Alan Bean

That's the best they can do.

I had talked, personally, I talked to Alan Bean, astronaut Alan Bean from Apollo 12, and he told me about how when he went up to Skylab, how they had seen a red flashing light actually approach Skylab and then leave.

And they had photographs of that.

And those photographs can be found online.

You can just stipulate that, right? So here's the thing.

When he got out of Alan Bean, the fourth man on the moon, his job was to take the camera off of the little side panel and mount it on the tripod and move it back so everybody could watch what they were doing at the landing site, right? So what he does is when he goes and gets the camera, the first thing he does is the exact thing he was trained not to do.

He takes it, he points it right at the sun, and burns out the optics on the TV camera.

So there's only about 43 minutes of footage on Apollo 12.

You got used to it in three seconds.

Three months later on Apollo 12, astronaut Al Bean walked on the moon and he turned to his other fellow astronauts.

It was Pete Conrad.

And he said, it's kind of like the song.

Thank you.

Did you know that the Apollo astronaut, Alan Bean, in his nod to Scottish heritage, he took a piece of McBean tartan to the moon, which is quite exciting.

That is very,

very American, isn't it? They love kind of buying into their old heritage, don't they?

He felt this incredible sense of gratitude for the Earth and for his life on Earth.

Another guy called Alan Bean, He said that later in his life, I think when he was in his 70s, he said that when he came, ever since his return from the moon, he'd never complained about the weather.

He was just glad that there was weather.

And he said that after he came back from the moon, he used to just sit in shopping malls.

But as we said before, basically no one is going to go through f- uh, 500 pages of space data to find one piece of commentary.

So just a few months after the Apollo 11 mission, Apollo 12 took off in November of '69 with Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean.

Now, Bean is at the alignment optical telescope, which is the instrument that astronauts will use to like lock onto stars and like orient the spacecraft and where it's supposed to be in space.

And the cabin is dark, so his eyes are fully adjusted to what he's staring at, and he's starts describing what he sees, these particles of light and these flashes and objects moving in different directions.

He says, quote, "Some of those things are escaping the Moon.

They really haul out of there and just press off at the stars." Now, it's weird not because it proves anything once again but because of who's saying it.

Alan Bean was a Navy test pilot who later became a professional painter, and he was by every account one of the most grounded and like You could say least mystical people in all of the astronaut corps, and the most likely explanation is boring, right? The spacecraft's water boiler would sometimes vent and throw off ice particles that sparkled in direct sunlight, and maybe, you know, Bean knew that, right? He probably was aware of this phenomena, but he wasn't certain, and no one in the transcript tells him what he's looking at.

Now, the last time a human being stepped foot on the moon was December of 1972.

But there have been a few more weird and unexplained observations that occurred during the later Apollo missions.

The astronauts of Apollo 12, meaning Commander Charles P. Conrad, Command Module Pilot Dick Gordon, and Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean, reported seeing powerful flashes of light, the same as Buzz Aldrin.

These occurred in the dark while the men were trying to sleep, and were powerful enough to be visible even with their eyes closed.

Plenty of other subsequent astronauts would report seeing these flashes, sometimes varying in brightness and even color.

Some of those reports came from the Apollo astronauts, as you can read in the documents that the US government just put out in early August.

For example, during Apollo 12, astronaut Alan Bean was on the moon and said he could see particles of light, flashes of light, sailing away into space.

He said it looks like some of those things are escaping the moon.

During Apollo 11, the astronaut saw some region near a crater light up.

November 20, 1969, the astronauts of Apollo 12 have already left the lunar surface.

Pete Conrad and Alan Bean was back with Richard Gordon, and the small ascent stage that had carried them up from the oceans of storms no longer has a crew to protect.

It has one last job.

The mission controllers send it back down.