AARO's own caption on a NASA tape: at 32:41, a scientist says "Could be an alien starbase"
The All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office's official description of NASA-UAP-D025 — released on June 12 as part of PURSUE — points to a specific timestamp where an Apollo 16 scientist on tape says, off-handedly, "Could be an alien starbase or something, I don't know." That line is literally the reason this audio file was declassified.
The catalog UI shows you the bland title — "Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing" — and nothing else. You only learn what's on the tape if you open the DVIDS metadata, which most readers never will. The quote is short, surprising, and from a presumably sober technical context (a NASA-internal debrief discussing experimental data correlations). It is the single most shareable line in any of the three PURSUE releases.
By the numbers
Side by side
Evidence
The NASA-UAP-D025 audio file ships with the public title **NASA-UAP-D025, "Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing"**. That's all the catalog tells you. The corresponding DVIDS API record — fetched per-video by the live site to render each modal — adds one sentence of context:
> *"At 32:41, the speaker makes an off-handed comment, 'Could be an alien starbase or something, I don't know' when discussing correlations between experimental data sets."*
That's the entire description field. No speaker name, no surrounding transcript, no preceding minutes of context. AARO is essentially pointing at a timecode and saying *listen here*.
A few things worth keeping straight:
- The speaker isn't identified. Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefings (May 1972, immediately post-mission) featured the *principal investigators* of the various experiments, not the astronauts themselves. So the line was almost certainly spoken by an experiment PI — a scientist, not a crew member — and was reported off-hand while discussing data correlations.
- The tone is "I don't know," not "this is one." This is the kind of half-joke a scientist drops when an unexplained signal pattern shows up. Calling that a "UAP encounter" stretches the term — but AARO clearly thought it was worth declassifying and timecoded.
- The companion file, NASA-UAP-D024, is also tagged
"Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing"(no timecode pointer in its description) — they're presumably two tracks or two sessions of the same series. D024 was published 2026-06-12; D025 was *quietly published one day earlier*, on 2026-06-11, alongside D023 (the Gordon Cooper / Cronkite interview — see [gordon-cooper-cronkite-1962](/findings/gordon-cooper-cronkite-1962)). The other seven release-3 DVIDS items all published on 6/12. Two-day staged upload.
The DVIDS VIRIN 720501-D-D0360-5668 confirms the imagery date — May 1, 1972 — three weeks after Apollo 16 splashed down on April 27, 1972.
To verify yourself: the file is at api.dvidshub.net/asset/video-1010336.json in this mirror. The original tape is on cloudfront at the link the JSON files[] array points to.
