Apollo 12

Apollo 12 was NASA's second crewed lunar landing, flown from November 14 to November 24, 1969, by commander Charles "Pete" Conrad, command module pilot Richard Gordon and lunar module pilot Alan Bean. Its connection to unidentified anomalous phenomena comes from crew remarks about unexplained lights and tumbling objects and from surface photographs that the Department of War republished in 2026 with highlighted features it said it had not analyzed.

The flight began dramatically. Lightning struck the Saturn V twice in the first minute after launch from Kennedy Space Center, knocking the spacecraft's fuel cells offline and scrambling its telemetry until Bean, on advice from flight controller John Aaron, moved a little-used switch to its auxiliary position. On November 19 Conrad and Bean set the lunar module Intrepid down in the Ocean of Storms about 535 feet from the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe, a demonstration of precision landing. Over two moonwalks they deployed experiments and removed Surveyor's camera and other parts for study on Earth. After they left, the discarded ascent stage was deliberately crashed into the Moon, and the seismometer they had placed recorded vibrations for nearly an hour. The crew splashed down in the Pacific on November 24.

On the way to the Moon, Conrad reported a bright object that appeared to be tumbling, then two objects flashing at about one and a half revolutions per second. Mission Control suggested the spent S-IVB rocket stage or one of the panels that had covered the lunar module, and Conrad later said he had seen one of those panels leaving the area at high speed. The editors of NASA's Apollo Flight Journal note that no definite identification was agreed.

The first PURSUE release in May 2026 included a four-page Apollo 12 transcript excerpt. In it Bean, looking through the lunar module's alignment telescope about two and a half hours before liftoff from the surface, described particles and flashes of light "sailing off in space" and said that although he first thought they came from the spacecraft's water boiler, some seemed to be "escaping the Moon." The release also contained five photographs from the landing site with highlighted features above the horizon, captioned as not constituting an analytical judgment; independent analysts matched at least one to a frame long held in NASA's public archive, and some attributed the marks to scratches on the film. A later release added a medical debriefing in which all three astronauts described flashes or streaks of light while trying to sleep, which NASA concluded were internal to their vision rather than external light sources.

In October 2026 journalist Ross Coulthart argued that only a few transcript pages had been released and called for the full record. Apollo 12's role in the UAP record is a set of crew observations that NASA explained as spacecraft debris and cosmic-ray flashes, alongside photographic features that remain officially unanalyzed.