Apollo 17 Evans observes fireball and tunnel effect during reentry — atmospheric reentry

CMP Evans reported an unusual visual perception during reentry: as the reentry fireball brightness diminished, he looked back through the rendezvous window and perceived what appeared to be a tunnel with a bright spot at its center, with the fireball visible at the far end. This effect is consistent with plasma sheath optics during atmospheric reentry and is not anomalous.

“EVANS: "after the brightness of the fireball decreased, I could look back up through the rendezvous window and see what to me was kind of like a tunnel with a bright spot in the middle of the tunnel. Way down the tunnel, way back behind, I could see the fireball."”

OCR quality is moderate with some scan artifacts and redaction classification headers. This is a visually unusual but physically explicable reentry observation — the plasma sheath creates optical distortions. Included here as a documented anomalous visual sighting even though the explanation is straightforward. The document is a merged multi-Skylab debriefing file (Skylab 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 headers appear later in the same text file); this specific content is from the Apollo 17 technical debriefing portion.