NASA Skylab 3 UFO incident

On the 59th day of flight Skylab III's three-man crew saw and photographed a strange red object.

Not more than 30-50 nautical miles from them, Alan Bean, Owen Garriott and Jack Lousman reported the object was brighter than any of the planets.

This incident has never been explained.

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astronauts Alan Bean, Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma spotted what they described as a red "satellite", which they photographed and mentioned during a subsequent debriefing:

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LOUSMA: "Did you tell him about that satellite we saw?

BEAN: Yes, we saw a great satellite. We didn't know if we told you about it.
LOUSMA: The closest and brightest one we've seen.
BEAN: Huge one.
LOUSMA: We've seen several. It was a red one.
CAPCOM: No, you may have told somebody, but it wasn't this team. I don't remember hearing about it.
LOUSMA: I guess we didn't report it. It was reflecting in red light and oscillating at, oh, counting it's period of brightest to dimmest, about ten seconds. It led us into sunset. That was about three revs ago, I think. Something like that, wasn't it Owen?

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GARRIOTT: Do you want to talk about that satellite?
LOUSMA: I saw a couple of satellites that appeared like a satellite would on earth. I saw one that was not like one you would see on earth, so why don't you mention it?
GARRIOTT: OK. About a week or 10 days before recovery and we were still waiting for information to be supplied to us about the identification. Jack first notices this rather large red star out the wardroom window. Upon close examination, it was much brighter than Jupiter or any of the other planets. It had a reddish hue to it, even though it was well above the horizon. The light from the Sun was not passing close to the Earth's limb at the time. We observed it for about 10 minutes prior to sunset. It was slowly rotating because it had a variation in brightness with a 10-seconds period. As I was saying, we observed it for about 10 minutes, until we went into darkness, and it also followed us into darkness about 5-seconds later. From the 5 to 10 second delay in it's disappearance we surmised that it was not more than 30 to 50 nautical miles [35 to 58 statute miles or 56 to 93 km] from our location. From its original position in the wardroom window, it did not move more than 10 or 20 degrees over the 10 minutes or so that we watched it. Its orbit was very close to that of our own. We never saw it on any earlier or succeeding orbits and we'd be quite interested in having its identification established.”

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Garriott said later that the object did not lead the Skylab into sunset, but rather followed the Skylab into sunset.

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whereas previously it was assumed that the object maintained a roughly fixed, large distance during the time of the first three photos and then it suddenly made an "un-satellite-like" rapid motion toward the Skylab

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based on the available information, these authors conclude that there was no man-made satellite that could explain this sighting and hence the object was truly anomalous. Further data are being sought.

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LOUSMA: I saw a couple of satellites that appeared like a satellite would on earth.

I saw one that was not like one you would see on earth

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In Disneyland of the Gods, John Keel writes of the Black Knight satellite. Never mind the almanac. You won't find it listed with Sputnik or Explorer. Black Knight is the name given to a radar blip discovered in 1960. This mystery satellite was found in a polar orbit, something neither the US nor the Soviets had accomplished. It was several times larger and several times heavier than anything capable of being launched with 1960 rockets. It shouldn't have been there, but it was.

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