These intriguing details are part of a collection of over 100 documents that the Defense Department made public last Friday. This unveiling coincided with the launch of a new website dedicated to archiving declassified information on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).
One of the notable pieces of evidence is a photograph captured by NASA during the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. The image, when magnified, reveals three ‘dots’ arranged in a triangular pattern in the lower right quadrant of the lunar sky, as described in the Defense Department’s caption.
While there is no consensus on what these anomalies might be, a preliminary analysis suggests they could potentially be physical objects, according to the Pentagon.
The last men to walk on the moon also reported seeing bright tumbling sparks and jagged fragments that resembled fireworks.
“Now we’ve got a few very bright particles or fragments or something that go drifting by as we maneuver,” pilot Ronald Evans said, according to the transcript released by the Pentagon.
Pilot Harrison Schmitt reported: “There’s a whole bunch of big ones on my window down there — just bright. It looks like the Fourth of July out of Ron’s window.”
Meanwhile, mission commander Eugene Cernan said he had difficulty sleeping after observing flashing that he compared to an “imposing” train headlight.
“Over the next three hours, Cernan described observing several flashing, rotating phenomenon that he assessed as corresponding to physical objects in space rather than a purely optical phenomenon,” the Pentagon says.
The documents also include a transcript of the 1969 Apollo 11 crew debriefing in which astronaut Buzz Aldrin recounted several unusual observations.
“The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was one day out or something pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it,” he said.
Like Cernan on Apollo 17, Aldrin also described seeing flashing lights while trying to sleep.
“I was trying to go to sleep with all the lights out. I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart,” he said.
Aldrin also said he saw “a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser.”
The Pentagon said additional documents and videos would be released on a rolling basis.
