Leroy Gordon Cooper, military pilot and among the first astronauts of the Nasa (he flew with the Mercury-Atlas 9 in 1963, the last flight of the Mercury program, and with the Gemini 5, in 1965), has certainly been an unusual public figure. Freemason belonging to the lodge n. 82 of Carbondale (Colorado), he brought the flag of his lodge in his first flight in the space; after his death, in 2004, he was cremated and his ashes brought in orbit in 2007, but beside these curiosities he was famous for some sightings of UFOs and a supposed treasure in which he was involved.

Cooper saw UFOs near US military bases

In a 1994 interview the former astronaut confirmed to have seen a UFOs formation in 1951, when he was in Germany at the air base of Neubiberg as Usaf pilot. However, it was not the only sightseeing of an Ufo in which Cooper was involved: as the journalist Whitley Strieber confirmed, Cooper told him to have observed another Ufo on the ground at the Edwards Air Force Base in the 1957.

Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad Jr. on a Gemini-5 spacecraft

In this case tapes were recoreded and then sent to Washington, where they were secreted and have not been made public since. The Ufo, according to the witness of Cooper, was a silver object standing at the end of the runaway, displayed no weapons and appeared to pose no threat, therefore the photos should not show anything that displays such a threat that it should not be revealed to the public opinion, yet the secret persists decades later.

Discovery Channel will look for the treasure of Gordon Cooper

Later the public statements of Cooper regarding the Ufo seemed contradictory and some suspected that the former astronaut had not directly seen the Ufo but that he only talked to people present to the event, but Strieber about this point was very specific and stressed that Cooper had expressly confided to him to have seen personally the Ufo. But Cooper did not only see UFOs during his career.

A tv series by Discovery Channel premiered 6/1/2017, “Cooper’s Treasure”, conducted by Darrell Miklos, treasures seeker and long date friend of the former astronaut, try to verify if the “anomalies” that the astronaut would have noticed in the flight Mercury-Atlas 9 flying over the Caribbean Sea can be indeed tied up to a treasure. What kind of treasure could be Cooper has never told, but according to Miklos he would have many times confided to believe that it was worth billion of dollars. Have it any connections with the UFOs seen by Cooper a few years before, or it will be "just" a shipwreck, maybe of Christopher Columbus' partner, Pinzon?