Hat Tip to LunaCognita for this great presentation which focuses on a pair of reported UFO incidents that occurred in 1962 during the X-15 Rocket Plane Research Program. Both these encounters, one during an April, 1962 X-15 flight by NASA test pilot Joseph Walker and the other during a July 1962 flight by USAF test pilot Major Robert White, took place at extremely high altitudes, right on the fringe of space.
During Major White's high-altitude test flight, while at apogee he reported sighting and visually tracking an unidentified object "for a full five seconds before it moved away". Two frames of film from the X-15's rear-facing "wing and empennage" stop-motion 16mm camera appear to capture an object (or objects) that seem to match Major White's visual description of the UFO he saw.
Several months earlier, during NASA test pilot Joe Walker's X-15 high-altitude flight, cameras aboard captured what Walker later described as being "five or six disc-shaped or cylindrical objects" near his aircraft.
During a May 11th, 1962 lecture at the "Second National Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space Research" in Seattle, Washington, Joe Walker also claimed that one of his mission objectives during his April 1962 flight in the X-15 was to detect and film UFOs at high altitude.
During the lecture, Walker showed several photographs to the audience of these UFOs captured on film, although NASA has since only ever made one of these frames public.
Here is the link to the online version of the August 3, 1962 issue of LIFE Magazine that is referenced in this presentation, where Major Robert White describes the UFO he saw out the window during his record-breaking July 17, 1962 high-altitude hop in X-15-3.
Here are some more interesting encounters which happened during these missions - a test pilot narrowly saved from death:-
Astronaut wings
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