Fact check: Buzz Aldrin did not claim to have seen aliens while heading to the Moon

Posts circulating on Facebook in late 2020 and early 2021 claim that Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr., the second person to walk on the moon, claimed that he “saw aliens while he was there.” According to the posts, Aldrin “told nasa (sic) & later took a lie detector test, which he passed.” This claim is partly false, as the astronaut did describe seeing an unidentified object moving outside of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, but the sighting was explained soon after the mission returned.

Recent examples of posts can be found here; and  here . Posts making this claim appeared on Facebook as far back as 2015 (here;

Some iterations  here include an image of an astronaut standing near a crater on the moon with a ball of light in the distance that has been circled in red.

This image does not show Aldrin, but rather Charles M. Duke, Jr., the lunar module pilot who crewed the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, collecting lunar samples near the rim of Plum Crater. Provided by NASA, the original photo, taken by Apollo 16’s commander John W. Young, can be found here . As for the light in the background , acting NASA chief historian Brian Odom (here) told Reuters via phone that it is a lens flare from the sun (here).

Aldrin was not on the Apollo 16 mission, but rather the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, joined by Commander Neil A. Armstrong and command module pilot Michael Collins ( here ,  here ).

In a 2014 “Ask Me Anything” discussion hosted by Aldrin on Reddit (here), the former astronaut answered a user’s question “Do you believe in aliens and what are the sightings you saw aboard Apollo 11?” with a description of “a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us” (here).

“There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world – it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose-to-nose with the two spacecraft,” Aldrin wrote.

Aldrin then stated that when the mission returned to earth, “we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed”: the “sun reflected off of one of these panels.” Not knowing that the public was not aware of this information, Aldrin explained, he described his observations many years later in a television interview. Aldrin wrote on Reddit that “the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with” him for allegedly withholding the information, even though what he observed “was not an alien.”

Claims that Aldrin saw a UFO during the first moon landing went viral almost three years ago, and was fact-checked by both USA Today (here) and the Washington Post (here).

According to both outlets, the claim about the lie detector stemmed from an April 2018 story in the British tabloid The Daily Star (here) that centered on a vocal analysis done by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health, an organization based in Ohio (here) that “carried out complex computer analyses of the astronauts’ voice patterns as they told of their close encounters.”

Back in 2007, NASA itself responded to a person linking to a now-removed YouTube video allegedly showing “Buzz Aldrin saying he saw a UFO on Apollo 11” and asking the question “Who’s fibbing, NASA or the Great American hero, Buzz Aldrin?” (here).

“The fibbing is being done by the producers of this video,” Senior NASA scientist David Morrison (here) wrote back. “I just talked to Buzz Aldrin on the phone, and he notes that the quotations were taken out of context and did not convey the intended meaning,” Morrison stated. 

According to Morrison, the Apollo 11 crew chose not to discuss the observation about the panels on the open communications channel “since they were concerned that their comments might be misinterpreted (as they are being now).” Aldrin reportedly told Morrison that the “discussion about the panels was cut from the broadcast interview, thus giving the impression that they had seen a UFO.”

A transcript of the technical air-to-ground voice from the Apollo 11 mission is provided here by NASA.

VERDICT

Partly false. Though Aldrin did describe seeing an unidentified object outside the window of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, the sighting was explained as the sun reflecting off a panel jettisoned earlier in the flight.

This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to fact-check social media posts  here;. 

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.