Strangest fact
Cooper is quoted constantly as an astronaut who saw UFOs, but the sightings he actually described all happened on Earth, as a fighter and test pilot. The one story set in space, from his Mercury flight, is the one he called a lie.
L. Gordon Cooper Jr. was one of NASA's first seven astronauts. On May 15 and 16, 1963, he flew the last Mercury mission, Faith 7, for 22 orbits, and in 1965 he commanded the eight-day Gemini 5 flight. He retired from NASA and the Air Force in 1970 and died on October 4, 2004, at age 77.
After leaving NASA, Cooper spoke openly about UFOs. The Independent's obituary records that in 1978 he gave testimony to a United Nations hearing on the subject, and that he campaigned for years against what he saw as a government cover-up. He said he had seen and chased metallic, saucer-shaped objects while flying with the Air Force in Europe in the 1950s. In his 2000 memoir Leap of Faith, he also wrote that in 1957 a camera crew at Edwards Air Force Base filmed a saucer landing on a dry lake bed, and that the film was sent to Washington and never seen again.
Cooper drew a firm line about space. Many UFO books claimed he saw a greenish object with a red tail during his Mercury flight. In 1999 he told a radio interviewer, as reported by Space.com, No, somebody made a lot of money selling ... lies on that one. It was totally untrue, sorry to say.
James Oberg wrote in 1978 that the Mercury story came from a misquotation of Cooper's report of seeing the southern aurora.
The space historian Robert Pearlman, reviewing Leap of Faith for collectSPACE in 2000, wrote that he found it hard to understand how someone so tied to science could embrace ideas such as extraterrestrial visits with little more than anecdotal evidence.