Gordon Cooper

American astronaut (1927–2004)

Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr. (March 6, 1927 – October 4, 2004) was an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, and the youngest of the seven original astronauts selected for Project Mercury — the Mercury Seven — NASA's first human spaceflight program. Cooper piloted Mercury-Atlas 9 (Faith 7) in 1963 and commanded Gemini 5 in 1965, becoming the first American to spend a full day in space and the first person to make a second orbital flight. He was also among the earliest NASA astronauts to publicly advocate for governmental transparency on UFOs, describing a 1951 sighting of disc-shaped craft over West Germany, a 1957 filmed landing at Edwards Air Force Base, and submitting a formal 1978 statement to the United Nations asserting that extraterrestrial craft were visiting Earth.

Early life and education

Cooper was born on March 6, 1927, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, the only child of Leroy Gordon Cooper Sr. and Hattie Lee Herd. His father, an Oklahoma state district judge and National Guard aviator, transferred to the United States Air Force when it was formed in 1947 and was stationed at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii Territory. His parents owned a Command-Aire 3C3 biplane, and he learned to fly as a child; he unofficially soloed at 12 and earned his pilot license in a Piper J-3 Cub at 16. After graduating from Murray High School in 1945, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, served with the Presidential Honor Guard in Washington, D.C., and was discharged in 1946.

Following his discharge, Cooper attended the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he met his first wife, Trudy B. Olson (1927–1994), through the local flying club. They married in Honolulu on August 29, 1947, and had two daughters.

Military service

At college, Cooper was active in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), which led to his commissioning as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in June 1949; he transferred his commission to the USAF in September. In 1950, after flight training at Perrin and Williams Air Force Bases, Cooper was posted to Neubiberg Air Base in West Germany, where he flew F-84 Thunderjets and F-86 Sabres for four years and became a flight commander of the 525th Fighter Bomber Squadron. He attended the European Extension of the University of Maryland while in Germany, and on returning to the United States in 1954 completed a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1956. While at AFIT, he met Gus Grissom; the two escaped unscathed from a 1956 Lockheed T-33 takeoff crash at Lowry Field.

Cooper and Grissom attended the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School (Class 56D) at Edwards Air Force Base in California in 1956. After graduation Cooper was posted to the Flight Test Engineering Division at Edwards, where he served as a test pilot and project manager on the F-102A and F-106B. At Edwards he flew experimental aircraft at a facility that, before the opening of Area 51 in Nevada, served as the primary site for the development of advanced and classified aircraft. By the time he left Edwards, he had logged more than 2,000 hours of flight time, 1,600 of them in jet aircraft.

The 1951 European sighting

Cooper's first reported UFO sighting occurred while he was flying fighters in West Germany in 1951. In his 1978 statement to the United Nations he described two days of observation over Europe of multiple formations of unknown craft flying from east to west at altitudes beyond the ceiling of contemporary jet fighters: "I did have occasion in 1951 to have two days of observation of many flights of them, of different sizes, flying in fighter formation, generally from east to west over Europe."

NASA career

Project Mercury

Main article:

Project Mercury

In January 1959, Cooper was ordered to Washington, D.C., to attend briefings on Project Mercury; despite his commanding officer's advice not to volunteer, he went through the selection process with 109 other pilots and was accepted as the youngest of the first seven American astronauts. The identities of the Mercury Seven — Scott Carpenter, Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Deke Slayton — were announced at Dolley Madison House in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1959. Cooper specialized in the Redstone rocket, chaired the Emergency Egress Committee, and served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Mercury-Redstone 3 and Mercury-Atlas 7 and as backup pilot for Mercury-Atlas 8.

Mercury-Atlas 9

Main article:

Mercury-Atlas 9

Cooper's selection as pilot of Mercury-Atlas 9 — with Shepard as backup — was announced on November 14, 1962; he was one of only two Mercury Seven astronauts yet to fly in space. He named the spacecraft Faith 7. Launched on May 15, 1963, Cooper orbited the Earth 22 times for 34 hours, 19 minutes, and 49 seconds — longer than all five previous Mercury astronauts combined — becoming the first American to sleep in orbit and the first launched on an entirely solo orbital mission. After a power failure during the 19th orbit knocked out clock, gyroscopes, and automatic control, Cooper took the spacecraft through re-entry manually, using star patterns and his wristwatch for timing, and splashed down four miles from the carrier USS Kearsarge. On May 22 he received a ticker-tape parade in New York City witnessed by more than four million spectators.

Gemini 5

Main article:

Gemini 5

Cooper was designated commander of Gemini 5, an eight-day, 120-orbit mission, with Pete Conrad as pilot; their assignment was announced February 8, 1965. Cooper and Conrad originated the practice of NASA mission patches, choosing an embroidered design featuring a Conestoga wagon and the slogan "8 Days or Bust" (later removed by Administrator James E. Webb). Gemini 5 lifted off on August 21, 1965. Despite fuel cell problems and failing thrusters, Cooper and Conrad established a new space endurance record by traveling 5,331,745 kilometres (3,312,993 mi) in 190 hours and 56 minutes — just short of eight days — showing that astronauts could survive in space long enough for a lunar mission. Cooper became the first person to make a second orbital flight. He later served as backup Command Pilot for Gemini 12 with Gene Cernan.

Project Apollo and departure

Cooper was selected as backup commander for the May 1969 Apollo 10 mission, normally a position that led to command of Apollo 13. When Alan Shepard returned to flight status in May 1969, Slayton replaced Cooper with Shepard as commander; the crew's mission became Apollo 14. Dismayed by his stalled astronaut career, Cooper retired from NASA and the USAF on July 31, 1970, with the rank of colonel, having flown 222 hours in space. He divorced Trudy and married schoolteacher Suzan Taylor in 1972, with whom he had two more daughters.

The Edwards Air Force Base 1957 incident

While serving as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base on May 3, 1957, Cooper had a crew set up a Cinetheodolite system — made by the German Askania Werke company — on a dry lake bed to photograph aircraft landings at thirty frames per second. The crew, James Bittick and Jack Gettys, reported that a "strange-looking, saucer-like" craft had hovered silently over them, extended three landing gear, touched down roughly 46 metres (50 yd) away, and departed vertically as they approached. Cooper reported the incident by a special Pentagon telephone number and was directed to have the film developed without prints and sent in a locked courier pouch; he reviewed the negatives, found the imagery excellent, and never learned what became of them, assuming the footage ended up with Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Cooper later described this as a direct example of UFO evidence being actively suppressed by U.S. government authorities (see UFO cover-up).

Researcher Steven Greer recounted that Cooper reviewed the film before forwarding it: "Gordon Cooper... looked at the film and sent it on a Pentagon plane." Filmmaker James Fox personally interviewed Cooper on camera about the incident and recounted the episode to Senator Harry Reid and Jacques Vallée. According to Fox, Cooper said his crew "were supervising the installation of a new runway for F-86 fighter jets at Edwards Air Force Base" when the disc appeared and was filmed landing on the dry lake bed. Fox has stated the footage was eventually located — "missing for 40 years" — and appears in his documentary The Phenomenon (2020).

Greer has also stated that Secretary of Defense William Cohen, under President Bill Clinton, contacted Cooper for full details of the Edwards incident — including the unit, the date, and the film shipment chain — and attempted to locate the footage through official channels, reportedly informing Cooper that the film had "vanished" and that the Secretary of Defense himself did not have access to it.

Disclosure advocacy

Cooper was among the earliest NASA astronauts to publicly advocate for governmental transparency on the UFO subject, though he denied reports that he had himself seen a UFO during his Mercury flight. In 1978, at a UN panel convened by Grenada and chaired by Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, Cooper submitted a formal written statement addressed to Ambassador Eric Mitchell Gairy, calling on the UN to establish a coordinated international program to collect and analyze UFO data: "I believe that these extra-terrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets," and endorsing the UN as "the only proper body to handle this subject properly and expeditiously." He noted the reluctance of most astronauts to discuss the topic publicly due to "the great numbers of people who have looked immediately sold tall stories and forged documents abusing their names and reputations." Cooper pointed out that there were hundreds of reports made by his fellow pilots, many coming from military jet pilots responding to radar or visual sightings; in his memoirs he wrote that he had seen unexplained aircraft several times during his career.

His 2000 autobiography Leap of Faith: An Astronaut's Journey into the Unknown (HarperCollins), co-authored with Bruce Henderson, recounted his Air Force and NASA experiences alongside his efforts to expose what he called a UFO conspiracy. Space historian Robert Pearlman wrote in his review: "While no one can argue with someone's experiences, in the case of Cooper's own sightings, I found some difficulty understanding how someone so connected with groundbreaking technology and science could easily embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence." His testimony was later collected for the Disclosure Project, and he described his recollections for the 2003 documentary Out of the Blue. The 1978 UN letter was reproduced in William Cooper's 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse (Light Technology Publishing, Flagstaff, Arizona), which brought it to a wide alternative-research audience.

Other activities and later life

After leaving NASA, Cooper served on several corporate boards and as a technical consultant for more than a dozen companies in fields ranging from high-performance boat design to energy, construction, and aircraft design. He headed Performance Unlimited, Inc., GCR, Teletest, Doubloon, Cosmos, and Gordon Cooper & Associates, Inc., and consulted for Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, and Republic Corp. From 1973 to 1975 he served as vice president of research and development for Epcot at The Walt Disney Company. In 1989, he became chief executive of Galaxy Group, Inc., a small-aircraft design company. While in space on Gemini 5, Cooper had recorded dark spots in the waters of the Caribbean that he believed might be shipwrecks; the 2017 Discovery Channel docu-series Cooper's Treasure followed Darrell Miklos as he searched through Cooper's files to locate the suspected wrecks.

Death

Cooper died at age 77 from heart failure at his home in Ventura, California, on October 4, 2004. A portion of his ashes was launched on a 2007 UP Aerospace SpaceLoft XL sub-orbital flight from New Mexico together with those of Star Trek actor James Doohan and 206 others; the capsule was recovered and the ashes returned to the families. A subsequent orbital attempt aboard Explorers on Falcon 1 in 2008 was lost when the rocket failed. Another portion of his ashes was flown on the SpaceX COTS Demo Flight 2 in 2012.

Awards and honors

Cooper received the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross with oak leaf cluster, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, the NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the Collier Trophy, the Harmon Trophy, the Iven C. Kincheloe Award, the John F. Kennedy Trophy, and an honorary D.Sc. from Oklahoma State University (1967). He was inducted into the Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame (1980), the International Space Hall of Fame (1981), and the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame (May 11, 1990).

Cultural influence

Cooper was portrayed by Dennis Quaid in the 1983 film The Right Stuff, by Robert C. Treveiler in the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, by Bret Harrison in the 2015 ABC series The Astronaut Wives Club, and by Colin O'Donoghue in the 2020 National Geographic series The Right Stuff. The 2019 series For All Mankind features Gordon "Gordo" Stevens, a character based in part on him, and the Thunderbirds character Gordon Tracy was named after him.

See also

• Disclosure movement
• List of people who have witnessed UFOs

References

Bibliography

• Atkinson, Joseph D.; Shafritz, Jay M. (1985). The Real Stuff: A History of NASA's Astronaut Recruitment Program. New York: Praeger. ISBN 978-0-03-005187-6. ＋
• Burgess, Colin (2011). Selecting the Mercury Seven: The Search for America's First Astronauts. New York; London: Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-8405-0. ＋
• Burgess, Colin (2016). Faith 7: L. Gordon Cooper, Jr., and the Final Mercury Mission. New York; London: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-30562-2. ＋
• Carpenter, M. Scott; Cooper, L. Gordon Jr.; Glenn, John H. Jr.; Grissom, Virgil I.; Schirra, Walter M. Jr.; Shepard, Alan B. Jr.; Slayton, Donald K. (2010) [1962]. We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4391-8103-4. ＋
• Cooper, Gordon; Henderson, Bruce (2000). Leap of Faith. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-019416-2. ＋
• French, Francis; Burgess, Colin (2007). In the Shadow of the Moon. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-1128-5. ＋
• Hacker, Barton C.; Grimwood, James M. (1977). On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini. Washington, D.C.: NASA. ＋
• Shayler, David (2002). Apollo: The Lost and Forgotten Missions. London: Springer. ISBN 1-85233-575-0. ＋
• Slayton, Donald K. "Deke"; Cassutt, Michael (1994). Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle. New York: Forge. ISBN 0-312-85503-6. ＋
• Swenson, Loyd S. Jr.; Grimwood, James M.; Alexander, Charles C. (1966). This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury. Washington, DC: NASA. NASA SP-4201. ＋
• Thompson, Neal (2004). Light This Candle: The Life & Times of Alan Shepard, America's First Spaceman. New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 0-609-61001-5. ＋