Apollo 17

Apollo 17 was the sixth and final Apollo lunar landing, flown from December 7 to December 19, 1972, by commander Eugene Cernan, command module pilot Ronald Evans and lunar module pilot Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and the only scientist to walk on the Moon. In 2026 it became the most prominent mission in the government's Apollo-era UFO releases, because the Department of War opened a case on one of its photographs and said its analysis was not yet complete.

The mission began with the only night launch of a Saturn V, after a hold of about two hours and forty minutes. On the way out the crew took the Blue Marble photograph of the full Earth. Cernan and Schmitt landed the lunar module Challenger in the Taurus-Littrow valley on December 11 and spent about 22 hours outside over three moonwalks, driving the lunar rover about 36 kilometers and collecting roughly 115 kilograms of samples, including the "orange soil" of volcanic glass. Evans made a deep-space spacewalk on the way home, and the crew splashed down in the Pacific on December 19. Cernan was the last person to walk on the Moon.

The released transcripts record several unusual observations, most of which the crew explained themselves. Shortly after leaving Earth orbit, Schmitt saw bright, jagged fragments he compared to "the Fourth of July" and guessed were ice or paint from the rocket stage. Later Cernan described a flash "like a train coming at you" just after a scheduled experiment on the light flashes astronauts saw with their eyes closed, and he reported a distant rotating object that Schmitt, through a monocular, said looked like the spent stage. In lunar orbit Schmitt reported a flash on the lunar surface north of the crater Grimaldi; NASA said at the time it might have been a meteor impact but could not confirm it. NASA later attributed the crews' light flashes to cosmic rays passing through the eye.

The first PURSUE release in May 2026 included an Apollo 17 photograph showing three dots in a triangular arrangement in the lunar sky. The Department of War said there was no consensus about the feature, that a preliminary government analysis suggested it was potentially a physical object in the scene, and that it had obtained the original film and would publish the full analysis with NASA when complete. Independent analysts identified the frame as part of a window panorama Schmitt shot about two hours after landing, long held in NASA's public archive, and some argued the dots are film defects. Documentary producer Dan Farah called it the most significant image in the release. As of October 2026 the analysis had not been published.

Other claims around the mission lack documentary support. A story relayed online in May 2026, attributed to a Japanese historian, held that aliens warned Cernan never to return to the Moon; no primary source supports it, and NASA had canceled its planned later Apollo missions in 1970, amid budget cuts, before Apollo 17 flew. Apollo 17's place in the UAP record is a set of crew observations with conventional explanations and one photograph that remains an officially open question.