Space Case

A funny thing happened on the way back to space. Earlier this year, in the midst of a grueling effort to get shuttles orbiting again, NASA got sidetracked by a congressman's request to identify a UFO in 32-year-old Apollo 16 film footage from the moon. Mystery solved, to the tune of about 200 man-hours and roughly $10,000: It's not an alien spaceship.

"This thing has been an Internet legend," says Gregory Byrne, leader of Johnson Space Center's Image Science and Analysis Group in Houston. Nevertheless, the 48-year-old space physicist hadn't heard the story until the inquiry from Rep. C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger, D-Md., landed on his desk last December. One of Ruppersberger's Baltimore constituents, Donald Ratsch, wanted NASA to identify a "saucer-shaped object with a dome on top" that appears in a fuzzy video copy of the film. Just which of the astronauts caught the object on film in April 1972 as the crew of Apollo 16 prepared to return to Earth is not known. Ratsch has puzzled for decades over the object, which appears in the field of view to the left of the moon for a few seconds, exits left as the camera pans right, then reappears faintly as the camera pans left again.

Ruppersberger, a freshman Democrat whose House assignments include working to prevent bureaucratic waste as a member of the Government Reform Committee, sent Ratsch's request to senior NASA officials in Washington on Nov. 19, 2003. "The congressman believes it's an important part of his job to represent his constituents inside the federal bureaucracy, and we take every constituent request very seriously," says Ruppersberger spokeswoman Heather Molino. "NASA felt it was necessary to do a thorough look."

The letter made it to Johnson Space Center in mid-December. "At first, I considered it a nuisance," says Byrne, whose team is deeply involved in NASA's recovery from the February 2003 Columbia disaster. Debunking an alleged encounter with an unidentified flying object might have been the last thing the team needed to spend time doing, but it happened to be a welcome detour. "[We] enjoyed working it," Byrne says, "because that shuttle return-to-flight work continues to drag on in some very tough stuff."

In the 18 years since the Image Science and Analysis Group was established after the 1986 Challenger disaster, Byrne recalls only two other UFO probes. One involved a stray liquid floating in front of a shuttle window, and the other proved to be ice rattled loose by a shuttle thruster firing. The third investigation spanned two months and involved two civil servants, four contract employees and Apollo 16 commander John Young, who now serves as an associate director for technical matters at Johnson. The team dug through NASA's still photo archives for pictures from other missions showing a similar object, and then consulted with Young, who agreed with Byrne that it could be some sort of antenna. But Ratsch's video was so blurry, it was impossible to say for sure. So they pulled the original 16 mm footage out of a big freezer in which all the Apollo-era film is preserved.

After warming the celluloid to room temperature over two days, they put it through a digital scanner and enhanced about 50 frames with computer software to bring out details. What emerged from the shadows was a boom that held a floodlight. It was attached to the Apollo command module and the astronauts used it to illuminate their space walk.

The team corroborated the evidence with photographs and spacecraft blueprints and reported back to NASA management Feb. 28. "I'm not completely satisfied," Ratsch says of the response he got in April. He's particularly skeptical about the boom. "There might be some kind of linear line, but that could be . . . the result of the UFO and its propulsion system."

The agency attracted international attention with the illustrated report, which it summarized on its Web site in April without citing the source of the inquiry. "It's one of the more impressive jobs of explaining a possible UFO that I've run into," says Don Berliner, chairman of the Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit Fund for UFO Research. "Usually," he adds, "these things end with a huge question mark," such as the peculiar cylinder Frank Borman and Jim Lovell spotted during their Gemini 7 mission in December 1965. An unofficial explanation that it was a stage of their booster rocket hasn't satisfied Berliner and other ufologists.

When NASA isn't being ridiculed for letting such stories persist, it is being accused of covering up encounters. "From where I sit, we do not cover up," says Byrne. "We just simply know better than to waste our time trying to prove they are blobs of grape juice, chunks of ice and floodlights on booms."

Despite NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe's promise earlier this year to crack down on congressional meddling by peer-reviewing budget earmarks, the agency insists its response to Ruppersberger's inquiry is justified. "The inquiry did not compromise any aspect of the Columbia investigation," says spokesman Bob Jacobs. He adds that answering such questions is part of the legislative affairs division's ISO 9000 standards process. "We try to be as responsive as possible."