From: jamesoberg@aol.com (JamesOberg)
Newsgroups: sci.space.history
Subject: Re: Send your questions for Gordon Cooper
Date: 07 Jun 2000 22:08:15 GMT

I'd ask him about the final days at NASA, when he was offered command of
Skylab's first crew instead of the Apollo mission he wanted (but which all the
astronauts he trained with agreed that he didn't deserve), and he quit in a
huff proclaiming he didn't want to hang around and be a "half-astronaut".

I'd ask him about his claims of seeing a UFO land at Edwards AFB in 1957 and
why the story he told gradually changed from being "in charge of the
photographers" who watched a UFO slowly fly past them (funny thing, the
photographers, whom I've interviewed, never knew Cooper had even BEEN at the
base at that time, much less worked for him -- they said), to watching it land
on the salt lake. But if it landed, why didn't Cooper remember going out to
look for imprints of the "tricycle gear" he described?

I'd ask him about his story from Gemini-5 where he says he had a super-secret
hand-held spy camera that could image license plates on the ground (actually,
it was lucky to resolve runways), that was confiscated upon landing because
he'd flown over Area-51 and the Pentagon was scared of the pictures he might
have made -- a problem because Gemini-5's orbital path never came within a 1000
kilometers of "Area-51" and it was physically impossible for him to have
overflown it.

Cooper tells entertaining stories to audiences who love to hear such stories,
and I have no problems with this.. I hope he doesn't have any problems with me
declining to believe the stories are true.