The view from the lunar landing module on July 20, 1969, was — in mankind’s best guess — the first time a living being traveled to another celestial body to observe the luminous blue planet shrouded in the seemingly infinite darkness of space.
But before that moment, the crew of Apollo 11, hurtling toward the moon, radioed mission command in Houston to ask about a curious object they saw on their third day in space.
“Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?” Commander Neil Armstrong asked, referring to the third stage of the Saturn V rocket that was jettisoned earlier in the flight.
Mission control had an answer about three minutes later, according to a NASA radio transcript of the mission.
“Apollo 11, Houston,” the command replied. “The S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles from you now. Over.” That satisfied Armstrong, who said 12 seconds later: “Okay. Thank you.”
The seemingly innocuous exchange has become a touchstone for UFO-sighting enthusiasts and alien truthers, and now, seemingly fake news.
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, 88, the second astronaut to set foot on the moon, believed that the crew saw an extraterrestrial spacecraft at this moment, and a “lie detector” test proves it, at least according to the British tabloid the Daily Star.
That’s not quite right.
“He has never said he saw a UFO. This story has been a fabrication for the sake of headlines and is not true as far as Buzz Aldrin is concerned,” his spokeswoman, Christina Korp, told The Washington Post in a statement Tuesday. That echoes Aldrin’s 2015 comment on Reddit that the object “was not an alien.” The Daily Star did not return a request for comment.
The truth is out there, if only the Daily Star looked more closely.
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