Case Directory

Fran Ridge:
We probably knew it even back then, but we most assuredly know it now: in 1973 we had no large orbiting space station circling the Earth. And at a time when one of the largest UFO flaps to hit the planet was in progress. A document that was found indicates that the location was over the southwestern Indian Ocean during revolution # 1863. Astronauts Alan Bean, Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma spotted what they described as a red "satellite", which they photographed and mentioned during a subsequent debriefing. We have radio conversation (transcript only) with Houston CapCom about 4.5 hours after the sighting of this object. There was no man-made satellite that could explain this sighting and hence the object was truly anomalous.

LOUSMA: "Did you tell him about that satellite we saw?

BEAN: Yes, we saw a great satellite. We didn't know if we told you about it.

LOUSMA: The closest and brightest one we've seen.

BEAN: Huge one.

LOUSMA: We've seen several. It was a red one.

CAPCOM: No, you may have told somebody, but it wasn't this team. I don't remember hearing about it.

LOUSMA: I guess we didn't report it. It was reflecting in red light and oscillating at, oh, counting it's period of brightest to dimmest, about ten seconds. It led us into sunset. That was about three revs ago, I think. Something like that, wasn't it Owen?

(NOTE: Astronaut Owen does NOT respond to this question, and the topic of conversation abruptly changes. There is no information available regarding whether or not this sighting was brought to the attention of Mission Control prior to this radio contact 4.5 hours after the event).

Joel Carpenter:
One of the things that's so darn fascinating about this case is something that Dr Maccabee and Brad Sparks bring up in the article on Maccabee's site. One interpretation of the sighting is that the object was approaching on an orbit in a 51 or 52 degree inclination and about to intersect with Skylab's 50 degree (but much higher) orbit. They mention that that inclination was used by the Soviets. But actually, they often used 65 degrees. 51 degrees was used for certain very specific flights: the Salyut space stations and the manned Soyuz ships that docked with them. At the time of the sighting, Salyut-1 and Salyut-2 had been flown, and both had failed. Salyut-2 was launched in April 1973 and was actually the top secret Almaz military station, the counterpart of the US MOL reconnaissance space station. Salyut-2 had recon gear aboard, but failed before it was manned for the first time, about 2 weeks after it was launched.