away using three extended landing gears, and then took off as they approached for a closer look. He called a special Pentagon number to call to report such incidents, and was instructed to have their film developed, but to make no prints of it, and send it in to the Pentagon right away in a locked courier pouch. As Cooper had not been instructed to not look at the negatives before sending them, he did. Cooper claimed that the quality of the photography was excellent, and what he saw was exactly what Bittick and Gettys had described to him. He expected that there would be a follow-up investigation, since an aircraft of unknown origin had landed at a classified military installation, but never heard about the incident again. He was never able to track down what happened to those photos, and assumed they ended up going to the Air Force's official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book, which was based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Cooper claimed until his death that the U.S. government was indeed covering up information about UFOs. He pointed out that there were hundreds of reports made by his fellow pilots, many coming from military jet pilots sent to respond to radar or visual sightings. In his memoirs, Cooper wrote he had seen unexplained aircraft several times during his career, and that hundreds of reports had been made. In 1978 he testified before the UN on the topic. Throughout his later life Cooper repeatedly expressed in interviews that he had seen UFOs, and described his recollections for the 2003 documentary Out of the Blue. Death Cooper died at age 77 from heart failure at his home in Ventura, California, on October 4, 2004. Cooper was the last American to have flown a solo mission in space until, on June 21, 2004, Mike Melvill piloted SpaceShipOne to an altitude of on its first spaceflight. A portion of Cooper's ashes (along with those of Star Trek actor James Doohan and 206 others) was launched from New Mexico on April 29, 2007, on a sub-orbital memorial flight by a privately owned UP Aerospace SpaceLoft XL sounding rocket. The capsule carrying the ashes fell back toward Earth as planned; it was lost in mountainous landscape. The search was obstructed by bad weather, but after a few weeks the capsule was found, and the ashes it carried were returned to the families.