Apollo Program

The Apollo program was NASA's crewed lunar program, run from 1961 to 1972 to meet President John F. Kennedy's May 1961 goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. After the loss of the Apollo 1 crew in a 1967 ground test, the program flew its first crewed mission in October 1968 and landed astronauts on the Moon six times, from Apollo 11 in July 1969 to Apollo 17 in December 1972. Twelve people walked on the surface. Apollo 13 had to abandon its landing after an oxygen tank exploded on the way out, and budget cuts canceled three further planned landings.

Apollo's place in UFO history rests mostly on what its crews saw in transit and on stories later built around those sightings. The best known is the "bogey" of Apollo 11. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins watched a light that seemed to keep pace with them on the way to the Moon and described it in their post-flight debriefing. It is generally identified as one of the four adapter panels that separated from the Saturn V's third stage, and in 2014 Aldrin said he was "absolutely convinced" they had seen sunlight reflecting off one of those panels, adding that the object was technically unidentified but "not an alien." Other episodes followed the same pattern: footage from Apollo 16 once promoted as a saucer leaving the Moon was traced by engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center to a floodlight on a boom projecting from the spacecraft.

In 2026 Apollo records became part of the government's own UAP disclosures. The Department of War's first PURSUE release, PURSUE Release 01 on May 8, included the 1969 Apollo 11 debriefing in which, according to the Associated Press, Aldrin recalled a "sizeable" object near the Moon and a "fairly bright light source" the crew thought might be a laser. It also included a 1972 photograph from Apollo 17 showing three dots in a triangular arrangement. The Pentagon's caption said there was "no consensus about the nature of the anomaly" but that a new, preliminary analysis indicated it could be a "physical object." A later tranche, Release 04 in July, added crew debriefings from Apollo 14 and Apollo 17.

The Apollo 17 image stayed open through the year. In October 2026 NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the agency had "disclosed all of our materials" as part of the PURSUE effort and suggested that radiation might have affected the camera, while investigators had not reached a final explanation. NewsNation journalist Ross Coulthart accepted radiation or a camera fault as possibilities but asked the Department of War and NASA to state whether the marks exist on the original "blue dots" film, and he called for fuller Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 records.

Wider claims about the program circulate with less support. Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell argued for years that UFOs were alien craft and that governments had concealed contact, although he said he had never seen one himself and relied on what others had told him. In July 2026 podcaster Jesse Michels asserted that NASA was "deliberately erasing" anomalies from the Apollo photographic record, citing physicist Maaneli Derakhshani's claim that two versions of an Apollo 14 frame differ by a blue orb, and an account by Ken Johnston, whom Michels described as a former NASA consultant, of being ordered to destroy early negatives. Responding to Mitchell's claims, a NASA spokesman said the agency "does not track UFOs" and is "not involved in any sort of cover-up about alien life on this planet or anywhere in the universe." Apollo's documented UAP record is a small set of crew observations, most traced to the spacecraft's own hardware, and one Apollo 17 photograph whose official analysis is still pending.