Apollo 14 crew debriefing (continued): Shepard, Roosa and Mitchell on streaks, “novas” and a blue flash, 1971 (NASA audio, NASA-UAP-D027)

0:00 Most of my streaks appeared to be on the periphery and for the first several days I got the impression that this direction was predominant. Later on it appeared that I don't think I could get that good a pattern, but that was my first impression for the first couple of days. The next question is, was there any apparent direction of propagation and could you tell it was coming from one side to the other or was it just a flash? Several times you didn't say from the left to the right or something like that. Tried to correlate it, but in my case I couldn't really correlate a pattern out of it. Yeah, I would think that the time period in which we tried to report them street by street, flash by flash, was representative. And it was my feeling that it was generally random during that time period and therefore generally random throughout the time that we were noticing.

1:00 No, I meant could you detect that it was moving from one side to the other? Oh, yes. It was moving in a specific flash. Oh, in a specific flash, yes. Yes. But you could see it as a travel from one side to the other. I think we tried to report it that way, didn't we? Yes, we did report it. That's the way it was puzzling us because it has to be very fast, you know. Isn't that question kind of redundant then? Was there some character to these flashes that had some aspect of direction? Were they all the same rod-shaped or did they have a tail on them? Well, what I reported as a streak was simply that. Now, maybe the way we determined the direction subconsciously was that it was a ball of light moving in a direction leaving a tail. But I can't say that for sure. All I reported was a streak, and I had the

2:01 impression of it moving from one direction to the other. And I reported that direction, and I can't clarify it much more than that. Do you want to, maybe while you're asking a question, would you just tell us the lights? I think they can see this in the dark room. Just try. The idea is to try to see whether this is what you saw or similar to it. I think you need to like that bit. Wow. Can you see anything? Yeah, except that's what it looked like, except it was traveling. In other words, it started out and it definitely progressed across the field of view. Direction of motion per individual street. Was that right? Yeah, except you're not traveling. It was traveling. I know. You started at a point in the street. I never did see two simultaneously either. Neither did I. Now, you have two streaks on that. I never saw that. At one time, you said you saw a semicolon-shaped thing. Saw what? A semicolon-shaped object.

3:02 This was in the first report. I never did. If I reported it, that's what I saw, but I don't remember it. Did you see anything that looked like this? All I can say is whatever was reported is what I saw. No, you know, we discussed the various shapes prior to flight, and I concentrated pretty hard on trying to see the shapes, and I think as I reported, no, it was either a streak, and just a rather simple streak, or it was a flash, and rather a simple flash. Nothing too exotic about it, and a more rare one would be maybe just pinpoint a light for an instant, rather than get the idea of a flash. There would just be a flash, so it would just be a pinpoint for a second, and it would be gone, but that was more rare than the other two. By a flash, you mean a distributed sort of thing? Yeah, I meant, you know, like watching an

4:06 explosion, you know, just a ball versus just a steady dot, yes. Was it, was it like this at all? Can you see that? No. Can I see this one? Can't see it. We're not getting any lighting. I don't think it's lighting. Oh, there was something just as you turned it there. Okay, I can see that. I mean, multiple, uh, well, this one. Okay, that, that to me would be the pinpoint that, that I'm describing. The, uh, the, the eruption, or the, the nova, as we call them, would be more of an explosion. Yeah. How about this? Yeah, yeah. Are there more dots than that? Well, you've got a very, very bright center and a diffused edge. I would say that, uh, the impression I had

5:08 was you would have an area like that indicating a blow-up, but the center wasn't predominantly that bright. Um, I, that, that's getting closer to what we would call, what I would refer to as a nova or a, or a flash. That's not as bright as what I called a nova, yeah. Uh, Ed, was your nova, uh, a, an explosion like this or a discreet like that? No, it was, uh, what I called a nova was, was more of a, a blob that seemed to start with that and kind of expand. More diffused. Yeah, and more diffused as, as the time went on. But brighter than that. Brighter than that, yes. That's what I, about what I'd call a flash or a star. Uh, here, here again, you've got too much contrast between the center and the, uh, diffused area there, though. That's what I'm talking about. Also, your time frame that you're flashing, that's too long. It was faster than that. But, am I right, Ed, from what you just said, that, that when you said flash, you really

6:09 meant a star and not a, not a, not a, not what you just described? I think I almost tended to use flash and star interchangeably. That's what proved to you. No, uh, when I, flash, nova, to me, were essentially the same thing. The only distinction I make is the, the pinpoint versus an explosion. Uh-huh. Okay, I think what Stu was calling a, a pinpoint was about what I'd call a star or a flash. And a nova, to me, was a much bigger, brighter thing. Okay, I got a couple of quick ones. First of all, the cabin lighting, uh, exactly, was it completely dark or were there some instrument lights, uh, still on? Absolutely dark. Okay. Wait a minute. Well, yeah, there is, you're talking about the time period that we ran this, uh, quantitative report, right? Right, right. So, completely dark. Okay. And, uh, did you have your eyes closed most of the time or were they open in the dark cabin? Mike, we had a little. Yeah, not high school. Well, even though we had the window shades

7:10 on, when we'd roll around so the sun would hit some of the windows, there'd be some light seepage around. We were aware of that ahead of time. So, that during that time period, we, at least I made an attempt to keep my eyes closed. Yeah. Open otherwise. And, of course, we closed our eyes when Ed flipped his flashlight on. Okay. But, generally speaking, eyes were open. No, mine, mine was, uh, almost closed all the time. I was floating down the corner of the LED, but I just, I kept my eyes closed because, uh, I didn't know when, uh, we might roll into the sun and I didn't want to pick up any light at all. Okay, the next question on the flashlight was, uh, when you shined it in your eyes, what was the approximate duration in each eye? About how many seconds? Well, I just kind of moved it across for, oh, five seconds or so. Five or six seconds. It hurt. It was very bright. Yeah. And, uh, next question on, uh, still your orientation in the LED. Uh, you said you were looking toward plus X. Is, uh, were you across? I was, uh, generally, you know, how you, you

8:12 have the three couches and, uh, plus X is, uh, I was oriented this way with my head looking face up, uh, down in this corner. So, your head was in the same direction as it would be if you were on the couch, just rotate it nicely. Yes, that's it. Okay. And, uh, the next question is, uh, in almost every case, you did report that it was in one eye or the other, at least one incident where you had, uh, both eyes. And my question is, uh, uh, it may be somewhat redundant, but, uh, were you absolutely certain that you could distinguish that it was one eye as opposed to, uh? Yeah, I felt I was getting more on the left than the right for some reason. Well, in fact, in fact, you're all heavily biased towards the right on the, on the one, on your report. Really? Very heavily. Like, like, we were four to one. I would have sworn that I was biased to the left. You had 12, 12 right and six left. And, uh, Al, you had 10 right and four left, and, uh, of the ones you reported, Stu, you had six right and two left, and the rest

9:13 were no reports or both eyes. It was all very heavily biased to the right eye. I mean, that's very surprising. No, well, you know. While we're talking about that, I, it seems to me that, uh, I would get a flash or a streak or whatever the phenomenon or whatever the shape was simultaneous with somebody else reporting. Yeah, that's exactly the next question. We, uh, uh, there were three, from listening to the tapes, three events, and it, it occurred in, in cases where, uh, different pairs were involved. Now, uh, which were coincidences where, and I think in one case, uh, uh, Ed, you said, uh, flash, and then Al, you said, simultaneous with him, I had a flash in the whole right eye. Now, my question would be, uh, when you, when it was simultaneous, was it after he began speaking, or was it, in fact, uh, was his words good enough for you to, to have been a mark on your flash? Well, with, certainly, within a fraction of a second, I think it was simultaneous. Yeah, the, a couple of times it happened to

10:15 me, it was, his mark, or whoever's mark it was, was good enough. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Same here. And, uh, and the next question is, uh, earlier, before the session, and when you were describing some of the subjective observation, you mentioned the, uh, halos that you'd seen, that you'd see a flash followed by, uh, Yeah, we finally asked him to take his halo off and put it away. The, uh. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Well, okay. Now, the, uh, uh, the after effects, were they, were they present most of the time? Did you see, did you have, uh, cognizance of, uh, a spike and then a, sort of a glow afterwards? Only on what I call the nova or the supernova. Is that true for you, true to? I didn't really notice a halo effect myself. I, I guess I'm not sure what, what we're calling that, uh, the halo effect. You mean a, a diffused, uh, brightness?

11:16 No, more, more like an afterglow. The halo, the afterglow. Did, did I call any of those? I sure don't remember it. No, I think Ed described it. Yeah, I, I don't think I saw any of those. Okay. And, uh, oh, the other question we had was, uh, uh, do you remember making any observations in lunar orbit? Uh, it's not, I know there were no formal periods, but, uh, any, just in the morning. You know, I thought about that on the way back, and, uh, I was, I was so tired that night that, uh, I, I really don't remember, uh, seeing any flashes, but I, I didn't look for any either. Uh, so I, I guess the question would be, I, I consciously did not see any, but I sure, that's, I, I wouldn't take that as a data point. Okay, that's fine. And then, uh, the final question that I have is, uh, after our formal session, uh, was on, was it about 191 GET, uh, you then had a sleep period later on. Do you remember whether you saw any during that sleep period closer in? It's significant whether you're inside the magneto pole.

12:16 Yeah. I don't consciously recall, but I don't really recall that there was any night except on the lunar surface that I didn't at some time or another, say some. You, you definitely, you didn't see any on the lunar surface? I just, no, I don't remember about the lunar surface. There was precious little sleep that night, anyhow, so. Okay, well, that's all the questions I had. Can we douse the lights for a minute? While, uh, while you're dousing light, I have one initial question. Did you get the impression that light flashes could have been within the cabin or definitely within your eye? Definitely within the eye. Okay. The, uh, I want to get some idea about orientation and, uh, and length of the streets. Did you ever see anything on the clock? No, no, I never did. The, uh, you, you use the, uh, terminology of, uh, six o'clock or hours of the clock. Does that mean to you, uh, when you say six

13:18 o'clock to the center, about how long the streak is that? That's a hard question to answer. Uh, if you were visualizing, uh, something about, um, oh, about the arm's length away from you, how long would you say your longest streak was? That long? Do you see my fingers? I'll show it. Let me describe it a different way. All right. Give you a, it appeared to me that the things, uh, I would say were three or four inches away from my, my plane, whatever that means. And, uh, we're a couple inches long. Tell us what it means. And a couple inches long, it's three or four inches in front of you. It, uh, it looks like this. Too long for me. I mean, two of them, I guess. See that one up above? The one up above looks better. How about this?

14:18 Uh, probably fairly close. Yeah, I'd say that's probably about as close as the longest one. See, I'm not sure what our, what our scale is here. I, I'd rather say that if I, if I'd consider whatever it may be, but the field of view of, say, my right eye and take a radius of that, that I'd put a streak at, uh, of about, uh, a half the radius would be the average streak. Half or a little longer. Um, okay. Uh, do you think, is there any way that you can, you can, uh, associate this length of streak to what you said, Stu, with a longer or shorter, or can you set you? Well, it would depend on how big a circle I want to draw for my field of view. Uh, I, I, yeah, I saw streaks, uh, that long because, uh, because with my eyes closed, I, I imagine a rather big field of view here in my eye. So, uh, yeah, I, I'd see, I'd see streaks that long. And one time you said you saw, uh, streaks oriented in a certain direction.

15:20 Do you remember that? Yes. The way you had it, bring it on a, that way. And, uh, Ed, what about you? Well, I think I had them from several directions, and I reported them as moving from one direction to the other at that time. There were several of them, though. How about, uh, Al? Any particular direction? Up and down? Left and right? I didn't notice any, any preferred orientation. And here again, I think I'd try to express the, the, uh, the length of the arc of the flash in terms of the, of the peripheral field. And if you're talking about a, a horizontal peripheral field as being somewhere in the vicinity of 150 to 160 degrees, then in some, in some cases, the light flashes would go across as much as, as 50 or 60 degrees of that. Yeah, that's interesting. Were the light flashes broken in the center? In some cases, they were. In some cases, I had the feeling it was two dots, one immediately following the other,

16:20 giving the impression of right to left or top to bottom or bottom to top or left to right. The point is, you see, that the retina is so curved, but if you draw a straight line, you can't get too long, long, you shouldn't be able to get too long a streak without breaking out of the retina again. You know, in the plan of the retina, it goes to shape like that. But it has some depth, does it not? It shouldn't have been any longer than that, uh, if it just is, is on the retina. Can't hear that. Through a couple of portions. Can't hear you. It should not have been any longer than what I showed you, if it just went through the retina in one track, but if it went through a couple of eyes. Then you would have the impression of a long streak. That's why we're interested in the character. I have one more about the cloud that you saw. This is a new phenomenon which we hadn't expected. Could you describe this lightning behind the cloud? I think it occurred, I reported it a couple of times, and it appeared, as I recall, to be down low on one eye or the other,

17:20 and it was just a diffuse lighting. Any color? White, silver. If you're out in the country and looking at the horizon, and there was lightning behind a cloud, was it like that? Except, generally, if you do that, you can see a streak behind the cloud. This, there was no streak. It was just a diffuse lighting. Simulator, look at that. We have a little gizmo that will simulate that sort of phosphine when you get out of quarantine, maybe have a look at it. I have one last attempt to try to do the cloud here. If you get down some lights a minute. Good job. Hi, yeah. It's still wet. Was it anything like that? I didn't see it. It's a pretty dim cloud, right? I'm not dark at that, but I still don't see it. I haven't seen anything on it yet. Okay. I'll let you get it. But what you're trying to describe is just what we used to call heat lightning as a kid.

18:20 Yeah, it's a general diffused light. Yeah. You didn't see the relief of the cloud, did you? No, not necessarily. No. It was just a blob of light. The one final question. We did voice up to you a question about whether you noticed any other sensations besides flashes, which was the reason for asking that was that if it was, you know, did you feel any tingling or find yourself twitching or hear anything? The reason for that is that if it is an interaction back in the brain, then your other senses are just about as sensitive as your visual sense, and maybe you should feel something, but you never noticed that. Didn't notice it. Didn't notice any sensation. There's two things to think about. Did you notice your thumb itching or your lips twitching? In particular. No. Never looked for it, either. Well, you know, these are suggested questions,

19:21 and the fact that you say no is significant. You can press on with different parts of the anatomy, and you might get a yes, but it has nothing to do with it. Well, those are the two biggest cross-sections. You know, if there's something significant about your thumbs or your lips, maybe you should warn people to look for that, because, I don't know, unless it's going to be so obvious that you would... Are you saying itch all over? Well, sometimes you might think you should be. I feel very comfortable. I think I said to Ed yesterday that you really did provide an enormously improved amount of data on this phenomenon than we've had in any previous flights. That's great. Well, I would add this, that I think that's the way you really have to go, is to take a definite trip, set it aside and do it, because otherwise it's so random, and there's so many other things going through your mind that it's the only way you can get it

20:23 quantitatively. However, you did a remarkable job of concentrating on it for that length of time. Do you feel that that was being unreasonable to ask you to do that without you going to sleep or something like that? It's a pretty boring thing to do, just sitting there lying watching. Do you think we should be in planning for doing this sort of thing on future missions, that we shouldn't try and do much more than we try to get you to do, because it's just too much just because they're lying and they're trying to concentrate on it? Well, if you can find a time period during the flight when they have, when they have everything else to do, I think it's reasonable to suggest that, yeah. I don't think I would do it before a sleep period or when they're tired or they'll go to sleep watching. Yeah, you know, I think along that line, Phil, by the time you've, if you, you know, talk a little bit pre-flight like we did, and then you know the phenomena is there because, you know, your first sleep period or the first time you get to spacecraft dark

21:25 and close your eyes, you're going to see flashes. And so then that, you know, sort of sparks your curiosity a little more. And then when they say, let's settle down and count them, well, I think you're agreeable to it. Hey, one other comment on that, and I'm not even sure that it's related, but I really think that, this is just a general impression, that if I would look at my, look at, say, the glow of the wristwatch or something like that and then close my eyes again, I'd almost always see a, see a flash. And I tried then to correlate looking at, say, a crack through the, through the window shade or looking at my watch or something and then closing my eyes, and I really came to the impression that the, that the two may have been correlated, but I never really looked at it enough to, to say that for sure.

22:26 But I think there was a correlation between, between seeing a light of something like this and then closing your eyes and, and pretty soon you, you'd pick up that flash. That's, that's an important observation. If the action is directly in the bipolar or the retina cells, the outer segment, you might expect it to behave the way electrical phosphenes do, rather than, than just from light, which takes dark adaption. What do you think about that, Ed? I'm not quite sure what your point is. I was going to make the comment that, with respect to the flashes, putting the flashlight in my eyes did not seem to destroy my dark adaptation. Now, what that means, I don't know. Did you do like that? Yep. That slow? That fast? For some time. You certainly wiped out some of the nerves. I wiped out something. You wiped it all out. I'm not sure that's true, Chuck. How long did you do it? You shouldn't wipe it all out. Oh, a couple of minutes. A minute. A minute, back and forth like this.

23:28 About five seconds per drive. Something like that. Yeah, hey, you know, I know what you're saying, though, is that the reason you think you didn't knock it all out is because you can still see the flashes? Is that what you're saying? Well, the cockpit looked different. Remember, I was doing this eyes open. And it seemed like with just what I consider dark adaptation, that I was more dark adapted, that I dark adapted much sooner after doing that than I did when we started the experiment. Yeah, sure. That you would do. Because you wipe out the cones less for that, just with the flashing, you do with the tungsten light or nothing else. Hey, I'd like to make sure on this dark adaptation. And I know during the formal hour or 40 minutes, whatever it was, that Ed was shining the light. But I don't know whether you picked it up on air to ground or not. But I had done that prior to that during one of the sleep periods. And there's just, you do not have to be dark

24:29 adapted to see these. Yeah, I think that's a completely dropping what Ed's saying. That's a very significant data point because it almost certainly proves that it's not a real light in your eye, generated in your eye. It's actually an interaction. Yeah, but why did it take us so long when we started the experiment before we saw anything? It was quite a while. And yet when I wipe the light across my eyes within 30 or 40 seconds, there they were again. 17 minutes. Pardon? No response. Yeah, but when I did it with the flashlight, within 30 or 40 seconds, they were right there again. You said that they were fainter. They seemed fainter than they had on previous times that you observed them. And there definitely is a threshold effect of some sort because you saw twice as many during that period as the other two did. And I think maybe it's just my guess was when you didn't see them and then you started to see them regularly, was that it was just that they seemed fainter than you expected. And so it took you a while to sort of get your attention now to fainter ones than what

25:30 you were looking for. Well, that may be the case, except they did indeed appear fainter in the beginning. And it wasn't a matter of looking for fainter objects. They were brighter after a while. And they didn't diminish in brightness. When I did the flashlight across my eyes, they were still just as bright 30 seconds later as they had them before I used the flashlight. And that's why I'm questioning the dark adaptation bit. Either I didn't wipe the dark adaptation out, or there is something related to dark adaptation that influences the phenomenon. I don't understand it. It doesn't make sense. That doggone time period that we did it and the few flashes we saw was very surprising to me. And we talked about this and we commented on it at the time. Boy, it seemed like, you know, you'd wake up during a sleep period and... They were all over the place.

26:30 Now, here again, maybe I'd lose track of time. You know, you're laying there in the dark cabin and maybe it was longer than what I thought. But it just seemed like that, you know, there's abundance of flashes. And I was amazed when it took 17 minutes to see a flash. I thought any time that you wanted to close your eyes and concentrate on it, you were going to see these things. That's why I suggest that you really ought to set a time period aside because it is such a random function as far as I'm concerned. To try to do it on a non-quantitative basis is often done. Plus the fact that I think that each individual is going to report at different levels of activity, too. I had a feeling there was maybe some little faint things that I would sort of see that I didn't want to talk about because I couldn't define them as a flash. Yeah, I had those, too. I think also it's a good idea to do it this way because your subjective impression is not necessarily right. Like, you felt that you saw more than your left eye on your right and that wasn't true.

27:31 It was wrong. Correct. So we need to get the data real well done. When you go to sleep at night, do you see any of these things? Most people do see something as they're going to sleep in a darkened room. They can't get to sleep right away. Down here. I think everybody does. I don't know. Yeah, you've got lights blinking around, you know, in your eyes if you get in a real dark room occasionally. Maybe it's because we've never really concentrated on looking for this particular type of phenomenon. These phenomena that you saw were different from the ones that you see once in a while? Oh, definitely. It's certainly a lot more frequent. Yeah. How about in brightness? About what? Brightness. I guess I'll make a note to see if I see any of those, you know, from here on. But I certainly haven't since we've been back.

28:32 But here again, and Ed mentioned this, and I agree with him, but it's another subjective thing, that the flashes you see when you wake up in the middle of the night as a whole appear to be brighter than the flashes as a whole during that experiment that we did during the day. And I'm like Al. I was a little reluctant to call anything except a very positive flash during that time frame. You know, I wanted to make really sure that that was indeed a mark at the time that I called it. But those that you saw during the middle of the night appeared to be brighter and, like I say, it appeared to be more of them. But here again, you know, you may lay there for an hour and you think it's five, ten minutes or something. I don't know. Maybe you lose track of the time. But it's a subjective thing. Ed saw one blue flash. Did anyone else see color? No. Wait a minute. No, that wasn't blue. It was a silver, a blue-white sort of thing.

29:34 Like a blue diamond, you see? Like a blue diamond. Was that the brightest that you saw? I don't recall. It was the brightest, no. Has anybody been hitting the head and seen stars? Yeah. Were these anything like that? I think I'm more concentrating on the pain. When you go to bed tonight, if you're in a dark room, if you just knock on your eyeballs, you should see flashes and it might be worth trying that to see whether they look like the same sort. Yeah, we cry a lot in here. Okay. No, I'll say, you know, if you can get the next crews interested, Phil, you know, it makes a great topic of conversation. And, you know, during the flag, you've got nothing else to talk about, you can talk about light flashes. So, you know, I think if you get the crews' curiosities aroused, why, it's a good deal. Well, I think the interest, the pressure on the subject would just build up with such that there will be some formal experiment on

30:35 this thing that's going to go away again. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll keep back in touch with you and let you know what we're going to do with this other thing and what we're going to do, how things are coming time-wise for the end of the business, too. You know what the date is, you know what the time is now, 07-31 on Saturday. Oh, release timing. Yeah. Work on springing us early, Chuck. Somebody said that the 21 days ended up on Saturday morning, yeah. Yeah. I would have been led to believe otherwise, Chuck. Yeah, the debriefing plan says 0800 the 26th on Friday. Deke says we get out Friday morning. Yeah, he called yesterday. He called me and I said, how the hell did we ever get this number in here? I said, I don't know when you got that number.

31:36 Well, the radiation people are here. We're talking about release and all that kind of business. Can we get a hack on when they're going to get total body counts?