Interview Excerpt with Astronaut Gordon Cooper, 1962
NASA-UAP-D023 · NASA · Nov 1962 · audio · 2:03 · Release 3
What the war.gov catalog says
In November 1962, journalist Walter Cronkite interviewed astronaut Gordon Cooper. In this excerpt from that interview, Cronkite asks Cooper about his views regarding the nature of unidentified flying objects, having previously expressed an interest in the subject. Cooper opines that “a large number of exceptionally well-qualified people have seen objects” without a “logical explanation” and speculates on the existence of other planets with “a livable atmosphere” and that maybe there are “some type of human life” out there. Interview was conducted in November 1962.
Transcript
speaker 1Gordon, you uh expressed interest at one time in uh unidentified flying objects, the feeling that there might be something to all these stories. Do you still feel that way?
speaker 2Well, I I feel that there have been a large number of fairly well-qualified, or exceptionally well-qualified, I should say, people who have seen objects that have not uh have not had any really logical explanation other than this. I think that uh maybe in fact each and every one of them does have an explanation. But I think that there are so many possibilities, so many thousands of possibilities of other planets out somewhere in the universe that would have a livable atmosphere, that I would hate to rule out uh the possibility that maybe there are people or some type of human life on some of these. And if this is the case, then it's not too unfeasible to think that perhaps some of these objects might have been something of this type.
speaker 1You don't think that the uh comparatively short step out into space that uh the Mercury flight will take you on is far enough out to make any observations in this area?
speaker 2No, I think we're still at a fairly uh low order of uh of getting out into space when you regard when you speak of space in being millions of miles involved. And we're only getting out a hundred miles or so.
laughter
speaker 1What about the so-called Glenn effect, Gordon, the uh, you know, the snowflakes, the fireflies? Uh now, both Schirra and Carpenter uh seem to feel that it's uh frost of some nature off of the capsule, uh but apparently uh Glenn still uh sort of casts doubt on that theory.
The audio quality is excellent, with clear speech and minimal background noise.
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