James Arthur Lovell Jr. (1928–2025) was a U.S. Navy captain, test pilot and NASA astronaut who made four spaceflights: Gemini 7, Gemini 12, Apollo 8 and Apollo 13. He was among the first three people to orbit the Moon and commanded Apollo 13, whose crew returned safely after an in-flight emergency in 1970. His place in the UAP record comes from Gemini 7, when his commander, Frank Borman, reported a "bogey" to Mission Control and Lovell added his own description of what was outside the spacecraft.

Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 25, 1928. He studied at the University of Wisconsin before entering the U.S. Naval Academy, graduated in 1952 and was commissioned as an ensign. After service as a naval aviator, he began the six-month test pilot course at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, in January 1958 and graduated at the top of his class. NASA selected him in September 1962 as one of its second group of astronauts.

In December 1965 Lovell flew as pilot of Gemini 7 with Borman, a flight of nearly 14 days that set an endurance record. He commanded Gemini 12 with Buzz Aldrin in November 1966, then flew as command module pilot on Apollo 8, the first crewed flight to orbit the Moon, in December 1968. As commander of Apollo 13 in April 1970, he and his crew looped around the Moon and returned to Earth after an oxygen tank failure crippled their spacecraft. He retired from the Navy and NASA on March 1, 1973, as a captain. His 1994 book Lost Moon, written with Jeffrey Kluger, became the basis for Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks, in which Lovell made a cameo. He received the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and passed away at his home in Lake Forest, Illinois, in 2025, at 97.

The Gemini 7 sighting is told chiefly through Frank Borman, who called out the "bogey" early in the flight. Lovell's part on the transcript is a description of the booster on his side of the spacecraft, "a brilliant body in the sun, against a black background with trillions of particles on it." The Department of War's first PURSUE tranche, Release 01, published the transcript and an audio excerpt on May 8, 2026, describing Lovell as Borman's fellow crew member. In June, Release 03 added the crew's technical debriefing from December 19 to 21, 1965, in which, according to NASA's catalogue description, Borman and Lovell discussed observational anomalies and sightings of Mercury, meteors, aurora and lightning.

Lovell's public reputation rests on Apollo 8 and above all on Apollo 13, whose safe return made him one of the best-known astronauts of his era. In the UAP record he is the second observer aboard Gemini 7, and his account of a sunlit booster amid a cloud of particles is part of the exchange that the 2026 PURSUE releases put back before a wide audience.