Debunked: Clip of Buzz Aldrin does not show him saying the moon landings were faked

AN IRISH FACEBOOK page dedicated to promoting the Flat Earth conspiracy theory has posted a video of astronaut Buzz Aldrin alongside a caption which suggests it shows him admitting that the moon landings never happened.

“It didn’t happen,” Aldrin says in the brief clip, responding to a question about the moon landing mission.

The video, which was posted on 10 August with the caption “Buzz Aldrin Admit the truth saying it didn’t happen,” [sic] was posted to Flat Earth Ireland, where it has been viewed more than 449,000 times.

Flat Earth conspiracy theorists claim that the Earth is not a round object – as depicted by globes – but rather that it is a flat shape along one plane that does not join up at the edges.

This conception of the Earth has been extensively disproven, including by photos of the Earth taken from space. However, adherents of the theory claim that such evidence is either misinterpreted or faked as part of a massive conspiracy theory.

The conspiracy extends to claims that NASA and other space programmes have fraudulently sought to trick people about the shape of the Earth.

In a Facebook group such as the one dedicated to the conspiracy theory, the clip of Aldrin, taken out of context, can be interpreted as suggesting that Apollo missions to the moon (including the one Aldrin travelled on) never happened.

However, the clip posted to the Flat Earth group was taken from a longer talk in which Aldrin spoke extensively about his experience as being the second man to walk on the moon.

“Getting down that ladder is not that hard to do,” he told the Oxford Union, a debating society at Oxford University, UK.

“Before it was my turn I got to look out the window and watch Neil kicking up some dust and picking up a grab sample that he put it in the pocket in the side of his suit. So I can see that, you know, moving around was going to be pretty easy.

“Besides, I’d done space walks — floating around with nothing. At least you had the surface of the Moon [and] a little bit of gravity. That really helped.

Aldrin had previously been very vocal about moon landing conspiracy theories, including being videotaped punching a man in the face who confronted him with such claims.

‘Never happened’

So what is the context of the clip of Aldrin saying “it didn’t happen” that was posted on Facebook by Flat Earth conspiracy theorists?

The full exchange begins with a question from an audience member: “What was the scariest moment of the journey?”

“Scariest?” Aldrin responds. “It didn’t happen. It could have been scary.”

This is where the clip on the Flat Earth group ends, with text appearing onscreen: “I think when people get to a certain age they no longer care and tell the truth or, let it slip, but Buzz has said this to many times now.” [sic]

However, in the full video, Aldrin continues to recall an incident about being in the space lander on the moon when he found a circuit breaker for the engine arm, a crucial bit of machinery to get the astronauts home, that had been accidentally pulled out.

It seems that he was initially saying that a scary moment hadn’t happened on the trip, until he remembered finding the misplaced circuit breaker.

The moon landings took place during the so-called “space race” during the Cold War, in which the United States and the Soviet Union vied to score a propaganda victory through feats of spaceflight, most notably manned flights to Earth’s Moon.

The Soviet Union, which had been closely tracking the American space missions, did not dispute the success of NASA’s moon landing (though it did not place the same symbolic weight on it that the Americans did).

The US moon landings have since been verified by space programmes of other countries, including the Soviet Union, China, India, and Japan.

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