Apollo 12 Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription

The Apollo 12 Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription preserves exchanges involving the lunar module Intrepid, its crew and Mission Control. It includes an operational timing instruction: according to the source record, Mission Control gave Intrepid a lift-off time of ground elapsed time (GET) 142 hours, 3 minutes and 47 seconds.¹ Within this operational context, Alan Bean said that, while looking through the Alignment Optical Telescope in Intrepid’s dark quadrant, he saw particles and flashes of light that appeared to come from behind him in quadrant 1 before sailing into space.² Bean initially thought the particles were dropping from the water boiler, but said that some might have been escaping the Moon.³

The transcript also records Bean’s report of an all-8’s flash on both the address and information registers of Intrepid’s Abort Guidance System. He described the display as being about one-fifth as bright as the normal numbers and pulsing every second.⁴ Bean said that lowering the illumination level slightly made the effect unnoticeable.⁵ A separate exchange concerns a flashing Data Entry and Display Assembly (DEDA). According to the source record, a Mission Control Capsule Communicator identified as “Fredo” said that he and the Capcom speaking had seen the same phenomenon during ground testing of most Apollo spacecraft at USA, New York, Bethpage. They considered electromagnetic interference (EMI) a probable cause.⁶ The record further states that TRW Inc. had a workup on the DEDA-flashing problem.⁷

During a rendezvous procedure, Richard Gordon, aboard Yankee Clipper, said he could not find Intrepid’s tracking light in his sextant because it appeared to have burned out.⁸ Charles “Pete” Conrad, aboard Intrepid, described small pieces of debris floating alongside the spacecraft during the first nightside pass, with the tracking light flashing on them; during a later pass, he said, the light no longer flashed on similar debris and he concluded that it had burned out.⁹ The source also records Conrad being told that Gordon had set up the television camera.¹⁰ Mission Control’s electrical monitoring nevertheless indicated that Intrepid’s tracking light was on, contradicting the crew’s report that it had been switched off.¹¹ For UAP research, the source matters because it places unusual visual reports alongside display behaviour, equipment troubleshooting and conflicting instrumentation reports in a contemporaneous mission transcript.