USS Hornet

The USS Hornet (CV-12) was commissioned in 1943. She earned nine battle stars in the Pacific, and on 24 July 1969 she recovered the Apollo 11 astronauts after the first Moon landing, with President Nixon aboard to greet them. An estimated 300 men died in her service, in combat and in the everyday dangers of carrier operations, including launch-cable accidents on the flight deck. She was decommissioned in 1970 and opened as a museum at Alameda in October 1998. Since then more than thirty volunteers and staff have described unexplained experiences aboard. A museum painter reported two men in sailors' whites with featureless faces. Others describe shadow figures, sailors and officers in uniform, their names being called, flashlights switching themselves on, switches moving in control rooms, and the sounds of work in the empty engine and boiler spaces. The volunteers who know the ship best describe its presences as benign.