Apollo 16 Scientific Debriefing, 1972 — NASA Audio (NASA-UAP-D025)
At 32:41, the speaker makes an off-handed comment, “Could be an alien starbase or something, I don’t know” when discussing correlations between experimental data sets.
Incident Overview
In 1972, in Houston, Texas, NASA preserved an audio recording that was declassified and published on June 12, 2026 as part of the third tranche of the Department of War’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE).
What the government released
At 32:41, the speaker makes an off-handed comment, “Could be an alien starbase or something, I don’t know” when discussing correlations between experimental data sets.
Status of the case
Records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which means the federal government has not concluded the events were anomalous, has not concluded they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Where AARO has offered a likely source for an item — an infrared sensor aboard a military aircraft, a commercial camera, or a known optical effect — that attribution is the agency’s working assessment rather than a final determination. Conventional candidates such as drones, balloons, flares, satellites, parallax and forced-perspective artifacts, and ordinary aircraft remain on the table for any unresolved case absent better data than a single sensor pass or a witness recollection.