Apollo 12 Medical Debriefing - Tape 12, 1969
NASA-UAP-D008 · NASA · audio · 7:50 · Release 2
What the war.gov catalog says
During a medical debriefing of the crew of the Apollo 12 mission, Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Command Module Pilot Richard “Dick” F. Gordon, and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean describe their observations of instances of light flashes or “streaks of lights.” The astronauts each reported that these experiences occurred in the dark as they tried to sleep. The NASA medical team considered whether similar phenomena reported by Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin had been attributable to exposure of the retina by cosmic rays. NASA later determined that the phenomena reported by the Apollo 12 flight crew were internal to the astronauts’ vision rather than external light sources.
Transcript
00:00static
speaker 1Ah, listen, we read this paragraph in here about these quotes coronal discharges that you guys were seeing, and, and that, that completely stops us. Tell, tell us what, how this came about, and who, who talked to you about it, and what, and what you saw.
commanderThey reported it on, uh, somebody reported on one of the earlier flights that, uh, some guy up, I got the letter, his paperwork somewhere, he sent it down to me at the Cape about, he said that the VHF radio noises which could be discharges from some place in space, and the other ones were, I thought it was on Neil's flight, he said he reported seeing flashes in the spacecraft at night with their eyes closed. Or no, they, they, they noticed them when they were awake at night and the spacecraft was dark, and they thought they were in the spacecraft. But, uh, whoever this guy was said, "No, that's a perfectly known phenomenon. You can get discharges across your eyes from gamma rays or something." So, he had a bunch of things we, close our eyes and face the Moon, you know, when we were orbiting it, because it would be more, you get less discharges facing the Moon than away from it. Well, you don't have to be anywhere near the Moon or anywhere. First night out, bing, boom, boom. And it just, if you, if you keep your eyes closed and you're awake down there and it's dark, and you think about it, when it happens, you can figure out, you can, you can pin down that it's one eye. It's with side of discharge, you see it in both eyes, you really see it in one eye or the other eye, and you can see what kind it is. We had two kinds. I guess the particle either strikes the eyeball perpendicular or, or discharges parallel, and we'd get either a, a flash like that, or we'd get a streak. And, uh, I, I don't know, for some reason, I got them more with my left eye than my right eye, but I could tell which eye it was.
command module pilotI'm trying to tell you we did, because Al, Pete slept with his, always on his left side in the spacecraft. And that stuff comes whistling across there, and I'd call, "Well, I got one in my eye."
02:12laughter
commanderI got, I got, I got one in my left eye, I'd spit out my mouthpiece.
02:18laughter
speaker 1They should have protected you, Dick. They should have all, they should have picked them all up.
commanderI'm really surprised you didn't hear about this, because there was a specific experiment for this flight. They had it in the flight, there's two pages in the flight plan of a form. We didn't bother because we were seeing them every time we'd close our eyes. There's a paper out now on these exact same two phenomena. This came out of a letter, but Neil talked about this.
speaker 1I, I remember their, their conversation about it.
commanderYeah, they thought it was something, you know, penetrating the spacecraft.
lunar module pilotWhat Pete described is the exact phenomenon. All three of us saw them. You'd see a light, you know, just a flash out there, or sometimes it'd be a, a streak. And I saw them in both eyes, either eye, and, uh, I can't remember if one was more predominant than the other. But I agree with Pete, it's a phenomenon that you're not seeing with both eyes. It's not something external, but it's something internal.
speaker 1Inside your eye.
lunar module pilotYeah, coming across inside of one eye. Apparently, they know about it.
speaker 1Well, we've been looking for, uh, cosmic rays, you know, cosmic ray strikes, and, uh, uh, heavy, heavy particles, heavy nuclei that, that go through. You know, we started that clear back in Mercury, taking, uh, photographs of the retina to see if you could see streaks across the retina and stuff, and we never could find any in there. And so we stopped that up early in, uh, well, by the end of the...
commanderYour eye is what, the fastest healer on your body, and if it's doing anything, you're never going to see it by the time you get a guy back. The only way you're going to see it is if you photograph it right after a particle runs through.
speaker 1Well, probably what, what it's doing anyway, it's probably hitting just a single cell, and, uh, yeah. That's all it'd have to do, particularly to make this flash, you know, you hit a single cell.
commanderI saw one night, I was looking at the MDC, a handrail up above, and one went right along, I don't know whether it went here, you know, right straight along that handrail for about that, that distance. I just had to be looking at that, and I mean, you could almost see them at will. That's right. If you close your eyes, you want, want to see one, you open one eye, and chances are you'll see it.
command module pilotAl didn't believe it at first.
commanderNo, Al didn't believe it the first night. And, uh, Dick and Al had been pretty well preloaded for that, you know, what we, uh, heard. And they asked Pete, "You seen them?" and God, Pete said, "Yes." They said, "Never mind the mission. Wake up at night, if you think you want to see something, close your eyes and face the window about one minute."
speaker 1Uh, let, let me ask you one more question about heart, uh, oh, here.
speaker 2Were, were these random, uh, distribution of these, or, or, or did they seem to be in a primarily horizontal...
speaker 1Okay, uh, were these, were these things random, or did they all seem to be in one direction, like were they always horizontal, or were they at random, they could be at any kind of angle?
commanderThe streaks I saw were, most of the ones I saw were horizontal. I shouldn't say that, that's just in my, it seemed to me I had the impression that they were always roughly in the same place, and mine were horizontal. The horizontal streaks were always, if I knew where I was looking, it always seemed like the horizontal streak was a little bit above the center, and it always seemed to me it went from right to left, no matter which eye it was in. The, the discharges were more towards the center, and, and it would be just a, it was just like a pinpoint of light would go...
command module pilotAnd close again.
speaker 1Like somebody was flashing a light at you.
commanderThat's right. That's right. Yeah, it was not too big a light, you know, it wouldn't fill your eye. It was a very small dot. Yeah.
speaker 1Huh. Well, I think that's about...
speaker 2Does that look the same for both of you? Is, is that the same, uh, reaction you had, Dick and Al, the way Pete described it?
lunar module pilotWell, for Pete, yeah. Mine, mine were not, mine were not 30 degrees of horizontal, but they were coming, see, I didn't notice them from the right or left.
speaker 1That's pretty interesting.
speaker 2But about the same, they seemed to appear about the same place?
lunar module pilotNo.
commanderThe ones, the horizontal ones that I saw were generally above eye level, you know, they were generally high. I, I don't know that I can exclude any other, I can't remember, I just don't remember having them down in the lower part of the vision. Oh, I, you see, Dick's telling you about seeing them with his eyes open, and, and other things, he'd center his eye on the lights of the instrument panel. I used to notice them the most when I was down there in that sleeping bag, and it was pitch black down there in the hole, and it wouldn't make any difference whether my eyes were open or closed. And I could lay there for, you could kill time that way, say for a half an hour, and either open them or close them and wait, and sure enough, after a while, you'd get one. And then I'd sit there for a while and say, "Okay, was that in the left eye or the right eye?" It takes you a while to sort it out, and, uh, but you can usually figure out which eye it was in.
speaker 1Now you know what you're doing when you're supposed to be sleeping on watch.
07:44laughter
speaker 1And there was a comment that...
The audio quality is fair to good, with some background noise and typical room echo from a historical recording.
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