Buzz Aldrin told journalist he saw a UFO near

[WoIverine]

MID: Do you know anything about NASA's R & D projects, or is that classified, etc.? An acquaintance of mine worked for NASA as an engineer for 30-40 years. He/she claims to have seen unknown tech that his/her team was instructed to reverse but never ask questions about.

[Brakzar Break]

Wasn't it Mr. Aldrin who popped some fool in the mouth for saying that he never went to the moon? Found it, yup, he did.

Love it.

So Mr. Aldrin "confided" in this journalist? Is there ANY verification of this anywhere?

*not holding breath*

Nibs

That was pretty awesome.

[digitalartist]

Just looking at the original post you have to doubt the story. Why would an American astronaut reveal something like that to a Bolivian journalist and not to an American one?

[the_UNKNOWN_DEAD]

gordon cooper.

So when Buzz says the he didn't see alien UFO's, you call him a liar, but when Gordo says that alien UFO's exist you believe him?

In other words, you evaluate the truthfullness of a claim by how much you agree with it, not by what evidence is presented?

Good to know that your opinion can be safely ignored.

[Wookietim]

Just looking at the original post you have to doubt the story. Why would an American astronaut reveal something like that to a Bolivian journalist and not to an American one?

To be fair, Aldrin has been sayign this to any reporter that will listen for at least two decades now... US and elsewhere.

[+HerNibs]

To be fair, Aldrin has been sayign this to any reporter that will listen for at least two decades now... US and elsewhere.

Where? I can find articles where he said that he saw something "L" shaped and is 99.9% sure that it was debris.

I can't find anyplace that states he saw a "UFO" (as in ALIENS).

That's a huge jump. From "ooh, look, a thing" to "alien".

Nibs

[Wookietim]

Where? I can find articles where he said that he saw something "L" shaped and is 99.9% sure that it was debris.

I can't find anyplace that states he saw a "UFO" (as in ALIENS).

That's a huge jump. From "ooh, look, a thing" to "alien".

Nibs

In 2005 to "The Science Channel" - http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case592.htm

In his book "RETURN TO EARTH" published in 1973 - http://ronrecord.com/astronauts/armstrong-collins-aldrin.html

In 2008 - http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1056198/buzz_aldrin_confirms_ufos_are_real.html

Just to name three widely dispersed mentions he has made of it to other sources... If you do a search on Google for "aldrin ufo" you will find many other times he has talked about this to reporters.

[the_UNKNOWN_DEAD]

Where? I can find articles where he said that he saw something "L" shaped and is 99.9% sure that it was debris.

I can't find anyplace that states he saw a "UFO" (as in ALIENS).

That's a huge jump. From "ooh, look, a thing" to "alien".

Nibs

That's how myths are started...someone ignores what was actually said in favor of their own fantasies...it gets repeated ad nauseum until the origin of the story becomes lost.

Everything I've ever read from Buzz only reinforces his NON-BELIEF in alien UFO's.

[the_UNKNOWN_DEAD]

If you do a search on Google for "aldrin ufo" you will find many other times he has talked about this to reporters.

UFO's yes...aliens?...no. Please try to remember there is a difference.

[+HerNibs]

In 2005 to "The Science Channel" - http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case592.htm

In his book "RETURN TO EARTH" published in 1973 - http://ronrecord.com/astronauts/armstrong-collins-aldrin.html

In 2008 - http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1056198/buzz_aldrin_confirms_ufos_are_real.html

Just to name three widely dispersed mentions he has made of it to other sources... If you do a search on Google for "aldrin ufo" you will find many other times he has talked about this to reporters.

I did and the only thing I saw Aldrin admit to is that he saw something that he 99.9% believes is debris.

I'm not denying that he said he saw something. I am stating that he didn't say ALIENS/UFO.

So, using Mr. Aldrin's sighting of something "L" shaped as support for UFO's (alien style) is a bit dishonest don't you think?

Even Mr. Aldrin has fought to have people stop using his statement as support for UFO's (alien style).

*please refer to my earlier quote and link*

Nibs

[Wookietim]

I did and the only thing I saw Aldrin admit to is that he saw something that he 99.9% believes is debris.

I'm not denying that he said he saw something. I am stating that he didn't say ALIENS/UFO.

So, using Mr. Aldrin's sighting of something "L" shaped as support for UFO's (alien style) is a bit dishonest don't you think?

Even Mr. Aldrin has fought to have people stop using his statement as support for UFO's (alien style).

*please refer to my earlier quote and link*

Nibs

All i am saying is that Aldrin has consistently been talking about seeing UFO's for quite a while now - and not just to foreign journalists... This is not exactly a new revelation.

[+HerNibs]

All i am saying is that Aldrin has consistently been talking about seeing UFO's for quite a while now - and not just to foreign journalists... This is not exactly a new revelation.

We are dancing around a definition here. I agree, Mr. Aldrin has stated that he saw something he couldn't identify.

At no time has he implied that he has seen anything related to aliens, as in travelers from another world/time/whatever.

Do you agree?

Nibs

[mcrom901]

So when Buzz says the he didn't see alien UFO's, you call him a liar,

i did not claim he was a liar because of not confirming the object as being an et craft.... but because of the available evidence which clearly shows too many contradictory tales in that regard.....

but when Gordo says that alien UFO's exist you believe him?

what are you on about.... go back and read the earlier posts again.....

In other words, you evaluate the truthfullness of a claim by how much you agree with it, not by what evidence is presented?

from where did you get that?

Good to know that your opinion can be safely ignored.

all opinions are irrelevant..... check the facts....

[Wookietim]

We are dancing around a definition here. I agree, Mr. Aldrin has stated that he saw something he couldn't identify.

At no time has he implied that he has seen anything related to aliens, as in travelers from another world/time/whatever.

Do you agree?

Nibs

Yes - I never said that he claimed to see "Aliens" - I have simply (and repeatedly now) reminded you that Aldrin has, for decades, related his experience with UFO's.

Do you agree?

[+HerNibs]

Yes - I never said that he claimed to see "Aliens" - I have simply (and repeatedly now) reminded you that Aldrin has, for decades, related his experience with UFO's.

Do you agree?

I agree. I just wanted to be sure we were saying the same thing. No aliens.

Nibs

[the_UNKNOWN_DEAD]

i did not claim he was a liar because of not confirming the object as being an et craft.... but because of the available evidence which clearly shows too many contradictory tales in that regard...

Either way you are calling him a liar...which demonstrates how ignorant you are...

no need to pay you any attention except to tell you that you are wrong.

...check the facts...

Hard to do that when you haven't posted any.

[mcrom901]

Yes - I never said that he claimed to see "Aliens" - I have simply (and repeatedly now) reminded you that Aldrin has, for decades, related his experience with UFO's.

the apollo 11 technical debrief statements highlights the sighting as discussed by all three astronauts..... again... quite conflicting.....

Aldrin: The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was 1 day out, or something, pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it.

Collins: How'd we see this thing? Did we just look out the window and there it was?

Aldrin: Yes, and we weren't sure but that it might be the S-IVB [saturn Rocket Third Stage]. We called the ground and were told the S-IVB was 6000 miles away. We had a problem with the High Gain about this time, didn't we?

Collins: There was something. We felt a bump or maybe I just imagined it.

Armstrong: He was wondering whether the MESA [Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly] had come off.

Collins: I don't guess we felt anything.

Aldrin: Of course, we were seeing all sorts of little objects going by at the various dumps and then we happened to see this one brighter object going by. We couldn't think of anything else it could be other than the S-IVB. We looked at it through the monocular and it seemed to have a bit of an L-shape to it.

Armstrong: Like an open suitcase.

Aldrin: We were in PTC [Passive Thermal Control] at the time so each one of us had a chance to take a look at this and it certainly seemed to be within our vicinity and of a very sizeable dimension.

Armstrong: We should say that it was right at the limit of the resolution of the eye. It was very difficult to tell just what shape it was. And there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size.

Aldrin: So then I got down in the LEB [Lower Equipment Bay] and started looking for it in the optics. We were grossly misled because with the sextant off-focus what we saw appeared to be cylinder.

Armstrong: Or really two rings.

Aldrin: Yes.

Armstrong: Two rings. Two connected rings.

Collins: No, it looked like a hollow cylinder to me. It didn't look like two connected rings. You could see this thing tumbling and, when it came around end-on, you could look right down in its guts. It was a hollow cylinder. But then you could change the focus on the sextant and it would be replaced by this open-book shape. It was really weird.

Aldrin: I guess there's not too much more to say about it other than it wasn't cylinder.

Collins: It was during the period when we thought it was a cylinder that we inquired about the S-IVB and we'd almost convinced ourselves that's what it had to be. But we don't have any more conclusions than that really. The fact that we didn't see it much past this one time period - we really don't have a conclusion as to what it might have been, how big it was, or how far away it was. It was something that wasn't part of the urine dump, we're pretty sure of that. Skipping ahead a bit, when we jettisoned the LM, you know we fired an explosive charge and got rid of the docking rings and the LM went boom. Pieces came off the LM. It could have been some Mylar or something that had somehow come loose from the LM.

Aldrin: We thought it could have been a panel, but it didn't appear to have that shape at all.

Collins: That's right, and for some reason, we thought it might have been a part of the High Gain Antenna. It might have been about the time we had high gain antenna problems. In the back of my mind, I have some reason to suspect that its origin was from the spacecraft.

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11TechCrewDebrfV1_2.pdf

[+HerNibs]

the apollo 11 technical debrief statements highlights the sighting as discussed by all three astronauts..... again... quite conflicting.....

http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/A11TechCrewDebrfV1_2.pdf

So? They are discussing the possibilities of what the "thing" could have been. I don't see alien mentioned at all. In fact, they seem to be discussing really mundane boring stuff.

So they have a bit of a difference as to what they see but they also state that the didn't see it clearly at first didn't they?

So? Again, nothing alien. Just a bunch of guys, IN FREAKING SPACE, who are surrounded with the most amazing scenery ever seen by man (at that time) and there is a bit of a disagreement as to the shape of the distant "thingy"?

Please point out to me where Mr. Aldrin implied or stated that he saw a UFO (alien style).

Nibs

[sinewave]

I have heard that account before and it is interesting. How much man made space debris was floating around out there by then? Couldn't it have simply been something from a test flight or a previous mission or even a Soviet piece?

Edited January 7, 2010 by sinewave

[mcrom901]

Hard to do that when you haven't posted any.

well it seems you are just playing here..... anyways.... if you missed my post on the earlier page..... here are his comments again......

"there was something out there that was close enough to be observed"

"mike decided he thought he could see it in the telescope & he was able to do that and when it was in one position it had series of ellipses, but when you made it real sharp it sort of L shaped"

"obviously the three of us were not gonna blurb out, hey houston we have something moving along the side of us we dont know what it is"

"how about those four panels"

"i got to be honest about it and either say well its detail but we saw nothing other than something that we were 99.99% was a man made object it was part of the spacecraft; but we did happen to see it and according to the technical definition of unidentified flying object, it has to fit in that category, cause there was no way for us to tell it was panel one two three or four, without bringing in the rest of the world and disturbing what the heck we were about going to the moon"

"i think it was one of the panels to very nearly the absolute certainty"

"i looked out & saw a star out there, but it wasn't a star, it was venus; but it kept following me all along"

"we just about could have said, look, we see a UFO out the window going along with us... you know what would have happened? the public would have gone crazy!"

"yeah, we were smart enough to say; where is the upper stage rocket? we think we might be looking at that out the window"

[Wookietim]

I have heard that account before and it is interesting. How much man made space debris was floating around out there by then? Couldn't it have simply been something from a test flight or a previous mission?

While that is possible, I don't think that "Space Debris" is really a valid probability in this case - one, this was in the very beginning of the space age and therefore there wasn't a whole lot of debris at that time and two, even now Earth orbit is big enough that we aren't seeing random junk floating by all the time in pictures from NASA....

So it's a possibility but not a probability.

[+HerNibs]

Orbital Debris FAQ

3). How much orbital debris is currently in Earth orbit?

Approximately 19,000 objects larger than 10 cm are known to exist. The estimated population of particles between 1 and 10 cm in diameter is approximately 500,000. The number of particles smaller than 1 cm probably exceeds tens of millions.

Whoa. That's a bunch of debris.

Wasn't Sputnik the first thing in space? 1957?

So I imagine there has been debris out there for a while.

Nibs

[Wookietim]

Orbital Debris FAQ

Whoa. That's a bunch of debris.

Wasn't Sputnik the first thing in space? 1957?

So I imagine there has been debris out there for a while.

Nibs

That is a lot of debris... but spread out over the entire orbit of Earth that means that there is perhaps one of them every couple hundred miles.... In other words, that is like reducing the population of Earth to the same pop that is currently in NYC. It would be a lot of people, but spread out over the entire area one could drive for days without seeing a single other person...

[mcrom901]

I have heard that account before and it is interesting. How much man made space debris was floating around out there by then? Couldn't it have simply been something from a test flight or a previous mission or even a Soviet piece?

if they are just simply space junk.... then why is nasa hiding the photographs?

LINK

pegasus b.....

The facts are plain. On June 3, 1965, Gemini-4 was launched into orbit 150 miles above the Earth's surface. Rookie astronauts McDivitt and White were headed for the USA's first long-duration flight, the first to attempt extensive visual observations and photography. On the second day, over Hawaii, the 35-year-old McDivitt reported seeing an object -- "like a beer can with an arm sticking out" -- which NASA officials later announced had been identified by Air Force space radars as the thousand-mile-distant Pegasus-2 (but that range was too great, it turned out, for McDivitt's object to have been the winged Pegasus satellite). Together with a mysterious "tadpole" photo, the McDivitt report has achieved UFO superstardom and has been firmly enshrined in UFO literature and lore.

norad......

But since 1969, when the Condon Report was published, some new resources have become available concerning McDivitt's UFO. Furthermore, Dr. Roach himself put his finger on the key to his forced endorsement of the McDivitt case, with the words "if the NORAD listing . . . is complete." An inquiry to the NORAD Directorate of Public Affairs did not produce a definitive solution. "Your comments on the NORAD role related to [Gemini 4] appear to be logical," replied NORAD Public Information Officer Del W. Kindschi, "but our space people tell me they no longer have copies of the messages that were sent to NASA Houston on the sightings," he added. How did McDivitt describe the UFO? His first report came in at Mission Elapsed Time (MET) 29 hours, 52 minuses, 17 seconds. Five minutes later he described it better. "It had big arms sticking out of it, it looked like. I only had it for a minute...."

usaf & nasa....

The Air Force wasn't interested, either: McDivitt never even filed a UFO report with Project Blue Book or anyone else. NASA did not bother with the story, it seems, because nobody was particularly puzzled by the object. when queried by Congressman Robert Michel (himself queried by a constituent), NASA Assistant Administrator for Legislative Affairs, Richard L. Callaghan, replied that "We believe it to be a rocket tank or spent second stage of a rocket."

the debunker.....

During a 1975 interview between Philip Klass (Aviation Week and Space Technology) and Col. Bernard Szczutkowski (USAF-ret.) ot NORAD, Klass mentioned his interest in investigating and exposing UFO cases. Szczutkowski reached into his desk, pulled out a photo, and asked Klass: "Do you want to see a photo of McDivitt's UFO?" Klass quickly assented. The NORAD officer handed Klass the PAO print of the Titan-II second stage. This, he told Klass, was what McDivitt had seen but was unable to identify. It was the Titan booster. Klass obtained a copy of the photo from NORAD and sent it to McDivitt, asking if it did not closely correspond to his verbal description of the UFO he had seen. McDivitt replied: "Thank you for sending me the slide of the Gemini-IV photograph. I very quickly identified the object in the photograph as the second stage of the Titan rocket which launched us . . . I am sure that this is not a photograph of the object which I described many times and which many people refer to as the Gemini IV UFO...." The reasons which McDivitt gave for this certainty, however, were very revealing. It was not because the objects were shaped differently at all. Instead, McDivitt explained, "At the time I saw whatever that object was, the background was nothing but the black of deep space. There was not a horizon anywhere within my view." (Author's note: Roach described the field of view from a Gemini as follows: "The astronauts are able to see only . . . about three percent of the celestial sphere." McDivitt's reply to my preliminary 1976 identification of his UFO with the Titan-II second stage was equally explicit: "The reason I did not assume that the object I saw was the upper stage of the Titan II was simple. During the first orbit of our mission my job was to fly formation with the upper stage of the rocket. This I attempted to do, and I spent approximately one-and-a-half to two hours looking at this upper stage from various angles and distances, and was quite familiar with its appearance. The object I saw later was indeed not the upper stage of the Titan II used in Gemini IV. It may have been a lot of other things, but it definitely was not that upper stage."

and finally the mysterious 'tadpole' pic.....

The "McDivitt UFO photo" -- the "tadpole" -- had a life entirely apart from the actual McDivitt UFO report. When pressed by newsmen for the photo which McDivitt had reportedly taken of the object, officials at the Public Affairs Office at NASA headquarters went through the flight film and selected a series of shots which they thought might have been the object. This was before McDivitt had a chance to review the film himself. The original NASA caption on the photo (PAO 65-H-1013) was as follows: "This photograph . . . shows the satellite McDivitt observed on the 20th revolution i of his four-day space flight . . . he said the Gemini-4 spacecraft was turning and the sun was coming across the window when he filmed the object." Later, after consultation with the astronaut, NASA press officials changed the caption to read: "Astronaut James McDivitt photographed this sun flare through the spacecraft window.... McDivitt explained later after the flight that the sun was coming across the window as the spacecraft rolled, the sun rays struck a metal bolt, causing the flares in the camera lens." This is hardly a useful photo to print. It is the kind that amateur photographers prefer to throw out. But under pressure from reporters who wanted to see "McDivitt's UFO," it was the best that NASA could come up with.

http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo/gemini4.htm

[+HerNibs]

Yes, it's from Wiki but it is sourced to NASA

Space debris, also known as orbital debris, space junk and space waste, are objects in orbit around Earth that were created by humans but no longer serve any useful purpose. These objects consist of everything from spent rocket stages and defunct satellites to explosion and collision fragments. The debris can include slag and dust from solid rocket motors, surface degradation products such as paint flakes, coolant released by RORSAT nuclear powered satellites, clusters of small needles, and objects released due to the impact of micrometeoroids or small debris onto spacecraft.[1] As the orbits of these objects often overlap the trajectories of spacecraft, debris is a potential collision risk.

Nibs