Gordo Gets an Eyeful
U.S. aerospace engineer, Air Force test pilot, and astronaut Gordon “Gordo” Cooper went into space twice, as one of the original “Mercury 7” astronauts (1963) and as part of the Gemini project in 1965. Contrary to a long-standing erroneous assumption by some UFOlogists, Cooper did not witness UFOs during his space flights. However, while he and other USAF pilots flew their F-86 Sabre jets over Germany in 1951, scores of unidentified flying objects, grouped in what Cooper described as “fighter formation,” flew above the jets. Although neither Cooper nor anyone else in his flight group could guess at the objects’ size, the craft flew very quickly, performing aerial maneuvers that no jet could duplicate.
Cooper and the unit made a report; when an official response came, the verdict was “flying seed pods.” In 1957, Cooper worked as a test-flight project manager at Edwards AFB. A USAF camera crew assigned by Cooper to fly above and film dry lake beds (before the surfaces were modified to become landing strips) witnessed a saucer- shaped object fly above their planes before extending a tripod landing assembly and coming to ground on one of the lake beds. When the jets swung back to approach, the saucer “lifted off, put the gear back in the [wheel] well and climbed out at a very high rate of speed and disappeared” (Cooper’s account).
Despite the saucer’s quick departure, the Air Force camera crew captured the saucer and its maneuvers. Cooper contacted his superiors, who asked that the film be developed and prepared for pickup by courier. The courier arrived and left with the film—and Cooper never heard another word about it.
Although he had had no time to project the footage, Cooper unspooled a portion from the reel before the courier arrived, and examined it through the light from a window. “It was certainly good film,” Cooper told an interviewer many years later. “Good close-up shots,” he said.
Could the Edwards AFB saucer have been attracted by the dry beds’ future role as landing areas?
Cooper got the distinct impression that the craft he saw in 1951, and the ones he glimpsed in film frames in 1957, were piloted. As an Air Force pilot-manager with privileged, classified access to the USA’s top-secret U-2 spy plane, Cooper understood the current state of avionics. He remained adamant that neither the USSR nor any other nation had aviation technology of the sort exhibited by the saucers he saw. Further, Cooper felt that the U.S. government mishandled some of the saucer information that fell into its hands and purposely sat on other information that would have informed the public.
In a 1978 letter to the United Nations, Cooper wrote, “I believe that these extraterrestrial [sic] vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which obviously are a little more technically advanced than we are here on earth.” Cooper suggested that the best course would be to institute “a coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze” UFO data from around the globe.