force Base are other cases in this archive and not this one.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 on two resolved claimants, and the count flatters it. One claimant is a group with no names attached, and the named one disowned the orbital sighting. Both come from a single account on a single channel. The grade counts names; it cannot see that the source and its subject disagree. What, if anything, approached Faith 7 is not resolved here. The man in the capsule said nothing did.