Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins & Buzz Aldrin talk about UFOs

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin Apollo 11 July 1969
Supposedly two ufo's hovered overhead as Armstrong prepared to step down the ladder of the LEM at the Sea of Tranquility. Aldrin is reported to have taken several pictures of them. Modern People magazine published what they claim to be some of these photographs in their June 1975 issue. They claim to have gotten the pictures from a Japanese source.
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During the broadcast of this historic event on the Canadian network coverage, they were discussing at some point a light which kept appearing while the astronauts were actually on the surface. Then it just seemed to be dropped.

One explanation for the halo's seen around or near some of the Appollo astronauts was that it was gases being vented from their backpacks.

Timothy Good writes that HAM radio operators receiving the VHF signals directly picked up the following message which was screened by NASA from the public.

Mission Control:	What's there ? Mission Control calling Apollo 11.
Apollo 11:	These babies are huge, sir ... enormous....Oh, God, you wouldn't believe it! I'm telling you there are other space craft out there... lined up on the far side of the crater edge... they're on the moon watching us.

Timothy Good uses "SAGA UFO SPECIAL #3" as a source for this quote.
From the book "Celestial Raise" by Richard Watson, ASSK, 1987, page 147-148;

"During the transmission of the Moon landing of Armstrong and Aldrin, who journeyed to the Moon in an American spaceship, two minutes of silence occurred in which the image and sound were interrupted. NASA insisted that this problem was the result of one of the television cameras which had overheated, thus interfering with the reception.

This unexpected problem surprised even the most qualified of viewers who were unable to explain how in such a costly project, one of the most essential elements could break down... Some time after the historic Moon landing, Christopher Craft, director of the base in Houston, made some surprising comments when he left NASA.

Author Sam Pepper (otherwise unidentified and he has since vanished) gave this version of "the top secret tape transcript" from "a leak close to the top", as follows:

Moon:	Those are giant things. No, no, no - this is not an optical illusion. No one is going to believe this !
Houston:	What ... what ... what ? What the h--- is happening ? What's wrong with you ?
Moon:	They're here under the surface.
Houston:	What's there ? (muffled noise) Emission interrupted; interference control calling 'Apollo 11'
Moon:	We saw some visitors. They were here for a while, observing the instruments
Houston:	Repeat your last information !
Moon:	I say that there were other spaceships. They're lined up in the other side of the crater !
Houston:	Repeat, repeat !
Moon:	Let us sound this orbita ... in 625 to 5 ... Automatic relay connected ... My hands are shaking so badly I can't do anything. Film it ? G--, if these d--ned cameras have picked up anything - what then ?
Houston:	Have you picked up anything ?
Moon:	I didn't have any film at hand. Three shots of the saucers or whatever they were that were ruining the film
Houston:	Control, control here. Are you on your way ? What is the uproar with the UFOs over ?
Moon:	They've landed here. There they are and they're watching us
Houston:	The mirrors, the mirrors - have you set them up ?
Moon:	Yes, they're in the right place. But whoever made those spaceships surely can come tomorrow and remove them. Over and out.

When the "Pepper Transcripts" first became public, UFO buffs wrote to their congressmen demanding that NASA officially confess to the coverup. NASA replied that "the incidents ... did not take place. Conversations between the Apollo 11 crew and Mission Control were released live during the entire Apollo 11 mission. There were between 1000 and 1500 representatives of the news media and T.V. present at the Houston News Center listening and observing, and not one has suggested that NASA withheld any news or conversations of this nature." (Letter from Assistant Administrator for Legislative Affairs to several congressmen, January 1970.)

In 1976, chief of the astronaut office Deke Slayton claimed that "I don't recall any of our astronauts ever reporting UFOs."

NASA claims that all photos, all voice transcripts, all debriefings are in the public domain and are available to the news media. ...

...Who has taken the trouble to check out this material ? Well, James Oberg has, for example. Alan Sandler did. Dr Hynek visited the Houston space center in July 1976 and was shown the material in question. NASA's original story, surprising, has been

...From internal evidence alone, it looks more and more like a crude hoax. This can be deduced from the vocabulary itself.

"Mission Control, this is Mission Control..." this was NEVER a phrase used by NASA, which instead always referred to "Houston".

Technical-sounding gibberish such a "field-distortion", "orbit scanned", "625 to the fifth", "auto-relays", etc. were never found in real transcripts.

"Repeat, repeat..." is never used on the radio; instead astronauts and Mission Control use the phrase "Say Again".

In addition, interviews with the handful of amateur radio listeners who are known to have tuned in to the S-Band (2270 megahertz) moon signals produced testimony that they heard the same conversations which were released by NASA. Since listening to the m

...The unavoidable conclusion is that the "Pepper Transcript" was either fabricated or that Pepper used very poor judgement in allowing himself to be victimized by somebody else's fake.

The following is an excerpt from the transcript of the Apollo 11 technical debriefing;

Aldrin:	The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was one day out or something pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it.
Collins:	How'd we see this thing ? Did we just look out the window and there it was.
Aldrin:	Yes, and we weren't sure but what it might be the S-IVB. We called the ground and were told the S-IVB was 6,000 miles away. We had a problem with the high gain about this time, didn't we ?
Collins:	There was something. We felt a bump or maybe I just imagined it.
Armstrong:	He was wondering whether the MESA had come off.
Collins:	I don't guess we felt anything.
Aldrin:	Of course, we were seeing all sorts of little objects going by at the various dumps and then we happened to see this one brighter object going by. We couldn't think of anything else it could be other than the S-IVB. We looked at it through the monocular and it seemed to have a bit of an L shape to it.
Armstrong:	Like an open suitcase.
Aldrin:	We were in PTC at the time so each of us had a chance to take a look at this and it certainly seemed to be within our vicinity and of a very sizeable dimension.
Armstrong:	We should say it was right at the limit of the resolution of the eye. It was very difficult to tell what shape it was. And there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size.
Aldrin:	So then I got down in the LEB and started looking for it in the optics. We were grossly misled because with the sextant off focus what we saw appeared to be a cylinder.
Armstrong:	Or really two rings.
Aldrin:	Yes.
Armstrong:	Two rings. Two connected rings.
Aldrin:	Yes.
Collins:	No, it looked like a hollow cylinder to me. It didn't look like two connected rings. You could see this thing tumbling and, when it came around end-on, you could look right down in it's guts. It was a hollow cylinder. But then you could change the focus on the sextant and it would be replaced by this open book shape. It was really weird.
Aldrin:	I guess there's not too much more to say about it other than it wasn't a cylinder.
Collins:	It was during the period when we thought it was a cylinder that we inquired about the S-IVB and we'd almost convinced ourselves that's what it had to be. But we don't have any more conclusions than that really. The fact that we didn't see it much past this one period --- we really don't have a conclusion as to what it might have been, how big it was, or how far away it was. It was something that wasn't part of the urine dump, we're pretty sure of that.

In his book "RETURN TO EARTH" Colonel Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. writes the following on pages 223-224;

In the middle of one evening, Houston time, I found myself idly staring out the window of the Columbia and saw something that looked a bit unusual. It appeared brighter than any star and not quite the pinpoints of light that stars are. I pointed this out to Mike and Neil, and the three of us were beset with curiosity. With the help of the monocular we guessed that whatever it was, it was only a hundred or so miles away. Looking at it through our sextant we found it occasionaly formed a cylinder, but when the sextant's focus was adjusted it had a sort of illuminated "L" look to it. It had a shape of some sort -- we all agreed on that -- but exactly what it was we couldnt pin down. We asked Houston some casual questions: "How far away is the Saturn third stage?" The response was in the vicinity of six thousand miles. That wasn't it.

It could possibly have been one of the panels of the Saturn third stage which fly off to expose the LM and cannot be traced from earth. We could see it for about forty-five seconds at a time as the ship rotated, and we watched it on and off for about an hour. We debated whether or not to tell the ground we had spotted something, and decided against it. Our reason was simple: The UFO people would descend on the message in hordes, setting off another rash of UFO spottings back on earth. We concluded it was most likely on of the panels. Its course appeared in no way to conflict with ours, and it presented no danger. We dropped the matter there.

In his book "Carrying The Fire" astronaut Michael Collins the command module pilot makes no mention of this incident.

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