What were the strange sounds picked up by the Apollo 10 crew ? Image Credit: NASA
The crew of Apollo 10 recalled hearing strange 'space music' while orbiting the far side of the moon.
The peculiar incident, which took place approximately two months before Apollo 11's historic moon landing, had come as such a surprise to the Apollo 10 astronauts that they had actually debated over whether or not they should even report what they had experienced back to NASA at all.
Described as "strange, otherworldly music coming through the Apollo module's radio," the anomalous audio is understood to have been picked up during the spacecraft's traversal of the moon's dark side where all radio and visual contact with the Earth is lost for up to an hour.
"It sounds like, you know, outer space-type music," one of the astronauts had said. "You hear that ? That whistling sound ? Whooooooooo ! Well, that sure is weird music !"
The mysterious case, which had remained locked away in NASA's archives until relatively recently, is the subject of an upcoming Science Channel TV series entitled 'NASA's Unexplained Files."
"The Apollo 10 crew was very used to the kind of noise that they should be hearing," said astronaut Al Worden who had himself flown to the moon as part of the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.
"Logic tells me that if there was something recorded on there, then there was something there."
"If you're behind the moon and hear some weird noise on your radio, and you know you're blocked from the Earth, then what could you possibly think ?"
The sounds are considered quite real. The source or significance is speculated to be an unintentional man-made artifact, but not proven to this day. We may never know.
.. sighs wearily.. wonders why people don't read the replies.. wanders off muttering about what the InterWebz are doing to people's brains.. Oh, you mean post #13 where you quoted, "...it was interference between the LM's and Command Module's VHF radios." Nope, too mundane. Not sexy enough. No ALIENZ! Now if I could figure out a way to make the alien shake his head...
I believe the Apollo program used microwave s-band for its primary communications. Let's not forget that around 1965 Bell labs detected remnants of the Big Bang using a low-noise microwave equipment. It is possible the Apollo was receiving background cosmic/solar radiation. Knowing the direction the Apollo communications antenna was pointed would provide a useful clue.
Just thinking of MID, I miss him... Thanks for the technical answers explaining this phenomenon. When I heard the noise I kinda figured it would be something like that.
I swear I heard some astronauts link back to NASA saying "Santa Claus exists" (or something similar) in reference to UFO's NO. It was Christmas, Decmeber 25, 1968, and Jim Lovell joked about seeing Santa as they came back around from circling the Moon. If you read the trans, there is nothing suspicious about the reference, and it was only much later that a guy by the name of Chatelain (a crazy Apollo denier) decided it must be code.. Another 'lunatic' by the name of Donna Hare then developed the idea. It is rubbish. Even Abovetopsecret covered it.. Did they see 'stuff'? Yes. Was some of it uni... [More]
Dont trust YT woo-woo. See+listen to the original NASA recording here. Every decade or so, someone “rediscovers” that moon-bound astronauts heard some whining “musical” audio in their headphones, on a couple of the early Apollo missions. These sounds were most likely frequency-sweeping radio interference from the VHF rangefinder used to help the Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module keep track of one another. Presented here: Excerpts from the Apollo-10 in-flight recordings in which the crew make reference to these events. Space.com
Please Login or Register to post a comment.