There is an untold story of the former NASA firefighter who testified to witnessing a UFO hovering over astronauts in a secret transmission due to being in the wrong place at the right time.
This testimony was made public by two researchers, BJ Booth and Eileen Nesbitt, who may or may not be with us anymore. The NASA employee who witnessed this incident started working for the US space agency in 1958 as a security guard at Wayside in Houston, Texas.
The event was witnessed by the NASA employee whose job it was to ensure that all fire safety standards, equipment and escape routes were in place and operational at all times. As part of his duty, he and his fellow firefighters were able to enter protected buildings at the Johnson Space Center, allowing them to view items that could only be defined as “Top Secret” on several occasions. During one of these periodic safety inspections, the anonymous NASA employee and a fellow firefighter observed an incredible event during the Apollo 15 Moon mission.
Apollo 15 was the ninth manned mission and the fourth to land on the Moon in the history of US manned space missions. When the first J mission landed on the Moon, it spent more time there than previous missions and placed a greater emphasis on scientific exploration. It was on Apollo 15 that the Lunar Roving Vehicle was put into operation for the first time.
The mission began on July 26 and ended on August 7, with exploration of the lunar surface taking place between July 30 and August 2. Commander David Scott and Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin landed near Hadley Rille and explored the local area using the rover, allowing them to travel farther from the Lunar Module than was possible on previous missions. They spent 18 hours and 37 minutes on the Moon’s surface in extravehicular activity (EVA) and collected 170 pounds (77 kg) of material from the surface.
An estimated 380 people were part of the Manned Spacecraft Center fire department when the firefighter arrived. His tenure at NASA lasted more than 26 years, but he never witnessed an employee complain about the agency’s tight security. “Even in recent years I have stayed in touch with several of my closest friends, when conversations have turned to anything we were told not to talk about, there was always someone there to remind us that we were told not to discuss it, even after we weren’t over there,” said Fireman.
The former NASA employee stated that there were several incidents that occurred during his tenure and to several of the firefighters that forced them to think about how the government wasn’t telling everything. For example, in Building 1 of the Johnson Space Center, which was Building 2 when he started working there, most of the second floor’s north center was the “crypto” room.
He didn’t know what went on in the room, but they weren’t allowed in the room under normal circumstances. However, when there was an alarm at the Fire Department, they responded to the floor of the building that appeared on the firehouse enunciator panel. Once, around 1964, they responded to Building 2 to find that the alarm originated in the “crypto” room.
But the doors were open, so they went inside to examine the puny control panel. He explained: “The entire east wall was covered with UFO pictures. When we were done, the policeman from that room came back and met us there. In fact, he pulled out his gun and pointed it at us before demanding to know why we entered that room.
Later, the armed officer pulled his gun after Everett [D.] Shafer, head of NASA security, vouched for them. The firefighter speculated that the policeman could be from the Air Force. They had another incident in the same room in 1968. This time he allowed them into the room. But the walls on all four sides were pictures of UFOs and other very strange looking aircraft. After they finished the job, Mr. Shafer and the officer told them not to speak to anyone about what they observed in that room. ( Shafer is mentioned in this NASA source )
Furthermore, according to the testimony of a former NASA firefighter, astronauts Scott and Irwin discovered that they were not alone on the Moon while studying Hadley Rill. This information was obtained from the exploration of the crater by astronauts. The following is his powerful testimony: ( Source )
Nothing out of the ordinary ever occurred in Missions, but during one particular Mission, something so unique happened that I will always remember it. Jim Baker and I were doing routine security inspection during a Manned Mission [Apollo 15] to the Moon.
We entered the observation room at the end of our patrol and, as usual, sat down at the back of the room to smoke a pipe. We both smoke pipes and the viewing room allowed smokers. We hadn’t been there more than fifteen minutes, it could have been longer, but I doubt it when the stage left door opened and several, at least five, of the upper echelon administrators of the Johnson Space Center entered.
Uh, it wasn’t actually called Johnson Space Center back then; instead the name was Manned Spacecraft Center. Anyway, I know one of those people was definitely the Chrome Dome, as we were irreverently known for calling Dr. Girth. Back then I had hair and I thought it was funny to refer to one of the best minds our country had by the nickname “Chrome Dome”.
Just before entering the viewing room, Jim and I noticed that the technicians in the mission operations control rooms (MOCR) had gotten up and left the room. Now this is not uncommon during a normal EVA, but the astronauts were in Hadley’s Rille. They couldn’t be seen because they were over the edge, in Rille itself. The Lunar Rover was about thirty, maybe forty or more meters from the edge, and had the front left camera at the spot where the astronauts had disappeared. You could hear the astronauts’ voices talking, but as with most dialogue, we weren’t really paying attention to what they were saying. We noticed technicians getting up and leaving the MOCR. Jim is the one who actually said something about it.
“Seems like everyone has a bee in their hat at the same time, doesn’t it?” “Probably their piss and lunch break,” I offered. It was shortly after I made this statement that Dr. Gilruth entered, and several others followed him. They didn’t look back, they just went to the center of the viewing room and chatted animatedly among themselves and pointed to the big screen to the right of the main MOCR screen.
Jim and I paid close attention to what was on the screen. There was an object above where the astronauts were supposed to be on Hadley’s Rille, just hovering. I’m totally sure it’s an object; it was round, had a bright side and a shadow side, with the shadow side matching the shadows of the moon, and although all the video shots coming from the moon looked black and white, they could have been in color. Harsh lighting was likely responsible for the illusion of black and white.
Anyway, the object started a slow movement of the screen from the left to the right of the screen. The camera on the left front of the Rover followed the object as it panned to the right. It soon became apparent that I wasn’t actually moving the screen to the right, but was circling the Rover.
The Rover has two cameras mounted on it. One camera was mounted on the front left and one on the rear right. When the object appeared at the rear right, the camera picked up the object and continued tracking it as it circled very slowly around the Rover. It finally got to the point where the rear right camera could no longer follow it, so the front left camera picked up the image again and followed it to where it was once again above where the astronauts were at Hadley’s Rille. ( Source )
I uttered something that caught Dr. Gilruth and the others. “What the hell is this? What led me to utter this sentence was that the object took off and disappeared from view in less than a second. It might have been longer, but it felt like it was gone in the blink of an eye, but I was still aware that it had actually gone up.
One of the men there, I still think it was Everette Shafer, turned around and asked what we were doing in the room, and we told them we were there to inspect the fire alarm panel at the back of the room and take our breaks to smoke. And to ask a question from us. “What the hell was that?”
Can you believe they actually told us it was a drop of oil on the camera lens on the moon? True! Now, I’m not stupid, although I’ve done some stupid things in my life, like getting married for the first time, but I know a lot of bullshit when I hear that! It wasn’t a drop of oil, no! I opened my mouth and said, “There’s no way this could be in the camera lens on the moon. The temperature would freeze the solid drop.”
UFO Hovering Near Astronauts? Astronaut David R. Scott, commander, standing on the slope of the Hadley delta, uses a 70mm camera during Apollo 15’s extravehicular activity (EVA) on the lunar surface. image credit: NASA
To which the man holding my permit in his hand, reading my name replied, “I mean, it was a drop of oil on the camera lens on the back of that screen.” To which he pointed. Okay, that was a good place to shut up and leave the screening room, but… Again, I said something because, as I’ve said before, I’m not stupid!
“There’s no way that drop of oil could land on one of those lenses behind the screen, because of the temperature. The heat is high enough to ignite the oil droplet. Whoever was holding my badge in his hand said, “If you want to keep your job, get out of here and keep your mouth shut about what happened here. Not about what I saw, not about why I was there, just leave and keep my mouth shut about what happened. I pulled away from him, turned to Jim and said come on.
When we left the room, to our surprise, there was Dick Nieber and Loring E. Williams from security at the doors. They were as surprised to see us leave the room as we were to see them standing guard there. Also, they told us Andrado and two others were at the back doors to keep unauthorized people out.
Then they told us their story: they were taken off vehicular patrol and told to immediately go to the IMCC and MOCR viewing room on the second floor and stand guard until further notice. They were told that absolutely no one other than Dr. Gilruth and the people with him could enter the room. No wonder our presence disturbed Dr. Gilruth and the others; we shouldn’t be there.
When Nieber asked us what happened there, we said we couldn’t discuss it. They thought the astronauts had been killed. That was what circulated among them as they guarded the doors to the display room. Wrong! That same night I sat down at the typewriter and wrote everything down, time, date, place and mission, plus every name I could remember who was there with all the facts relating to the incident, and asked Jim Baker to read and sign. He read it and signed it on condition that I give him a copy of the report. I went to the copy machine, made six complete copies of the report, and gave one of them to Jim.
Incidentally, when we got back to the firehouse, Sgt. Thomas Walsh asked us to go to the dispatcher’s office to speak with him. He closed the door and told us that he had received a call from Shafer, that no matter what we saw or heard in the screening room, we shouldn’t discuss this with anyone, ever, because it had to do with Homeland Security. “National Security over a drop of oil on a camera lens?” I don’t think so!
Jim Baker died in 1983 of a sudden heart attack. He was 46 years old and one of my best friends, and we would regularly get together at his house in his gun shop to talk about various people and things. The last time I saw him alive I asked him if he still had his report hidden and he told me that he actually burned his copy but gave a copy to another friend in West Virginia who wanted it.
I retired in 1979 and moved to Austin, Texas. I was a security dispatcher for the LBJ Presidential Library back in Austin when I got a call from Jim’s daughter, Amey, saying that her father had passed away that morning. Jim’s last words to me, back in his little gun shop, were, “You sure did hell over that drop of oil, but you were right, they were full of shit and you knew it.”
Addendum: 03-13-05
I looked it up recently and it was Apollo 15. For some reason I lost my original notes written on the NASA Fire Department’s old IBM Selectric. However, I must reiterate that this was not a movie, it was in real time and we watched the incident as it happened on the big screen at the MOCR on the second floor of Building 30, also known as the Mission Operations Control Center.
We had stopped in the observation room to check the smaller fire panel at the back of the room and then sat down to smoke our pipes. We had been there for about fifteen minutes when Dr. Gilruth and about five other men. They didn’t even know we were in the room until the object took off, after it had circled the Lunar Rover.
As I said, it was the flight where the astronauts had landed near Hadley’s Rille, and when the incident happened they were out of sight on the ledge in the Rille. As far as I know, that’s what was being said by the media. However, when we returned to the Fire Department, no one had seen the object, and Sgt. Thomas Walsh took us to the Dispatcher’s office and told us that he received a call from Everette Shafer, NASA security, telling her to inform us of the oaths we signed regarding national security and the penalties associated with breaking the law.
