First Man

by James R. Hansen

  In the preliminary flight plan, Aldrin and Armstrong were not scheduled to make their first inspection trip into Eagle until Apollo 11 reached lunar orbit around midday of day three, but Aldrin lobbied successfully with the mission planners to enter the LM a day early in order to make sure the lander had suffered no damage during launch and the long flight out. The sojourn began a little after 4:00 P.M. CDT, about twenty minutes into what NASA considered at the time the clearest TV transmission from space ever made. Collins did the honors of opening the hatch. Armstrong squeezed through the thirty-inch-wide tunnel and floated in through the top of the LM, followed by Aldrin. Both Neil and Buzz remember the down-up-up-down trip into Eagle as one of the oddest sensations of their entire Moon trip, crawling from the floor to the ceiling of the command module only to find themselves descending headfirst from the ceiling of the docked LM. “Though slightly disorienting,” Buzz states, “it was intriguing to move about my chores, knowing all the time that just a few feet away everyone else was, by my reckoning, upside down.”

  Though Neil was the first one to take a look inside Eagle, it was Buzz as lunar module pilot who began preparing the LM for its separation from Columbia that was to come forty-five hours later. Buzz and Neil took the movie camera and television camera along with them, sending back the first pictures from inside the LM. Mission Control knew that the transmission was coming, but it surprised the TV networks, which were not expecting the next pictures from Apollo 11 until 7:30 P.M. EDT, the same time as the previous evening. Scurrying to make the necessary technical connections, CBS, for example, went on air with Cronkite and sidekick Wally Schirra at 5:50 P.M. The first images—being broadcast live to the United States, Japan, western Europe, and much of South America—showed Aldrin taking an equipment inventory in the LM. Later, Buzz gave the international television audience a look at the space suit and life support equipment that he and Neil would wear on the Moon.

  No account of the flight of Apollo 11 would be complete without coming to grips with subsequent tales that the crew saw a UFO.

  According to the story—which over the past thirty-plus years has been told and retold in so many different versions that it is in fact wrong to call it one story—the astronauts on their way to the Moon saw something, perhaps several things, they could not identify, ranging from mysterious lights to actual formations of spaceships. One version has “a mass of intelligent energy” tailing the spacecraft all the way from the Earth to the Moon. Another has “a bright object resembling a giant snowman,” which later “proved” to be two UFOs, racing across Apollo 11’s path as it reached lunar orbit. Still another has Collins spotting a UFO as he was photographing the LM’s ascent from the surface. Allegedly, close analysis of the Apollo 11 film and photographs verified the presence of UFOs, but NASA, the Pentagon, and the entirety of the U.S. government all conspired to cover up the evidence, going so far as editing out major portions of Apollo 11’s onboard and air-to-ground audio recordings. Most incredible of all, the story has made the rounds that just as Armstrong started down the ladder to make his historic first step off the LM and onto the Moon, he saw something on the lunar surface that made him scramble back into the LM, only venturing out again several minutes later after Mission Control calmed him down and insisted that he and Aldrin make their Moon walk.

  In broad sociocultural perspective, it is not at all surprising to find that people fascinated with UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life have projected their anticipations onto the astronauts and their missions. The sighting of “flying saucers” became an epidemic in the years following World War II, perhaps because, as one historian has tried to explain it, the specter of Armageddon brought on by the appearance of the atomic bomb spawned “at once an appetite for vicarious scientific adventure and a need to externalize fear.” So crazy had the belief in UFOs become in the late 1940s that the U.S. Air Force began to amass hundreds of case studies and firsthand personal testimonies about UFOs from pilots and common folk alike, in what came to be called the “Blue Book investigations”; in the end, the air force’s conclusions satisfied no one. The UFO craze crested in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the birth of the Space Age, heightened by the launch of the first satellites and space capsules. Any comment about a possible unidentified flying object, especially if made by a pilot, set off another string of reported sightings. Stories circulated that NASA test pilot Joe Walker, in April 1962, filmed five cylindrical and disk-shaped objects from his X-15 aircraft; that two radar technicians, in April 1964, watched UFOs following an unmanned Gemini capsule; that NASA installed a special instrument on Gemini IV to detect UFOs; that Borman and Lovell on Gemini VII and Conrad and Gordon on Gemini XI had spotted “bogeys.” Whatever it was that was originally factual behind the reports quickly got lost amid the illusions, gross exaggerations, and outright fabrications that fed the public’s growing appetite for news about UFOs.

  It would have been astounding if something as epochal as the first Moon landing had not generated a fresh and intense new round of UFO stories even more untruthful, hyperbolic, and stubbornly persistent than what came before. On the Internet today, a search involving the words “Apollo 11” and “UFO” results in 5,410 hits, “Apollo” and “UFO” in 61,700 hits, “astronaut” and “UFO” in 46,000 hits; “pilot” and “UFO” in 136,000 hits; and “UFO” alone in 4.46 million hits. Just for “Neil Armstrong” and “UFO,” one gets directed to 3,180 different Web sites; for Buzz Aldrin, 1,700 sites; for Mike Collins only 349. Clearly, it is important to those who want to believe in alien intelligence that the First Man, even more so than his two crewmates (or any other astronaut), spotted a UFO.

  As is true for many a fanciful story, the stories about Apollo 11’s UFO “sightings” have a kernel of truth. The first alleged sighting came early on day one just as the burn for TLI was starting:

  00:02:44:37 elapsed time

  Why Collins jokingly said to his crewmates, “you don’t want to look at it,” can only be interpreted to mean that he worried that, if they did look, and saw what he saw, they all might feel it necessary to report that they had seen something they could not identify. And reporting anything that sounded like a UFO was not something the astronauts wanted to do. So, they said nothing to the ground about the flashing lights, even though, as Aldrin recalls, they saw the flashes “at least two or three different times,” and not just on the outbound flight.

  The first time that an American astronaut said he saw something strange in space was in 1962 when John Glenn in Friendship 7 spotted what he called “fireflies” (“I see a big mass of some very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they’re luminescent…. they look like little stars…. They swirl around the capsule”). As it turned out, Glenn’s fireflies were ice flakes falling off the skin of the Mercury 6 space capsule, but that discovery was not made until Carpenter’s Mercury 7 flight. By that time, the idea had circulated in the popular mind that Glenn might have run into some alien life form.

  Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin knew all about John Glenn’s fireflies—as well as about every other phenomenon, physical, optical, or otherwise, that they and their fellow astronauts had experienced in the twenty manned spaceflights prior to Apollo—but what the flashes were that seemed to appear outside their windows less than three hours into their own flight they did not know.

  After the astronauts were back safely on Earth, Aldrin had the most to say about the flashing lights; not surprisingly, Armstrong had the least. So anxious was Buzz to tell someone about them that he did not wait until the astrophysics part of the Apollo debriefing; he volunteered the information right in the middle of the debriefing about the astronauts’ food.

  “The food guys couldn’t have cared less,” Buzz laughs today. “It wasn’t their subject, and the astrophysics guys never listened to the food debriefing, so nothing happened. At the time we were in quarantine, so I finally called up somebody but was told, ‘They are all on travel.’ Later, I was able to talk to s
omebody and together we began to understand what it was. I forget how many weeks later, someone from astrophysics finally called and said, ‘We’re getting more curious about this, and we’re wondering if you could help us with an experiment. We’ve designed something and would you come over and put your head in this thing for us,’ and I said, ‘No, thanks!’”

  The phenomenon of the flashing lights was unusual enough that NASA briefed the next crew about it. When Apollo 12 went up, they too saw the lights; in fact, they came back and reported, “Guess what? We see them with our eyes closed!”

  The flashing lights turned out to be a phenomenon that occurred in the especially dark conditions of outer space inside the human eyeball. “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 11 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.”

  Less significantly from the point of view of science, but of import for those who want to believe in UFOs, was a second “sighting” that the crew could not explain—or at least be 100 percent sure of their explanation.

  It took place the evening of the third day—the day of the first sojourn into the LM—shortly after 9:00 P.M. Aldrin apparently saw it first: “I found myself idly staring out of the window of the Columbia and saw something that looked a bit unusual. It appeared brighter than any star and not quite the pinpoint of light that stars are. It was also moving relative to the stars. I pointed this out to Mike and Neil, and the three of us were beset with curiosity. With the help of the monocular we guessed that whatever it was, it was only a hundred miles or so away. Looking at it through the sextant we found it occasionally formed a cylinder, but when the sextant’s focus was adjusted it had a sort of illuminated ‘L’ look to it. There was a straight line, maybe a little bump in it, and then a little something off to the side. It had a shape of some sort—we all agreed on that—but exactly what it was we couldn’t pin down.”

  The crew fretted, “What are we going to say about this?” Aldrin remembers, “We sure as hell were not going to talk about it to the ground, because all that would do is raise a curiosity and if that got out, someone might say NASA needed to be commanded to abandon the mission, because we had aliens going along! Our reticence to be outspoken while it was happening was because we were just prudent. We didn’t want to do anything that gave the UFO nuts any ammunition at all, because enough wild things had been said over the years about astronauts seeing strange things.”

  At first the crew speculated that what they were seeing was the shell of the Saturn S-IVB that had been slingshot away more than two days earlier. After the S-IVB’s propulsive maneuver, the astronauts had seen it traveling well out of their way, on a trajectory that would miss the Moon and send it into solar orbit. (On later Apollo missions, NASA intentionally maneuvered the S-IVB to impact the Moon for the purpose of taking seismographic readings, but it did not do that on Apollo 11.) So, at two days, twelve hours, forty-five minutes, and forty-six seconds of elapsed time into the flight, Neil radioed, “Houston, Apollo 11. Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?” The answer came back some three minutes later: “Apollo 11, Houston. The S-IVB is about 6,000 nautical miles away from you. Over.” “Okay. Thank you,” replied Neil.

  The astronauts scratched their heads. At far closer than 6,000 miles, the object in sight could not be the S-IVB, but rather one of the four panels that had enclosed the LM’s launch garage. When the LM was extracted for face-to-face mating with the command module, the side panels had sprung off in different directions. Analytical studies had indicated the most likely trajectories for the four ejected panels, but NASA could not track the panels because there were no transponders on them.

  The Apollo 11 crew was convinced that what they saw was one of the panels. According to Aldrin, “We could see it for about forty-five seconds at a time as the ship rotated, and we watched it off and on for about an hour…. Its course appeared in no way to conflict with ours, and as it presented no danger we dropped the matter there,” and went to sleep. Nothing more was said about the sighting until one portion of NASA’s classified debriefing. Armstrong is confident that no one in NASA suggested what they should or should not say in the future about the UFO. What was to be said was left to the individual crew member.

  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 have 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 other three panels, but I suspect that the one that was directly down from the Sun from us would have provided the brightest reflection.”

  How the panel had kept up with the Apollo 11 spacecraft for over two days—and in fact, was out in front of it—was a simple matter of Newtonian physics. “When the SLA panels were ejected,” Neil explains, “they had a very slight outward relative velocity, but their velocity along the flight path was essentially identical to that of the CSM-LM combination. The panels, therefore, having no atmospheric drag to slow them, traveled at the CSMLM speed, but developed an ever-increasing lateral separation from it.” As for why the S-IVB was so far behind the spacecraft, that was explained by the fact that the S-IVB was traveling along the same velocity vector but after separation was traveling slightly slower than the CSM-LM. Over a couple days’ time, a sizable distance developed between the two.

  No matter the thoroughness of the scientific explanation, however, the fact of the matter is that Apollo 11 did see what technically has to be called an unidentified flying object. “When somebody asks, ‘Did you see a UFO?’ Aldrin admits, “technically we should say we did. But given all the misstatements that would come forth from that, I’ll only tell the story if I’m given enough time. I’ll tell a complete story to somebody with the idea that, once they understand the whole story, they won’t make a big thing of it. I’ll try to manage the information in the right way. But immediately after Apollo 11 we all thought it was so, ‘No, no, no.’”

  The third night out the Apollo 11 astronauts rested more fitfully—they knew that when they awoke, day four was going to be different. As Collins would later say, it was time for the crew “to lay their little pink bodies on the line.” Stopping their rotisserie motion and getting into lunar orbit was not automatic. If the spacecraft did not slow down sufficiently it would sail on by the Moon in a gigantic arc and make a looping return back to the vicinity of the Earth.

  Arousing the astronauts that morning at 7:32 A.M. CDT, Mission Control again started the day by reading them the morning news. “First off, it looks like it’s going to be impossible to get away from the fact that you guys are dominating all the news back here on Earth,” said Bruce McCandless, taking his turn as CapCom. “Even Pravda in Russia is headlining the mission and calls Neil ‘The Czar of the Ship.’ I think maybe they got the wrong mission…. Back here in Houston, your three wives and children got together for lunch yesterday at Buzz’s house. And, according to Pat, it turned out to be a gabfest. The children
swam and did some high jumping over Buzz’s bamboo pole.”

  McCandless mentioned that a Houston astrologer by the name of Ruby Graham was reading all signs as right for Apollo 11’s trip to the Moon: “She says that Neil is clever, Mike has good judgment, and Buzz can work out intricate problems. She also says Neil tends to see the world through rose-colored glasses, but he is always ready to help the afflicted or distressed. Neil, you are also supposed to have ‘intuition that enables you to interpret life with feeling.’” Armstrong offered no comment, as the word of an astrologer held no interest for him—nor offered any real understanding of his personality.

  With their spacecraft now only 12,486 miles from the Moon, the dawning of a spectacular and eerie view made it clear that the moment of truth would soon be at hand. With the Sun directly behind the Moon and backlighting the planetoid, Apollo 11 was flying through a giant solar eclipse, a massive lunar shadow, with the Sun’s corona cascading brilliantly around the edges of what was now a huge dark object completely filling their windows. The Earthshine shone so brightly from behind them that it cast the lunar surface as three-dimensional. Grabbing their cameras, the astronauts took numerous shots of the sensational effect, but the highly unusual lighting conditions impacted the quality of the pictures.