posted July 31, 2006 10:03 PM               

quote:

---

Astronaut hero Buzz Aldrin says a mysterious flying object shadowed the first manned mission to the Moon in 1969, according to a shocking new documentary.

"There was something out there, close enough to be observed," says Aldrin in "Apollo 11: The Untold Story," which will be broadcast tonight by Britain's Channel Five.

"Now, obviously the three of us weren't going to blurt out, 'Hey, Houston, we've got something moving alongside of us and we don't know what it is,' you know? We weren't about to do that, because we knew that that those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people and somebody might have demanded we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is."

Aldrin says NASA covered up the UFO encounter. The Apollo 11 mission of July 1969 remains the highlight of manned space exploration, 37 years later.

---

posted July 31, 2006 10:18 PM               

quote:

---

In Armstrong's mind today, there is still no doubt that what they all saw was a detached part of their own spacecraft. "We did watch a slow blinking light some substantial distance away from us. Mission Control eventually concluded — and I agree — that it was one of the Saturn LM adapter panels. These panels were enormous and would ahve been given a rotation in the process of their ejection from the S-IVB. The reflection from these panels would, therefore, be similar to blinking. I do not know why we did not see the three other panels, but I suspect that the one that was directly down from the Sun from us would have provided the brightest reflection."

---

See pages 430 to 432 for the full passage and explanation.

posted August 01, 2006 06:15 AM               

quote:

---

Appearing from 11p-11:30p PT, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin discussed his career and experiences walking on the moon. He recounted how they had to fix the Moon Lander after the switch of a circuit breaker was snapped off. Aldrin also clarified his rumored UFO sighting. What he actually saw were bright flashes at night -- which at the time were quite mysterious. But on a later mission, he said these flashes were identified as "high velocity Z particles," -- nothing related to an ET craft."

---

posted August 01, 2006 06:45 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Hawkman:
What he actually saw were bright flashes at night-- which at the time were quite mysterious. But on a later mission, he said these flashes were identified as "high velocity Z particles," --nothing related to an ET craft."

---

quote:

---

The flashing lights turned out to be a phenomenon that occured in the especially dark conditions of outer space inside the human eyball. "I thought I was seeing something within the cabin and outside of my body," Buzz relates today, and so did Mike. From his few remarks to his mates about the flashes at the time, it is not clear that Neil was so sure they were not just optical phenomena — and typical of Neil, he was never fast about drawing conclusions except when he had to.

What the Apollo crew eventually found out was that there was a threshold — an optical threshold tied to a psychological threshold — where a person had to want to look and see the flashing lights or he just would not observe them. Experts have since explained that some astronauts have such a sensitive threshold that they see the flashes even when flying in near space below the Van Allen radiation belt. "But six people had gone outside the Van Allen Belt before we did [the crews of Apollo 8 and 10]," Aldrin notes, "and they hadn't seen any flashes." So, the crew of Apollo 11 was involved in another "first."

---

quote:

---

Visual light flash phenomenon experiment is a result of some experiences by previous flight crews on lunar flights. The crews of Apollo 11, 12, 13 and 14 reported seeing light flashes and streaks of light when they were in the darkened Command Module. Usually when their eyes were closed. Both [during] the translunar and trans-Earth coast and in lunar orbit. These light flashes [were] at a frequency ranged anywhere from .5 to 2 events per minute. One conjecture or hypothesis that's been extended to explain this phenomenon is that the flashes are visual phosphedes induced by cosmic rays. There is some controversy, however, as to whether the cause is due to Cherenkov radiation produced by high energy particles traveling through the eyeball or whether the flashes result from ionizing collisions of these high energy particles in the retina or in the visual centers of the cerebral cortex. At any rate, to conduct the experiment, the crew puts on eyeshades, opaque eyeshades, similar to the television quiz show of several years past. It requires that all three crewmen face in the same direction and undergo a dark adaptation period prior to actually beginning [an] oral description of the light flashes. The crewmen will report such things as the Ground Elapsed Time to the nearest minute. Of course they can't see their spacecraft timing or clock, they have to guess at it. The frequency of flashes, description of the flashes and also the location of each crewman in the Command Module, and the way that each man is oriented.

---

posted August 01, 2006 11:14 AM               

Regards,

posted August 01, 2006 12:58 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by Robert Pearlman:
It should also be noted that in correspondence with NBC journalist Jim Oberg, the producer of this "documentary" admitted to using footage taken from a UFO conspiracy tape and that in fact, it was from a shuttle mission and not Apollo.

---

posted April 03, 2008 11:18 AM               

In AS14-68-9486, a small, shiny object appears above the lunar horizon (about 10 o'clock to Shepard). You need to zoom in a bit to see it. No doubt a nick on the negative or something on the lens, but amusing.