Edwards AFB Saucer Filming (Gordon Cooper Account), 1957

The account

On a May morning in 1957, a crew setting up a precision-landing camera system on the dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base reportedly saw a silent, saucer-shaped object. The camera system, a cinetheodolite, was meant to photograph aircraft landing at one frame per second, so the crew was filming when the object appeared. Gordon Cooper, then a test pilot at Edwards and later a Mercury and Gemini astronaut, was supervising the filming. His account, told in his memoir Leap of Faith and in the 2003 documentary Out of the Blue, describes the craft hovering on three extended legs.

Cooper says he did not witness the object himself but saw the footage. He reported it through a special Pentagon telephone line. The person on the line reportedly told him to have the film developed and sent to Washington without making prints. Cooper says he looked at the photographs anyway and never received a follow-up.

The official record

The Project Blue Book file on the case does not match Cooper's version. It concludes that the object was most likely a routine balloon launch from the base that same morning. Researchers who examined the file note that it lacks the 8-by-10-inch glossy prints that were supposedly made from some of the 35-millimeter stills. James Oberg's write-up on efforts to locate the report examines the search for the original documentation.

Case for and against

The case rests heavily on a single witness's recollection, years after the fact. Cooper's accounts also differ on details: sources give the date as 1957 or 1958, and his description of the object's landing gear and the photographs has shifted between tellings. No primary Pentagon or Air Force testimony from Cooper has surfaced. Skeptical writers have suggested that what Cooper and the crew saw was a classified Air Force aircraft rather than a UFO, a plausible explanation given Edwards' role as a test site for experimental aircraft.

Supporters point to Cooper's standing as a senior test pilot and astronaut, and to the gap between the balloon explanation and the missing prints. The episode is also consistent with Cooper's other reported encounter, a 1951 sighting of formation discs over an airbase in Germany, which he described in later interviews.

Current status

The incident is known mainly through Cooper's memoir and interviews and through the Blue Book file summary. Because the film and prints are not publicly available, the case remains unresolved. It is cited in ufology as an example of a documented official handling of a UFO report, with the balloon explanation the only official finding on record. Its credibility rating reflects the gap between a respected witness's account and the lack of any independently verifiable physical evidence.