The world watched on in anticipation as NASA sent astronauts to walk in space for the first time, but one of those on board spotted something that he just couldn’t take his eyes off
On what was set to be remembered for being the very first space walk, an unusual sighting by astronaut Jim McDivitt means it will always be remembered for something very different.
Flying through the eerily black sky in June 1965 aboard NASA’s Gemini 4 mission, astronaut Jim claimed he saw a mysterious ‘beer can’ like UFO flying past him.
So much so, even 10 years later he still couldn’t let go of what he saw on that day.
Speaking to US television all those years later, he said: “At the time I saw it, I said there was something out in front of me or outside the spacecraft that I couldn’t identify and I never have been able to identify it, and I don’t think anybody ever will.
“We were in drifting flight and my partner, Ed White, was asleep. I couldn’t see anything out in front of me except just the black sky.
“And it was rotating around, I noticed something out in front that was a white cylindrical shape with a white pole sticking it out of one corner of it – it looked like a beer can with a smooth pencil sticking out. I grabbed two cameras and took pictures of it.
“As the sun shone on the window, I could no longer see out and the thing just disappeared.
“They checked NORAD records to see what they had up on radar and there wasn’t anything within very close range of us.”
But, unlike many UFO sightings that are told from anecdotal evidence alone, Jim had been careful to photograph what he had seen.
But, as the public eagerly awaited the release of the photos, they were ultimately underwhelming and became known as the ‘tadpoles’ thanks to their blurry complexion.
Jim said: “I’ve seen the photos that were released. I went back and went through each frame of all of the pictures that we took and there wasn’t anything in there like what I had seen.”
After further inspection and analysis, any hope that Jim had become one of the rare few to have spotted alien life were quashed completely after another explanation came to light.
Speaking in 1999 he said: “And really what it was, was a reflection of the bolts in the windows.
“The windows were made up of about three or four or five panes of glass, so that if one got broken we still had some pressure integrity.
“And these little things, when the Sun shined on them right, they’d multiply the images off the different panes. And I’m quite sure that that’s what this thing was.”
