Person · 6 March 1927 – 4 October 2004
Gordon Cooper
Also known as L. Gordon Cooper, Leroy Gordon Cooper, Gordo Cooper, Cooper
- Colonel, U.S. Air Force; Mercury Seven astronaut (Mercury-Atlas 9, 1963; Gemini 5, 1965); test pilot at Edwards AFB
Gordon Cooper (1927–2004) was a U.S. Air Force pilot and one of the seven original Mercury astronauts. After four years flying F-84s and F-86s from Neubiberg Air Base in West Germany, he graduated from the test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base in 1956 and served there as a test pilot and project manager in Flight Test Engineering. In 1963 he flew Faith 7 (Mercury-Atlas 9), the last and longest Mercury mission, finishing it under manual control after equipment failures, and in 1965 he commanded Gemini 5, an eight-day endurance record.
From the late 1970s Cooper said publicly that he had seen UFOs over West Germany in 1951, and that in 1957 a camera crew he had sent out at Edwards filmed a saucer landing, film he sent to the Pentagon. The crew's own account, given to the physicist James McDonald and later researchers, is of a disc photographed in flight, with no landing and no role for Cooper. Asked about the case in 1978, he said he had seen nothing personally and it was “all second hand evidence”. He addressed a United Nations committee in March 1978 and called for a coordinated scientific program in a letter for its November 1978 discussion of UFOs, and told his story again in his memoir Leap of Faith (2000) and the documentary Out of the Blue (2003). He died in Ventura, California, in October 2004.
Sources: Wikipedia · James Oberg (archived)
Facts and claims
- claimed Cooper claimed to have seen his first UFO while flying over West Germany in 1951, but denied reports that he had seen one during his Mercury flight. — Gordon Cooper Source: en.wikipedia.org (archived)
- claimed In a letter read into the 1978 United Nations discussion of UFOs, Cooper called for a top-level coordinated program to study them scientifically. — Gordon Cooper Source: Citizen Hearing 2013: History & Background, Part 2 at 18:00
- claimed Asked about Edwards in a 1978 interview for OMNI, Cooper said: “I didn't get to see anything personally, it was all second hand evidence really.” — Gordon Cooper Source: web.archive.org
- claimed Edgar Mitchell said in 2013 that Cooper had an incident at Edwards Air Force Base in which a UFO landed while he was on duty. — Edgar Mitchell Source: Citizen Hearing 2013: Opening statements (Mitchell, Hellyer) at 6:10
- claimed Space historian Robert Pearlman, reviewing Leap of Faith, found it hard to understand how someone so connected with groundbreaking technology “could easily embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence”. Source: en.wikipedia.org (archived)
Connected files
Books
Incidents
- Edwards AFB Askania photographs (reported) — Cooper later claimed the camera crew filmed a saucer landing; the crew and their boss said they never heard of him
People
- Edgar Mitchell (statements by)
Official records (PURSUE)
- NASA-UAP-D023 — Interview Excerpt with Astronaut Gordon Cooper, 1962 (subject of) — Walter Cronkite's November 1962 interview with Cooper on UFOs
Videos
- Christopher Mellon on the Joe Rogan Experience (clip, 2021) (discussed in)
Mentioned in videos
- Citizen Hearing 2013: Pilots & Aviation Experts
- The Allagash abduction: Jim Weiner & Charlie Foltz (American Alchemy, 2026)
Mentioned in documents and records
- Exempt from Disclosure: The Disturbing Case About the UFO Coverup
- NASA-UAP-D010 — Mercury Atlas 9 Audio Excerpt, May 15, 1963
- NASA-UAP-D011 — Mercury Atlas 9 Audio Excerpt, May 15, 1963
- NASA-UAP-D020 — Gemini 5 Technical Debriefing, Part II, 1965