NASA-UAP-D024
“Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing”
- Agency
- NASA
- Format
- Audio
- Incident date
- Not given
- Place
- Houston, Texas
- Released
- Release 03, June 12, 2026
- Source
- DVIDS
- Topics
- Spaceflight, Debriefings & transcripts
Description from war.gov
Transcript
Machine summary
Written by Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) on June 12, 2026, from the record's text and war.gov's description. It is not part of the record and can contain errors; check it against the document.
NASA-UAP-D024 is an audio recording of a post-mission scientific debriefing conducted following the Apollo 16 mission, held in Houston, Texas. The session involved NASA principal investigators and Apollo 16 crew members reviewing preliminary experiment results and anomalies in preparation for Apollo 17. Beginning around the 25-minute mark, seismologist Gary Latham raises an unreported visual anomaly: an astronaut (identified in context as Ken Mattingly) described observing a brief, bright flash from orbit — brighter than any star in his field of view, appearing below the lunar horizon, instantaneous in duration, and noticed peripherally while the cockpit was darkened for low-light photography. Latham characterizes it as possibly the first reported transient luminous event observed from lunar orbit.
The flash report is notable because it had not been formally documented prior to this debriefing, and Latham explicitly states no transcript had yet been produced. The crew member could not give a precise time or location, though the data was noted as potentially recoverable from the DSE recorder. The exchange is significant for UAP-adjacent records because it represents a credible, contemporaneous firsthand account of an unexplained optical phenomenon in a controlled observational environment. No redactions are apparent in the available transcript, but the full DSE audio correlation is not included in this release.
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