USS Hornet

Two Apollo crews came back from the Moon, and the first solid thing they stood on was this flight deck.

USS Hornet, CV-12, is an Essex-class aircraft carrier completed in late 1943 and now moored at Alameda. She went to the Pacific with the Fast Carrier Task Force, the navy's primary offensive force of the war. In early 1944 she hit Japanese installations in New Guinea, Palau and Truk. She took part in the Mariana and Palau Islands campaign, including the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the one nicknamed the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot for the losses inflicted on the Japanese. She was there for the Philippines campaign later that year and the Volcano and Ryukyu Islands campaign through the first half of 1945. Typhoon Connie damaged her badly in June 1945 and sent her back to the United States for repairs. The museum counts nine Battle Stars for her Pacific service.

After the war she carried troops home under Operation Magic Carpet and went into reserve in 1946. The Korean War brought her back, though she spent most of it being modernised to handle jet aircraft. She was rebuilt again in the late 1950s as an anti-submarine carrier, played a minor part in Vietnam, and then got the job she is best remembered for: recovering the crews of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 as they returned from the Moon.

Hornet was decommissioned in 1970. She is now both a National Historic Landmark and a California Historical Landmark, and she opened to the public as the USS Hornet Museum in 1998.

The museum is straightforward about the other reason people come. Alongside ship tours, youth education, field trips and overnight stays, it lists paranormal tours as a category of its own. A ship this old, carrying this much history, has attracted those stories for decades, and the museum sells the tour rather than the certainty.