Apollo 11's UFO encounter

Did Apollo 11's crew encounter a UFO en route to the moon?



Aldrin, however, says that the video was heavily and very selectively edited. What really happened was this: the crew saw the object outside their spacecraft and asked Houston the location of the Supplemental Rocket Booster, SRB, a small rocket used to help the spacecraft achieve escape velocity. It was then ejected from the assembly and fell away. Houston answered that the SRB was several thousand miles away, having tracked it by radar.

The Examiner recounts the rest of the story as recounted by NASA senior scientist David Morrison.

In an interview on the Science Channel..., Aldrin stated that he, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins saw unidentified objects that appeared to follow their Apollo spacecraft.

To get the story straight, I called Buzz Aldrin, who was happy to explain what happened. He said that his remarks were taken out of context to reverse his meaning. It is true that the Apollo 11 crew spotted an unidentified object moving with the spacecraft as they approached the Moon. After they verified that this mystery object was not Apollo 11’s large rocket upper stage, which was about 6,000 miles away by then, they concluded that they were seeing one of the small panels that had linked the spacecraft to the upper stage (any part of the spacecraft’s rocket upper stage will continue to move alongside the spacecraft, as both are floating in free-fall).

These panels were too small to track from Earth and were relatively close to the Apollo spacecraft. Aldrin told me that they chose not to discuss this on the open communications channel since they were concerned that their comments might be misinterpreted. His entire explanation about identifying the panels was cut from the broadcast interview, giving the impression that the Apollo 11 crew had seen a UFO. Aldrin told me that he was angry about the deceptive editing and asked the Science Channel to correct the intentional twisting of his remarks, but they refused. Later, Aldrin explained what happened on CNN’s Larry King Live (left, bottom) but was nearly cut off by the host before he could finish.

That being put to bed, I personally would like a learned explanation of what the white dot is in this clip of an Apollo command module orbiting the moon (not the Apollo 11 mission, I think it is of Apollo 10). The clip is only seven seconds; look immediately to the left of the CM at the very beginning. A white dot moves upward and off the screen.



Piece of space junk? Probably. But weird, whaever it is.