11.8 Was alien music heard during Apollo 10 and kept secret?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. It was radio interference between the two Apollo spacecraft modules, it wasn’t music at all, and it wasn’t kept secret.


THE DETAILS: It is alleged that while Apollo 10 was flying over the far side of the Moon and was out of radio contact with Earth its crew heard in their headsets “strange music-like radio transmissions” and that this event was kept secret for decades. In 2016, the Huffington Post reported this claim, noting that it was made in NASA’s Unexplained Files, a Science Channel TV show.

The crew of an Apollo mission to the moon were so startled when they encountered strange music-like radio transmissions coming through their headsets, they didn't know whether or not to report it to NASA, it's been revealed. [...] Almost four decades went by before lost recordings emerged that revealed something unsettling that the three Apollo astronauts had experienced while flying above the far side of the moon. [...] The transcripts of the Apollo 10 mission were classified and untouched in NASA's archives until 2008.

-- Lost Tapes Reveal Apollo Astronauts Heard Unexplained ‘Music’ On Far Side Of The Moon, Lee Speigel, Huffington Post, 20 February 2016, subsequently corrected

Actually, a little fact-checking shows that the event didn’t unsettle the astronauts in any way and wasn’t kept secret at all. Moreover, the recordings were never lost and the transcripts were already declassified in 1973.

John Young, who was on board Apollo 10, figured out the reason for the sounds as they were occurring: in the onboard audio recordings he can be heard noting that they are “Probably due to the VHF ranging, I guess”. VHF ranging was a technique which used the VHF voice radios of the spacecraft to determine the distance between the Lunar Module and the Command Module.

In other words, it was obvious even to the astronauts themselves that the sounds were coming from the Apollo spacecraft, not from some alien source. After some amusement at the unexpected noise, the astronauts resumed their work with no sign of concern.

Moreover, the Apollo astronauts certainly didn’t cover up the episode. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins reported it in detail already in 1974, and quite openly, in Chapter 13 of his book Carrying the Fire (Figure 11.8-1):

There is a strange noise in my headset now, an eerie woo-woo sound. Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared hell out of me. Stafford's Apollo 10 crew had first heard it, during their practice rendezvous around the moon. Alone on the back side, they were more than a little surprised to hear a noise that John Young in the command module and Stafford in the LM each denied making. They gingerly mentioned it in their debriefing sessions, but fortunately the radio technicians (rather than the UFO fans) had a ready explanation for it: it was interference between the LM's and command module's VHF radios. We had heard it yesterday when we turned our VHF radios on after separating the two vehicles, and Neil said that it "sounds like wind whipping around the trees." It stopped as soon as the LM got on the ground, and started up again just a short time ago. A strange noise in a strange place.

Figure 11.8-1. Michael Collins explains the allegedly mysterious sound in his book Carrying the Fire.

NASA responded to the 2016 Huffington Post article by noting that the voice recordings and transcripts of Apollo 10 had been publicly available since 1973 to anyone who asked the US National Archives for them.*

* Apollo 10 Audio — Publicly Available Since 1970s, Tumblr.com, 22 February 2016; NASA History Office, Twitter.com, 22 February 2016.

Figure 11.8-2. NASA’s reply to the Huffington Post article.

Additionally, listening to the original recordings and the transcripts of the astronauts’ onboard conversations* makes it very clear that there was no actual music involved.

* Apollo 10 Onboard Voice Transcription, classsified confidential in 1969 and released to the public in 1973, pages 241-242; Apollo Flight Journal, Day 5 part 20.

Onboard recording a10o-1021010, dated 23 May 1969, includes the allegedly mysterious sound, which is simply a continuous whistle. The sound is discussed briefly by the crewmembers with no sign of concern while they continue their normal work, at 2:51 and then at 7:43, as follows:

102:13:02 Cernan: That music even sounds outer-spacey, doesn't it? You hear that? That whistling sound?

102:13:06 Stafford: Yes.

102:13:07 Cernan: Whooooooooooo.

102:13:12 Young: Did you hear that whistling sound, too?

102:13:14 Cernan: Yeah. Sounds like - you know, outer-space-type music.

102:13:18 Young: I wonder what it is.

[...]

102:17:58 Cernan: Boy, that sure is weird music.

102:18:01 Young: We're going to have to find out about that. Nobody will believe us.

102:18:07 Cernan: No. It's a whistling, you know, like an outer space-type thing.

102:18:10 Young: Probably due to the VHF ranging, I'd guess.

In other words, this alleged UFO mystery is based purely on poor fact-checking by a sensationalist TV show and by the Huffington Post. If the writers of the show or the Post journalist had bothered to do their research, they would have realized that this conspiracy theory had already been posted and debunked several years earlier.*

* Apollo 10 astronauts heard 'music' behind the Moon, Godlikeproductions.com (2008); Apollo 10 crew heard "music"....., Apollohoax.net (2009).

The Post later published a correction; NASA’s Unexplained Files did not.

NEXT: Chapter 12. How to debate a Moon hoax believer

11.7 Were giant UFOs photographed in front of the Moon during Apollo 9?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. They’re the crosshairs of the sextant through which the photo was taken.


IN DETAIL: Many pro-conspiracy theory sites have shared a photograph, claimed to be from the Apollo 9 mission, which shows three oblique linear objects in front of the Moon. These objects are described as a “Fleet of three UFOs” (Figure 11.7-1).

Figure 11.7-1. The alleged UFO photograph as posted by Truedemocracyparty.net (2013).

This actually is a photograph taken by the astronauts during Apollo 9, which did not fly to the Moon but performed a series of critical tests in Earth orbit during a ten-day flight which began on 3 March 1969. The photograph is AS09-23-3500, which can be viewed at Jsc.nasa.gov, in the Project Apollo Archive or at Eol.jsc.nasa.gov. The direct scan of the original film is available at Arizona State University’s March to the Moon website.

However, the version presented by UFO enthusiasts has been heavily processed to enhance the linear objects in question. Figure 11.7-2 shows the full original, unprocessed photo.

Figure 11.7-2. Photo AS09-23-3500 without processing.

Figure 11.7-3 is a digitally processed version based on the TIFF scan available at March to the Moon.

Figure 11.7-3. Digital processing enhances the linear features in photo AS09-23-3500.

These linear objects definitely occur in the original image and have not been added later by someone. However, understanding their real nature requires knowing the context in which the photograph was taken and making a few deductions.

According to NASA’s Apollo 9 photograph catalog, the picture was taken at 21.50 GMT on March 10, 1969, and is described tersely on page A-94 as  “Lunar view”.

The GAPE catalog reports that the photo was taken with an 80-mm lens: the same one used for the other photographs on the same film spool, including the ones taken directly before and after, which show views of the Earth (Figure 11.7-4).

Figure 11.7-4. Photos taken before and after AS09-23-3500, which is the first on the left in the third row.

However, a photograph taken with an 80-mm lens from Earth orbit would not have yielded such a large image of the Moon, especially with medium-format Hasselblad cameras such as those used on Apollo 9 (which used 70-mm film). This means that AS09-23-3500 was taken with a high-magnification lens. But there were no suitable telephoto lenses on board Apollo 9.

It turns out that Apollo 9 actually had a sort of high-magnification lens: the one fitted to the sextant used to determine the position and attitude of the spacecraft with respect to the stars, as explained in a NASA video (Figures 11.7-5 and 11.7-6). This sextant had a 28x lens.

Figure 11.7-5. The Apollo sextant in a NASA informational video.

Figure 11.7-6. An Apollo sextant on display at the National Air and Space Museum. Credit: Doug Adler, Astronomy.com.

This sextant had a sighting reticle, shown in Figure 11.7-7, formed by lines arranged in a cross-like configuration. One of the arms of this cross was formed by two parallel lines. This shape matches quite closely the arrangement of the linear objects in AS09-23-3500. If you look at the photograph carefully, moreover, you’ll notice that there are two highly blurred lines at right angles to the three darker ones.

Figure 11.7-7. The reticle of the Apollo sextant, as shown schematically in a NASA video.

In other words, the most plausible explanation for the mysterious linear objects is that the photograph was taken through the sextant’s lens by placing the camera’s lens against the eyepiece of the instrument. This inevitably included the sextant’s reticle in the frame. The camera moved slightly during the shot, more or less in the same direction as the three darker lines, and therefore blurred the perpendicular ones.

Figure 11.7-8. The reticle of the Apollo sextant compared with a detail of AS09-23-3500.

The option of taking photographs through the eyepiece of the sextant had been  explicitly planned and was actually used at least once during Apollo 14 for the similar COAS system installed in the Command Module.

The alleged “fleet of UFOs”, therefore, is not a cluster of giant extraterrestrial spacecraft but almost certainly set of tiny reticle lines of the sextant through which this unscheduled photo of the Moon was taken.*

* A more detailed version of this analysis is available in the article Nufologia: il mistero delle linee davanti alla Luna di Apollo 9 (in Italian) by the same author (2019).

NEXT: 11.8 Was alien music heard during Apollo 10 and kept secret?

11.6 Did a lie detector test confirm the astronauts’ UFO sightings?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. Two of the astronauts were dead at the time of the alleged test.


THE DETAILS: In April 2018, several news outlets reported that four astronauts (Buzz Aldrin, Al Worden, Ed Mitchell and Gordon Cooper) had passed “lie detector” tests regarding their claims of encounters with aliens.

However, the original source of this news report is a British tabloid, the Daily Star, which on 8 April published an article entitled ‘I saw a UFO’ Buzz Aldrin PASSES lie detector test revealing truth about aliens by Mike Parker (Figure 11.6-1). The article mentions an “Institute of BioAcoustic Biology” in Albany, Ohio, which reportedly performed “complex computer analyses of the astronauts’ voice patterns as they told of their close encounters”. According to the Daily Star, “Aldrin, Al Worden, Edgar Mitchell and Gordon Cooper all took part in the study”.

Figure 11.6-1. The Daily Star presents its “exclusive” scoop.

But there’s a problem with this story: two of the astronauts who allegedly “took part in the study” were dead at the time of the report. Ed Mitchell died in 2016 and Gordon Cooper died in 2004.

Careful reading of the article reveals that the “analyses” were not performed on the astronauts, as suggested initially, but merely used old recordings of their voices. This is in no way comparable to a lie detector test, which requires the subject to be present and measures several physiological parameters instead of merely analyzing the voice.

Incidentally, Cooper was involved in the Apollo program only as a backup crew member; he went to space twice with Mercury and Gemini flights, but never flew to the Moon.

Moreover, the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology has no scientific credibility: it is owned by a private individual who claims, without any evidence, that “the frequencies contained in the voice are holographic representations of your state of health and wellness”.

In any case, the alleged “analyses”, would be flawed due to two basic errors of method. The first one is that the Aldrin statement that was reportedly analyzed is his report that he saw an object during his journey to the Moon, but Aldrin has stated that the object was an Apollo spacecraft panel and not a UFO (as described in Section 11.2). The second one is that even assuming that these “analyses” had any scientific merit, they would merely indicate that the astronauts believed what they said and were not lying: they would not confirm that their words were factually correct.

NEXT: 11.7 Were giant UFOs photographed in front of the Moon during Apollo 9?

11.5 What about astronaut Ed Mitchell’s UFO claims?

IN A NUTSHELL: He made it very clear that he had no direct evidence of contact with extraterrestrials, but trusted people who said they had such evidence. He never claimed that he had seen UFOs during his lunar mission and actively denied any such claim.

Figure 11.5-1. Ed Mitchell on the Moon.

THE DETAILS: Apollo 14 Lunar Module pilot and moonwalker Edgar Mitchell (1930-2016) is often presented as an authoritative UFO witness. He openly supported claims that some of the unidentified flying objects sighted since 1940 were extraterrestrial vehicles, but he also made it very clear on several occasions that he did not support claims that he saw direct evidence of extraterrestrial presence while he was in space or on the Moon or that NASA was involved in some kind of Moon landing coverup:

The notion that there are structures on Mars or the Moon is bonkers. I can attest to the latter -- I’ve been there. We saw no structures at the landing site and none was reflected in my helmet, as has been alleged.

– UFOs: It’s a coverup, by Tom Rhodes, Ottawa Citizen, October 11, 1998.

I, nor any crew I was on (I was on three Apollo crews), received any briefing before or after flights on UFO events, saw anything in space suggesting UFOs or structures on the moon, etc. We did it just like we said in official reports. My only claim to knowledge of these events is from the individuals, mostly of yesteryear, who were in government, intelligence, or military; were there, saw what they saw, and now believe it should be made public. But I claim no first hand knowledge, nor have any.

– Ed Mitchell Most Unhappy With Greer Using His Name As Disclosure Witness, Rense.com, 2001.

Figure 11.5-2. Ed Mitchell in 1971 (NASA/Collectspace).

On the other hand, he went on record saying that he believed that extraterrestrial spacefarers have visited Earth and that there is a government coverup of the UFO phenomenon (but not of the Apollo Moon landings):

I happen to be privileged to [...] be in on the fact that we have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been covered up by our governments for quite a long time [...] I have been deeply involved in certain committees and certain research programs with very credible scientists and intelligence people that do know the real inside story [...] The Roswell crash was real and a number of other contacts have been real and ongoing.

– Astronaut Says Aliens Are Real, Kerrang Radio (2008).

The evidence to back up these claims is, as Mitchell himself readily acknowledged, not first-hand and is based on statements by other people that Mitchell believed to be reliable but cannot corroborate. Currently there is no publicly available hard evidence and therefore this fascinating issue remains a matter of opinion.

NEXT: 11.6 Did a lie detector test confirm the astronauts’ UFO sightings?

11.4 Did the astronauts find alien structures on the Moon?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. The footage that supports this claim is taken from a 1977 British parody documentary, Alternative 3.


THE DETAILS: One of the many UFO-centered tales regarding the Apollo missions alleges that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the two moonwalkers of Apollo 11, found alien artifacts on the Moon. Overwhelmed by their discovery, they started reporting it excitedly to Mission Control over the public radio link, while Mission Control tried to shut them up and told them to switch to a secure channel.

According to the proponents of this story, the radio transmissions from the Moon had a built-in delay designed to allow censorship and so the discovery was never made public. Allegedly, however, some radio enthusiasts managed to intercept the direct radio signal from the Moon and recorded it, and so the amazing extraterrestrial discovery was leaked.

Here’s the transcript of the astronauts’ excited exchange, which is also available as an audio file:

Astronaut 1: Hey, Houston, do you hear me? [garbled] we have here now.

Houston: We have it.

Astronaut 2: What is it? We have some explanation for that?

Houston: We have none, don’t worry, continue your program!

Astronaut 1: Oh boy it’s a, it’s, it, it is really something [garbled] fantastic here, you, you could never imagine this!

Houston: Roger, we know about that, could you go the other way, go back the other way!

Astronaut 1: Well it’s kind of [garbled] ha, pretty spectacular... God... what is that there?

Astronaut 1: It’s [garbled], what the hell is that?

Houston: Go Tango, Tango!

Astronaut 1: Ha! There’s kind of light there now!

Houston: Roger, we got it, we [garbled], lose communication, Bravo Tango, Bravo Tango, select Jezebel, Jezebel!

Astronaut 1: ...ya, ha! ... but this is unbelievable!

Figure 11.4-1. A slightly different version of the alleged exchange, published in American Psychic and Medium Magazine, January 2018, page 169.

However, the original source of the alleged recording is actually a 1977 British parody documentary, Alternative 3.

Figure 11.4-2. Alternative 3 (Anglia, 1977). The alleged astronaut recording begins at 24:04.

Even without knowing its source, there are rather obvious clues that the exchange is fake. First of all, the voices in the recording are completely different from Armstrong and Aldrin’s, as any comparison with their original voices will easily show.

Figure 11.4-3. Samples of Neil Armstrong’s voice during the Apollo 11 Moonwalk.

Figure 11.4-4. Samples of Buzz Aldrin’s voice during the Apollo 11 Moonwalk.

Moreover, the dialogue doesn’t follow standard protocol at all. In real Apollo mission recordings, every new communication begins with the name or callsign of the recipient followed by the name or callsign of the speaker. Astronauts  begin to talk to Mission Control by saying “Houston...” and then identifying themselves or their spacecraft, as in “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed”. Mission Control always begins by saying the name of the astronaut or spacecraft being called and then identifies itself by saying “Houston”. This is a very formal procedure, ingrained by habit in the astronauts’ behavior. No such protocol is followed in the allegedly secret audio clip.

The beeps (formally known as Quindar tones) that separate the astronauts’ voices from the orders from Mission Control are different from the real ones, and so are the background noise and the type of distortion.

Also, there’s no sign of the 2.6-second delay between the voice from Mission Control and the replies of the astronauts that inevitably occurs due to the round trip to Earth-Moon distance, covered by the radio signal at the speed of light.

Another version of this exchange was published by an American-Canadian tabloid, the National Bulletin, on September 29, 1969, under the title Phony Transmission Failure Hides Apollo 11 Discovery... MOON IS A UFO BASE! It’s not clear whether this was an attempt at parody like Alternative 3, but it certainly has the same implausible setting and is replete with meaningless technobabble such as “orbit scanned” or “In 625 to the fifth, auto-relays set”, which might be impressive to the layperson but are dead giveaways for experts in the field.

The issue of the badly faked beeps is a good opportunity to dispel two frequently repeated myths about them: they could not be heard by the astronauts and they were not used to indicate that it was the other party’s turn to talk.

These beeps instead controlled the transmission of the radio signals from Earth via transmitters located in various countries, which were used as the Earth’s rotation brought them within line-of-sight reach of the spacecraft. They were linked to Mission Control in Houston, Texas, via analog telephone lines, which were affected by interference and noise, so it was necessary to mute the transmitter locally, at the transmission station, instead of closing the microphone in Houston.

Essentially, therefore, the Quindar tones were remote control signals sent over the telephone lines. This is similar to the “push to talk” function in walkie-talkies or ham radio equipment.

These signals are still used for some space communications. They take their name from Quindar Electronics, Inc.,which provided the equipment that generated these tones and responded to their commands. The tones are 250 milliseconds long at 2,525 Hz for the activation tone (transmission start) and 2,475 Hz for the deactivation tone (transmission stop).

A filter eliminated the tones from the signal sent to the Apollo spacecraft and therefore the astronauts usually didn’t hear them. However, during some flights, such as Apollo 8, the filtering didn’t always work fully and the piercing beeps reached the astronaut’s ears.

NEXT: 11.5 What about astronaut Ed Mitchell’s UFO claims?

11.3 Did Apollo 20 secretly recover an alien spaceship?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. The story was made up by French artist Thierry Speth.


THE DETAILS: A popular UFO-related claim* is that there was a secret military mission to the Moon, named Apollo 20, that was performed by a joint Russian-American crew to recover an alien spacecraft found on the Moon.

* Did the USA/USSR Fly a Secret Joint Mission to the Moon in 1976 To Investigate a Crashed Extraterrestrial Mothership? Michael E. Salla, Bibliotecapleyades.net, 2007.

A man named William Rutledge claims that he was one of the members of this crew together with US astronaut Leona Snyder and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. According to his tale, a Saturn V rocket departed in secret in 1976 from the Vandenberg military base in California and reached the far side of the Moon, where the photographic reconnaissance performed by Apollo 15 had discovered a giant extraterrestrial spaceship.

Evidence of this alien vehicle was said to be visible even in public photo atlases of the Moon, for example in the detail of NASA photo AS15-P-9625 shown in Figure 11.3-1. The alleged spaceship is the elongated sunlit shape at the center of the picture, surrounded by deep shadow.

Figure 11.3-1. The alleged alien spaceship.

This claim is highly implausible: if the presence of an extraterrestrial vehicle on the Moon was so top secret that it prompted a covert joint Russian-American mission, then why was its picture released to the public?* Since images of the far side of the Moon were available at the time only if NASA or the Soviet Union chose to publish them, it would have been trivially easy to censor them and keep the secret.

* The image is available online for example in the Apollo Image Atlas, Lpi.usra.edu.

Rutledge’s tale, however, continues with many technical details that appear quite plausible to the layperson and includes rather shocking videos, which even show a humanoid alien corpse (Figure 11.3-2) and close-ups of the extraterrestrial vehicle.

Figure 11.3-2. The alleged alien corpse shown by Italian TV program Mistero.

Many UFO researchers, however, have investigated Rutledge’s story and shown that it is just a well-orchestrated hoax created by French artist Thierry Speth.*

* Falso un video dell'Apollo 20, Cun-veneto.it, 2007 (in Italian, archived at Archive.org); An Alien with Boobies (and floating torsos), Forgetomori, 2008; Above Top Secret, 2010.

For example, the alleged video footage of the alien spaceship includes a very terrestrial-looking spring, and in one of the videos of the interior of the Lunar Module the background can be seen through an astronaut, revealing the fact that the astronaut was superimposed using visual effects (Figure 11.3-3).

Figure 11.3-3. In the bottom right corner, the lower part of body of the astronaut is missing due poorly executed video effects.

Moreover, the alleged alien corpse turns out to be one of Speth’s sculptures and the images of the alleged “city” shown in one of the Apollo 20 videos are copied from pages and 25 of Bruce Pennington’s book Eschatus: Future Prophecies from Nostradamus’ Ancient Writings.

In addition to these clear indications of fakery, it is technically absurd to think that a giant Saturn V rocket could depart from California without anyone noticing its thunderous liftoff and bright climb through the sky and without being spotted by the world’s professional and amateur astronomers as it flew to the Moon, as occurred for the real Apollo missions.

A launch from Vandenberg, on the west coast of the United States, instead of Cape Canaveral on the east coast, would have entailed huge trajectory problems.

If launched eastward, as in real flights, the massive S-IC first stage would have fallen back onto US mainland, possibly causing injury and damage and being easily spotted, instead of plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean as usual.

If launched westward, over the Pacific, the rocket would be subjected to a huge speed penalty. Orbital rockets usually lift off along a west-to-east trajectory in order to take advantage of the substantial speed boost provided by the Earth’s rotation (1470 kilometers per hour, or about 910 miles per hour, at the latitude of the Kennedy Space Center). An east-to-west Vandenberg launch would not only entail the loss of the natural boost of the Earth’s rotation, but would cause an equivalent speed penalty, as the rocket would have to accelerate against the Earth’s motion.

A polar orbit (to the north or to the south) would still have to do without the rotational boost and this would again reduce considerably the Saturn V’s payload capacity.

As regards the alleged alien spaceship, the high-resolution original photographs (Figure 11.3-4) show that it’s just an elongated depression of the lunar surface. The appearance of a smooth, artificial-looking shape is an artifact of the low-quality copies often used by UFO enthusiasts and hoax perpetrators. The illusion vanishes as soon as a high-quality photo is examined.

Figure 11.3-4. Detail of NASA photo AS15-P-9625. Scan from the Arizona State University archive.

NEXT: 11.4 Did the astronauts find alien structures on the Moon?

11.2 Did Buzz Aldrin see a UFO?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. He saw a discarded part of the Apollo spacecraft. He said so immediately upon returning to Earth, but conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous documentary makers ignore or even edit out his explanation.


THE DETAILS: This remarkable claim stems from a statement made by Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11) in the documentary First on the Moon: The Untold Story (2005). Here’s what he says verbatim:

There was something out there that was close enough to be observed... and what could it be?... Mike [Collins] decided he thought he could see it in the telescope, and he was able to do that, and when it was in one position it had a series of ellipses. But when you made it real sharp it was sort of L-shaped.

That didn’t tell us very much... Obviously the three of us were not gonna blurt out “Hey, Houston, we’ve got something moving alongside of us, we don’t know what it is, you know, can you tell us what it is?” We weren’t about to do that! ’Cause we know that those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people, and who knows what somebody would have demanded that we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is. So we didn’t do that, but we did decide we’d just cautiously ask Houston where... how far away was the S-IVB...

And a few moments later, they came back and said something like it was six thousand miles away because of the maneuver, so we really didn’t think we were looking at something that far away, so we decided that after a while watching it, it was time to go to sleep, and not to talk about it anymore until we came back, in debriefing.

Aldrin’s expression clearly reveals his amusement (Figure 11.2-1) as he tells this anecdote; he doesn’t speak in the solemn tone that one might expect for such a world-shaking revelation as an alien encounter. Nevertheless, the documentary dwells on his words and also shows a blurry image of an object (not the one seen by Apollo 11, but another one observed during another Moon trip) while the narrator states that the object seen by Aldrin was never identified certainly.

Figure 11.2-1. Buzz Aldrin recounts his “UFO” encounter in First on the Moon: The Untold Story (2005).

At first sight, it would seem that an Apollo astronaut is claiming that he saw an extraterrestrial spacecraft and decided, together with his crewmates, to keep quiet about it. That’s the way many UFO sites present this story. But a little fact-checking reveals that the conspiracy of silence was perpetrated not by the astronauts, but by the authors of the documentary, perhaps seeking a dramatic scoop.

The most likely and thoroughly non-extraterrestrial explanation of the sighting had in fact been given directly by Aldrin during the interview he recorded for the documentary, but it was cut, as Aldrin told David Morrison of the NASA Astrobiology Institute*, and continues to this day to be ignored by the media.

* Ask an Astrobiologist, 26 July 2006, Nasa.gov.

The astronaut explained to the documentary makers that the object that was chasing them was quite likely to be one of the four fairing panels that enclosed the Lunar Module (LM), as shown in Figure 11.2-2.

Figure 11.2-2. Extraction of the Lunar Module. Detail of NASA drawing S-66-5107.

During liftoff from Earth and for the initial part of the trip to the Moon, the LM sat on top of the S-IVB stage (the cylinder at the bottom left in Figure 11.2-2) and below the Command and Service Module (CSM), protected by these four panels.

As the spacecraft continued its voyage toward the Moon, the CSM separated from the S-IVB stage and turned around to face the stage. The fairing panels opened out and detached from the S-IVB and then the CSM docked with the LM and pulled it away from the stage.

The docked CSM and the LM (the actual Apollo spacecraft) then moved away from the S-IVB, which was commanded from Earth to fire its engines to set it on a trajectory that avoided any risk of collision with the spacecraft.

The fairing panels, however, were already uncoupled from the S-IVB stage and therefore were not affected by the trajectory change and diligently obeyed Newton’s laws of motion, continuing by inertia along the same path as the Apollo spacecraft, like seagulls trailing a ship, until the spacecraft fired its main engine to change course.

Aldrin subsequently confirmed the true nature of the sighting on several occasions, for example on the Howard Stern Show of August 15, 2007, in a TV interview for the Science Channel in which he asked for the opportunity to explain to the viewers that he had not seen an alien spacecraft (the TV channel refused his request), and in a Reddit Ask Me Anything in 2015, when he wrote the following:

On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world - it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be "unidentified."

We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network. And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that i had not given them the information. It was not an alien.

The tale of the astronaut who says he saw a UFO is too good to be put down and so it continues to circulate unchecked, despite the fact that the matter had already been clarified and discussed thirty-five years earlier during the debriefing mentioned by Aldrin, as recorded on pages 6-33 to 6-36 of the Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing of July 31, 1969.

It’s quite ironic that the astronauts, during their flight, chose not to discuss the issue over the radio because they were concerned that their remarks might be misinterpreted but this choice was then construed as evidence that they were hiding something. Just as they expected, their words were grossly misunderstood.

NEXT: 11.3 Did Apollo 20 secretly recover an alien spaceship?

11.1 Are there UFOs in Apollo photographs?

IN A NUTSHELL: No. The objects claimed to be UFOs are actually lens flares or spacecraft debris.


THE DETAILS: Some UFO enthusiasts claim that the photographs taken on the Moon by the astronauts show the presence of alien vehicles. For example, Ufocasebook.com includes, in the section entitled The Best UFO Pictures Ever Taken, three photographs of the Apollo 16 mission (Figure 11.1-1).

Figure 11.1-1. Alleged UFOs in Moon photographs according to Ufocasebook.com.

It’s worth noting that the people who present these photographs as evidence of a UFO-related conspiracy claim that they were really taken on the Moon and therefore implicitly contradict the other conspiracy theorists who deny the Moon landings.

The “UFOs” that can be seen in these photographs and in many other images from the Apollo missions are not flying saucers that NASA nonchalantly left in the pictures, hoping that nobody would notice them: they’re simply reflections of the Sun inside the camera lens. These reflections are known to photographers as lens flares and occur on Earth, too, although usually they are less noticeable because on Earth the sky is very bright when the Sun is up and therefore the flares fall onto a bright background. On the Moon, the sky is black even when the Sun is above the horizon, so any lens flare stands out starkly against the blackness.

The photos shown in Figure 11.1-1 are, top to bottom, AS16-114-18423, AS16-114-18422 and AS16-109-17804, all from the Apollo 16 flight. They’re incomplete versions of those images, cropped so as to not show an important detail.

It turns out that in the uncropped high-resolution original scans of these photographs, the “UFOs” are actually two in each image and are always aligned in the direction of the Sun, the position of which can be determined by tracing the directions in which the shadows converge. These are typical indications of a lens flare.

In the third photo, in particular, the lens flare would stand out unmistakably if someone hadn’t trimmed off the upper part of the picture, because the second “UFO” is actually in front of the sunshade on the astronaut’s helmet (Figure 11.1-2).

Figure 11.1-2. Detail of photo AS16-109-17804, including the part that is cropped in the version shown by Ufocasebook.com. Note the raised sunshade on the helmet and another “UFO” on the sunshade.

It’s rather hard to believe that the pictures were cropped so conveniently just by chance or that the vehicles used by aliens for their Moon trips are the size of horseflies.

The visual records of the Apollo flights include dozens of photographs affected by lens flares. In the color photos, such as the ones shown in Figure 11.1-3, the rainbow effect produced by the different refraction of the various colors inside the lens is an obvious giveaway that the alleged alien spacecraft is merely a byproduct of the camera lens and is not a real object.

Figure 11.1-3. Lens flares in photos AS11-40-5872 and 5873 of Apollo 11.

However, not all the “UFOs” that can be spotted in the Apollo photographs are camera-generated. Some are real objects that are difficult to interpret correctly without knowing the technical context: for example, they are often parts of the spacecraft that were jettisoned after use or flakes of the vehicle’s covering that peeled off and traveled alongside it by inertia.

Fragment break-off was quite frequent. Figure 11.1-4 shows the S-IVB stage of Apollo 8 after its separation from the Command and Service Module: note the swarm of bright debris that surrounds the jettisoned stage.

Figure 11.1-4. The third stage of Apollo 8. NASA photo AS08-16-2583.

Figure 11.1-5 instead shows a piece of Mylar covering that detached from the Apollo 10 Command Module and floated outside the spacecraft. Astronaut John Young estimated it to be about 50 centimeters (a foot and half) long.

Figure 11.1-5. NASA photo AS10-28-3988 (Apollo 10).

Without knowledge of this context and with no distance references to estimate the size of the object, it’s easy to imagine the flake to be a mysterious alien vehicle. It is not surprising that this is one of the most frequently mentioned Apollo images among UFO enthusiasts. However, a more thorough perusal of the Apollo archives reveals at least two more photographs (AS10-28-3989 and 3990) of the same fragment as it slowly turns. If these photos are combined to create a stereo pair, they clearly show that the object is small and close to the viewer.

NEXT: 11.2 Did Buzz Aldrin see a UFO?

Chapter 11. UFOs and Moon landings

One of the many contradictions of Moon hoax theories is that some claim that the Apollo landings never happened, while others argue that the Apollo flights not only did happen but even encountered extraterrestrial spacecraft and there were even secret missions to the Moon.

It’s important to be acquainted with these theories of secret flights and alien encounters, because they are part of the classic repertoire of hardcore conspiracy theorists and reveal very clearly the typical errors of the conspiracist mindset.

Most importantly, however, they’re very amusing to bring up in a Moon hoax discussion and then watch the ensuing colorful argument among the various factions of conspiracy theorists.

NEXT: 11.1 Are there UFOs in Apollo photographs?