Video clips don’t show Buzz Aldrin admitting he never went to the Moon

A Facebook reel, played more than 800,000 times, claims to show former NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin admitting he had never been to the Moon. 

The video consists of three separate clips, each appearing to show Mr Aldrin—the second person ever to set foot on the Moon—explaining how his expedition to the Moon had been staged or had never happened at all. 

Long-standing conspiracy theories about the 1969 Moon landing being fake are extremely widespread online, and we have checked them before. 

In fact, all three of the clips in the Facebook reel have been debunked before—including by Full Fact. 

Mr Aldrin has given many interviews since these clips were filmed in which he clearly recounts his journey to the Moon. A handful of ambiguous responses, taken out of context, cannot be used as conclusive proof he never went to the Moon. 

There is also significant photographic evidence of Mr Aldrin on the Moon, alongside thousands of other publicly-available photos and hours of video footage. 

Anecdote about ‘extraterrestrial prank’ never really happened 

The first clip used in the shows Mr Aldrin speaking directly to camera where he appears to describe “humanity’s first extraterrestrial prank”. He explains that in the pictures and video from the Moon landing, his name can be seen on the tag on his space suit, but that you can’t see his face behind the helmet. 

He then says: “This is a secret I’ve been keeping for almost half a century.” The implication, according to this Facebook video, is that he never really went to the Moon and that he was not in the space suit. 

But this clip has been taken out of context. The video of Mr Aldrin speaking was aired on the American late-night talk show Conan in 2013, as part of a skit where the host Conan O’Brien was responding to a video sent in by a viewer who pointed out that Mr O’Brien had confused Mr Aldrin and Neil Armstrong (the first man on the moon) in a previous episode of the show. 

As part of his response to the viewer, Mr O’Brien invites “a message from a man who should know”, before introducing Mr Aldrin. In a satirical reply, Mr Aldrin claims that he and Mr Armstrong switched spacesuits as a prank, and that he was in fact the first man on the Moon. It’s clear throughout the clip that this is intended to be taken as a joke, and nowhere throughout Mr Aldrin’s “confession” does he claim he never went to the Moon at all. 

Mr Aldrin didn’t say journey to the Moon ‘didn’t happen’

In the second clip, an audience member at a talk can be seen asking Mr Aldrin: “What was the scariest moment of the journey?” 

The former astronaut appears to reply: “Scariest… it didn’t happen. It could have been scary.” The implication of this short clip is that Mr Aldrin was admitting that the journey itself never took place, though there could have been scary moments if he’d actually been. 

Again, this video has been taken out of context. In his longer answer, filmed during a talk at the Oxford Union in March 2015, Mr Aldrin appears to initially tell the audience member that there just wasn’t a scary moment during the journey—not that the journey itself didn’t happen. 

Upon further prompting, Mr Aldrin goes on to recount a story about how, while on the Moon, he had discovered a broken circuit breaker. He then explains that he used a pen to push the circuit breaker back into the lunar module, which allowed the spacecraft to return to Earth. 

Interview with child about the Moon landing has been taken out of context 

In the third clip, a small child is shown asking Mr Aldrin: “Why has nobody been to the Moon in such a long time?” 

As part of a longer response, he appears to say: “I think I know… Because we didn’t go there.” Once again, his answer has been wrongly interpreted as an admission that the Apollo 11 mission never went to the Moon at all. 

We have written about this clip before. In his full response, Mr Aldrin says: “That’s not an eight-year-old’s question. That’s my question. I want to know. But I think I know. Because we didn’t go there. And that’s the way it happened.

“And if it didn’t happen it’s nice to know why it didn’t happen so in the future, if we want to keep doing something, we need to know why something stopped in the past if we want to keep it going.”

Mr Aldrin’s phrasing isn’t particularly clear, but that doesn’t mean he never went to the Moon. It’s plausible that he was responding specifically to the question about why astronauts hadn’t been to the moon “in such a long time”. The last crewed expedition took place in 1972, with a total of 12 astronauts (all from US expeditions) walking on the Moon’s surface. 

On 3 April 2023 NASA named the astronauts due to be part of a new mission to the Moon, though this is not set to involve a walk on the Moon’s surface. 

A later part of Mr Aldrin’s reply makes this slightly clearer. He says: “Money. It’s a good thing. If you want to buy new things, new rockets, instead of keep doing the same thing over and over, then it’s going to cost more money. And other things need more money too.”