WHAT’S THE STORY?
THAT’S the trouble. There isn’t one. Well, unless you’re the Daily Star and a thousand other so-called ‘news sites’ that have recently been pumping out the story that Buzz Aldrin saw a UFO on his trip to the moon on 1969.
The latest claim is that Aldrin passed a lie detector test that “proved” he saw a UFO on that famous journey in which he became the second human being to step on the moon, shortly after Neil Armstrong.
Apart from the conspiracy eejits that say NASA faked the moon landings, Aldrin’s UFO is probably one of the most common “space myths” that’s been going around for years, but at least the latest version has a bit of invention – that “lie detector” line is a lulu because everybody knows they are infallible, right?
Problem is that the man himself, who is now 88, says he never took such a test, and he has denied for years that he saw a UFO.
And in any case, lie detector tests, or polygraphs to give them their Sunday name, are notoriously unreliable.
SO HOW COME THE STORY IS OUT THERE?
ACCORDING to the Daily Star, a company called the Institute of BioAcoustic Technology and Sound Health in Albany, Ohio, did the ‘lie detector’ tests on recordings made by Aldrin and fellow astronauts Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14), Al Worden (Apollo 15), and Gordon Cooper (Mercury-Atlas 9). In other words, new technology was used to examine old recordings and no actual polygraph took place, not least because Mitchell and Cooper are, ahem, dead.
Funnily enough the Institute is promoting its ‘Sound Health’ technology as an improvement on lie detectors. On its website it states: “Join Sound Health and embrace this pioneering path to New Medicine!
“Sound Health has proven that your voice can be used to reveal who you really are under the layer of public personality you have created.
This is an opportunity for the human race to break free of all of the deceit and deception that we live with on a daily basis.”
They haven’t revealed if they have examined Donald Trump yet.
WHAT DID BUZZ ACTUALLY SEE?
LET the man himself tell you: “On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us.
“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 four panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft.
“So in the close vicinity, moving away, were four panels. And I feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don’t know. So technically, the definition could be ‘unidentified’.
“We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed.”
THE UFO STORY WAS A MYTH?
CORRECT. As Aldrin cogently explained a few years ago: “It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence.
“That’s what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost certain that there is life somewhere in space.
“It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on Earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today. But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away.”
That is the view of most reputable scientists – space is just too vast for aliens to be visiting here, or us to be visiting them, at least for a very, very long time.
TELL US MORE ABOUT BUZZ
EDWIN Eugene Aldrin Jr was born in New Jersey in 1930 and has some Scottish ancestry. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War and then took a PhD in aeronautics before joining NASA.
Since retiring he has successfully battled depression and alcoholism and he was beside President Trump when he announced new space exploration last summer.
Some things that can be said with certainty: his first words on the Moon were “beautiful view” and Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear was named after him.
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