Huh?
On his Mercury flight, John Glenn claimed to have seen “fireflies”, which turned out to be small pieces of debris.
Another crew (Wally Schirra’s on Apollo 7, I think) started reporting a UFO described as having skids, 12 reindeer, and a big fat guy at the controls.
I’m not aware of any other “genuine” UFO sightings by astronauts, but then I haven’t been reading the Weekly World News lately.
I’ve heard that an astronaut claimed to see a UFO. This claim was backed up by transmissions between the astronaut and Mission Control. Somewhere (sorry, no cite) I read that the conversation was taken out of context and that it was nothing more than a little joke.
FWIW, I saw a “UFO” when I was in seventh grade. It was a glowing elipse behind some thin overcast. It wasn’t the sun, and it didn’t appear to be moving so it wasn’t one of the jets out of (then-)NAS Miramar. Was it from “outer space”? I seriously doubt it. It was just something in the sky that I couldn’t identify. Maybe refraction in the humid air. Maybe a Goodyear blimp that was catching the sun just right. But IMO, the possibility of extra-terrestrial craft visiting this planet is so mind-numbingly remote that it verges on the impossible. YMMV.
In any case, IIRC the “astronaut UFO sighting” was a joke between the astronauts and Mission Control that someone misinterpreted.
From NASA official fact sheet FS-2000-01-015-HQ: The US Government and Unidentified Flying Objects:
So I guess NASA has determined that being rectally probed by big-headed gray humanoids is simply something which is “normal for the space environment”…
Okay, seriously, here’s an old Skeptical Inquirer article by James Oberg which discusses Astronaut “UFO” Sightings in some detail.
It was STS-73, and it was indeed a joke. Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegrio was floating around inside the Shuttle, playing around a little, and stronaut Cady Coleman jokingly quipped, “We have an unidentified flying object here”. The UFO community jumped all over this, and I still hear it claimed as a serious quotation, though it’s easy to find the truth. I went to google, typed in “shuttle coleman joke UFO” and got this page: http://www.ufovideo.com/sts73/sts73.htm. Check it out; it’s funny. The guy who wrote it thinks there really is a spaceship reported.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by The Bad Astronomer *
**
And he got in touch with his congressman about it too!
Thanks for the link Mr Astronomer (or can I call you Bad?)
No site, but I recall seeing L. Gordon “Gordo” Cooper on a morning talk show a while back, during which he unequivocally declared that he was a firm believer in extraterrestrial visitations/crafts what-have-you. IIRC, he did indeed report what he considered a “genuine” UFO on a mission back in the 60s/early 70s.
Sir