PURSUE includes a 1962 Walter Cronkite interview with astronaut Gordon Cooper about UFOs
NASA-UAP-D023 is a previously-unsurfaced excerpt from a November 1962 CBS interview, conducted by Walter Cronkite, in which Mercury 9 astronaut Gordon Cooper gives his views on unidentified flying objects. The catalog shows only the title; the DVIDS record tells you the topic.
Cooper went on to be one of the most publicly outspoken U.S. astronauts on the UFO subject — testifying before the UN in 1985 and granting decades of interviews. This 1962 Cronkite excerpt is the earliest known on-tape version of his views. It being included in a Pentagon disclosure release is itself the story.
By the numbers
Evidence
The catalog row reads, simply: **NASA-UAP-D023, Interview Excerpt with Astronaut Gordon Cooper, 1962**. The DVIDS record fills in what the tape actually contains:
> *"In November 1962, journalist Walter Cronkite interviewed astronaut Gordon Cooper. In this excerpt from that interview, Cronkite asks Cooper about his views regarding the nature of unidentified flying objects, having previously expressed an interest in the subject. Cooper opines that 'a large number…"*
The DVIDS description gets truncated mid-quote — AARO's own metadata system cuts off Cooper's actual line. The full audio is on cloudfront via the JSON files[] reference; the truncated quote is what makes the description so interesting.
Context that the catalog doesn't give you:
- November 1962. Cooper's first spaceflight (Mercury-Atlas 9, *Faith 7*) wasn't until May 1963. So this interview happened *six months before he flew*, when Cronkite would have been previewing the Mercury program. Cooper was already publicly known as the only Mercury Seven astronaut openly interested in UFOs at the time.
- VIRIN
621101-D-D0360-5375confirms the November 1, 1962 imagery date. - Published 2026-06-11 — one day before the rest of release 3 dropped, alongside NASA-UAP-D025 (the Apollo 16 "alien starbase" item — see [apollo16-alien-starbase-timecode](/findings/apollo16-alien-starbase-timecode)). Whoever staged the release pushed the two NASA audio items the night before everything else.
Why this is in PURSUE at all. Cooper had already given public UFO interviews on tape before 1962. The genuinely novel thing here is that the *Department of War* — through AARO — formally redistributed this clip as a UAP-related historical record, with its own UAP record ID. They're not declaring it new footage. They're using their declassification venue to assemble a canonical reference set of UFO-related audio across NASA history. The Gemini and Apollo tapes from release 3 (NASA-UAP-D015–D022, D024–D025) do the same.
