Project Mercury
The first U.S. human-spaceflight program (1958–1963), which put the Mercury Seven astronauts into suborbital and orbital flight.
UAP relevance: PURSUE Release 02 includes Mercury-era NASA audio, most notably Scott Carpenter’s 1962 Mercury-Atlas 7 description of particles that “look exactly like snowflakes” (src-nbc-pursue-firsthand-encounters-2026-05; framed as “light shavings” in src-newsnation-pursue-release-02-2026-05). The clips sit within the broader PURSUE astronaut-audio cluster alongside Apollo 12 and Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 material.