Artemis II
Artemis II was NASA's April 2026 crewed lunar flyby, the first since Apollo; it is tied to UFO discussion only through the 2026 disclosure debate around it.
Artemis II was the first crewed flight of NASA's Artemis program, a ten-day mission that carried four astronauts around the Moon and back from April 1 to April 10, 2026. It was the first time people had traveled beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. No sighting of unidentified anomalous phenomena is tied to the mission; its connection to the UAP story is that it flew at the height of the 2026 disclosure debate, and the crew's White House visit became an occasion for remarks about the government's UFO files.
The crew were commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch of NASA, and mission specialist Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency. NASA noted when it named them in 2023 that the flight would carry the first woman, the first person of color and the first Canadian on a lunar mission. They launched from Kennedy Space Center on the Space Launch System rocket on the evening of April 1 aboard the Orion spacecraft they named Integrity.
On April 6 the crew swung around the far side of the Moon, passing about 4,067 miles above the surface, and broke the distance record set by Apollo 13 in 1970, reaching about 252,756 miles from Earth. The flight had minor problems, including a frozen vent line on the spacecraft's toilet and a small helium leak in the service module, but returned safely with a splashdown off San Diego on April 10. In August President Trump presented the four astronauts with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
The UAP link came on April 29, when Donald Trump welcomed the crew to the Oval Office. Asked by a reporter about the UFO files, he said the government would release "as much as we can in the near future" and that pilots he had interviewed had seen "things that you wouldn't believe," referring to military pilots rather than the astronauts. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman agreed with him. The crew were not asked to respond, and reports described their reactions differently, from suppressed smiles to carefully neutral expressions. Nine days later the Department of War issued its first release of historical UAP files, which included transcripts and photographs from Apollo 12 and Apollo 17.
Online, a small number of posts suggested that bright spots in footage of the rocket's stage separation might be plasmoids, a claim that drew no response from NASA or mainstream outlets, and fabricated videos of the flyby circulated on social media. Artemis II's significance in the UAP record is as a backdrop: a historic return to deep space whose timing renewed public interest in the Apollo-era records that were released weeks later.