Congressional, White House, UFO-related Constituent Correspondence, 1998

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A machine read this text from the scan. When the text and the image disagree, the image is right.

Artist's rendition of the astronauts' view of the rendezvous evaluation pod after it has been jettisoned from the Gemini adaptor section. Gemini radar locked on to evaluation pod.

Scott Carpenter took this photo of a subsatellite balloon jettisoned by his Mercury-7 capsule in 1963. Balloon did not inflate and looked like a limp sleeve. Compare with photo S65-45672. UFO researcher George Fawcett has convinced many that this actually shows a "classical domed UFO" accompanied by smaller scout craft; fictional statements by astronaut Carpenter have been quoted.

see plate 21 for full photo blowup

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Actual Gemini-5 photo (blowup of S65-45672) of the pod at a range of several hundred feet. The glare and the graininess of the enlarged image give the subsatellite a "blob" appearance and even make it look like two objects. The potato-shaped grey blob is the pod's insulation blanket.

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Space engineers at Cape Kennedy prepare the "rendezvous evaluation pod" sub-satellite for a joint flight with the Gemini-5 spacecraft in 1965.

This sequence of pictures illustrates the problem of identifying photographs of objects in the glare of space.

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