Skylab 3's red star

The archive's one telling says the Skylab 3 crew photographed a large star-shaped object brighter than a planet, thirty to fifty nautical miles away, and watched it for ten minutes. It remains unidentified, the telling says. No individual is named; the crew is credited as a group.

What is on the record

The archive now resolves four claimants. One is the crew as a group, from one video on one channel. The other three are Alan Bean, Jack Lousma and Owen Garriott, named in NASA's 1973 Skylab technical crew debriefing, carried in the Pentagon's UAP record releases. That debriefing is the source of the names but is not listed among this page's documents. The file does not hold the photographs.

The event is in that debriefing. On 20 September 1973 Jack Lousma first noticed what Owen Garriott described as a rather large red star out the wardroom window, much brighter than Jupiter. The crew tracked it for five to ten minutes and concluded it was obviously a satellite in an orbit very similar to their own. Garriott took four photographs: three show a point of light and one shows a squiggle. Later analysis reads the squiggle as a film or camera fault and the object as a nearby satellite or a piece of debris shed by Skylab itself. The word unidentified belongs to the telling and not to the crew.

Why it sits where it does

The grade is L3, the tier for independent named witnesses: three crewmen named in the debriefing alongside the telling's unnamed crew. They watched from the same window, so this is three names on one sighting rather than three sightings. The tier measures sourcing and never truth. The photographs are public but not in the file. What the crew of Skylab 3 photographed is not resolved here. Their own answer was a satellite.