On November 19, 1969, Charles Conrad Jr. and Alan Bean of Apollo 12 became the second pair of astronauts to land on the moon’s surface. Looking through the periscope-like viewer of their landing module, Bean saw something he couldn’t explain. Particles of light were flying off into space, and quickly.
“It looks like some of those things are escaping the moon,” he told mission control. “They really haul out of here and just press off at the stars.”
The transcript of Bean’s description and the photos have been out there since the Apollo era. But last Friday, as part of a batch of newly declassified UFO-related files, the U.S. Department of Defense released enhanced images of the lights, highlighted in yellow boxes for better visibility. This new release indicates that the DOD has studied them as possible UFOs.
The still images can’t show the rapid skyward motion Bean described, but they do show that he wasn’t hallucinating, and why he and the subsequent investigators were so puzzled. Some lights appear blue; others, white. One particularly rich image showed the lights in five areas of the sky, below.
Photo: NASA
NASA has emphasized that such unexplained phenomena are not evidence of alien life. But while the Department of Defense has suggested that the lights could be electromagnetic interference, glare, or an optical phenomenon, after all these years, there remains no confirmed explanation for them.
Friday’s release contained more unexplained lights from the Apollo program, this time from Apollo 17 in 1972. The photo shows a small triangle of three dots of light, taken in the sky near the lunar horizon by the last of the moon missions.
The triangle of dots taken from the lunar lander by Apollo 17 astronauts. Photo: NASA
