NASA-UAP-D029, Apollo 17 Crew Medical Debriefing (Continued), 1972

NASA-UAP-D029, Apollo 17 Crew Medical Debriefing (Continued), 1972 is an official NASA record of a debriefing held on December 21, 1972, in Houston, Texas. NASA declassified and released the recording publicly for the first time as part of PURSUE Release 04 on July 10, 2026. ¹²³⁴

  Provenance and Background

This recording is segment 2 of 2 of the Apollo 17 post-mission medical debriefing at the Manned Spacecraft Center, now the Johnson Space Center, in Houston. In this continued segment, crew members and debriefers discuss the "light flash phenomena": high-energy cosmic rays passing through the eye and striking the retina, producing the perception of light streaks or flashes. At the time this was a newly identified effect; it is now well documented in spaceflight medicine. Two of the three crew members reported observing these flashes at various points during the mission, including in lunar orbit and on the lunar surface.³⁴

  References

  References

1. war.gov ↩

2. war.gov ↩

3. dvidshub.net ↩ ↩²

4. d34w7g4gy10iej.cloudfront.net ↩ ↩²