“I just talked to Buzz Aldrin on the phone, and he notes that the quotations were taken out of context and did not convey the intended meaning,” Morrison stated.In 1639, Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop recorded the first UFO sighting in America. “The fibbing is being done by the producers of this video,” Senior NASA scientist David Morrison ( here) wrote back. Aldrin wrote on Reddit that “the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with” him for allegedly withholding the information, even though what he observed “was not an alien.”Ĭlaims that Aldrin saw a UFO during the first moon landing went viral almost three years ago, and was fact-checked by both USA Today ( here) and the Washington Post ( here).Īccording to both outlets, the claim about the lie detector stemmed from an April 2018 story in the British tabloid The Daily Star ( here) that centered on a vocal analysis done by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health, an organization based in Ohio ( here) that “carried out complex computer analyses of the astronauts’ voice patterns as they told of their close encounters.”īack in 2007, NASA itself responded to a person linking to a now-removed YouTube video allegedly showing “Buzz Aldrin saying he saw a UFO on Apollo 11” and asking the question “Who’s fibbing, NASA or the Great American hero, Buzz Aldrin?” ( here).

“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,” Aldrin wrote.Īldrin then stated that when the mission returned to earth, “we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed”: the “sun reflected off of one of these panels.” Not knowing that the public was not aware of this information, Aldrin explained, he described his observations many years later in a television interview.

In a 2014 “Ask Me Anything” discussion hosted by Aldrin on Reddit ( here), the former astronaut answered a user’s question “Do you believe in aliens and what are the sightings you saw aboard Apollo 11?” with a description of “a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us” ( here).

Armstrong and command module pilot Michael Collins ( here, here ). As for the light in the background, acting NASA chief historian Brian Odom ( here) told Reuters via phone that it is a lens flare from the sun ( here).Īldrin was not on the Apollo 16 mission, but rather the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, joined by Commander Neil A. Provided by NASA, the original photo, taken by Apollo 16’s commander John W. Duke, Jr., the lunar module pilot who crewed the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, collecting lunar samples near the rim of Plum Crater. This image does not show Aldrin, but rather Charles M. Some iterations here include an image of an astronaut standing near a crater on the moon with a ball of light in the distance that has been circled in red. Posts making this claim appeared on Facebook as far back as 2015 ( here). Recent examples of posts can be found here and here. Armstrong was the photographer for this image. Apollo 11, launched forty years ago today on July 16, 1969, carried astronauts Neil Armstrong, who was the Mission Commander and the first man to step on the moon, Aldrin, who was the Lunar Module Pilot, and Michael Collins, who was the Command Module pilot. astronaut Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin, one of three Apollo 11 astronauts, during the lunar landing mission on July 20, 1969.

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