“If the organizing committee had asked me I’m sure I would have said okay, because it was in the town where my parents lived. Nevertheless, I would have been happier had they not used my name or, if they used my name, they would have used a different approach for the museum.
“I did try to support them in any way that I could by presenting them with such materials as I had available, either gifting or loaning items.
“From the outset I was uncomfortable because that museum was built as the ‘Neil Armstrong Museum.’ A number of people came to believe that it was my personal property and a business undertaking of mine. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus was actually going to be overseeing the museum, and I told its director that I felt uncomfortable. I asked him as well as another member of the planning board if there was anything that could be done about the public image issue and to respond to me about what they thought. They said they would, but they did not.”
Armstrong’s relationship with the museum leadership has remained strained throughout the thirty-three years of the facility’s existence. In the mid-1990s, for example, came the issue of a picture postcard of Neil as an astronaut on sale in the museum gift shop. The image came from an official NASA photograph, taken when he was a federal government employee. For him it was a question of ownership. The rights to the picture belong to the people, the same visitors, Neil believes, who “think I own the place.” The seal of the Ohio Historical Society is displayed inside the main door, but according to Neil, “it’s so low profile that most people don’t notice it.” Eventually, Armstrong relented on the matter of the picture, granting then museum director John Zwez “my permission on a limited-time basis.”
As for the namesake Wapakoneta airport, “Again, they just didn’t ask. It’s a public airport so, had they asked, I probably would have said sure, okay. The problem is that there were businesses on that airport that took the name of the airport, like the ‘Neil Armstrong Electronics Shop.’”
In the 1990s Armstrong had a run-in with Hallmark, the greeting card company.
“The Hallmark case was simple,” Neil relates. “They put out a Christmas tree ornament. It had a little spaceman inside it. It also had a recording that played my voice, and it had my name on the box.” Hallmark advertised the product by saying, “The Moon glows as the famous words spoken by Neil Armstrong when he stepped out on the Moon and into history.” Unfortunately, Hallmark’s people had not received or even asked his permission. Nor did the popular card company follow NASA’s established procedures for such matters.
So in 1994 Neil sued Hallmark. Wendy Armstrong, the wife of his son Mark, served as his attorney. At the end of 1995, the two parties settled out of court: “Hallmark Cards announced today that it had settled a lawsuit with Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong over the use of his likeness in a Christmas ornament last year. Armstrong had claimed that his name and likeness was used without his permission on the ornament, which celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. The size of the settlement was undisclosed, but said by one source to be substantial. Armstrong plans to donate the settlement from the Kansas City–based company, minus legal fees, to Purdue University, his alma mater.” Purdue later confirmed that it received the money.
“NASA hadn’t been very careful about the matter, either. Up to then, it had been pretty careless in the treatment of individual rights. Now, I get letters that correctly state what NASA’s position is about getting my approval, and before that I never did. I get many such requests, some of which I’ve granted [some without charge and some for a fee] and some of which I haven’t.
“In many cases where they are either nonprofit or government public-service announcements, I will approve them. At first, I wasn’t very careful about keeping records of this and would just say, ‘Yes, that’s all right.’ Then, after being exposed to the legal world, I recognized that you have to have all kinds of files of proof.”
An even more loathsome legal matter concerned the sale of some of Neil’s hair. In early 2005, the Lebanon, Ohio, barbershop that Neil had patronized for more than twenty years sold some of its famous client’s locks for $3,000 to a Connecticut man who, according to Guinness World Records, had amassed the largest collection of hair from “historical celebrities.” In a private conversation in the back of the shop, Neil asked his barber to either return the hair or donate the $3,000 to a charity of Armstrong’s choosing. When neither result followed, Neil’s attorney sent the barber a two-page letter, one that referenced an Ohio law protecting the names of its celebrities. Instead of settling the matter quietly, the barber sent the letter to local media. The strange story attracted international attention.
Christian leaders the world over gave voice to the idea that humankind’s trip to the Moon was a “pilgrimage,” a “spiritual quest,” and that at the heart of all flying, all space exploration, was a religious truth.
NASA’s master rocketeer and builder of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun, expressed the sentiment in 1969 for the scientific and technical community: “Astronomy and space exploration are teaching us that the good Lord is a much greater Lord, and Master of a greater kingdom. The fact that Christ carried out his mission on Earth does not limit his validity for a greater environment. It could very well be that the Lord would send his Son to other worlds, taking whatever steps are necessary to bring the Truth to His Creation.”
Pope Paul VI expressed it for the Catholic world, referring to the Moon landing as “the ecstasy of this prophetic day.”
The morning Apollo 11 launched, Reverend Herman Weber gave voice to it for Viola and for all American evangelicals from his pulpit in Wapakoneta’s St. Paul United Church of Christ: “As Thou hast guided our astronauts in previous flights, so guide, we pray, Neil, the esteemed son of our proud community, and his partners, Buzz and Michael, and all others who are involved in this righteous Lunar flight in every station.”
In a speech to his congregation days after the Moon landing, the Iowa minister to whom Viola later confided by letter that Neil had strayed from the truth of Jesus Christ, asked, “Could the external presence of Neil Armstrong, the courageous leader, be a symbol of the presence within of the strong arm of the Lord?…Their place was the Moon, their ship was the Eagle, which landed on a firm rock at a place called Tranquility Base. Could there possibly be a rock of ages which is a base for all tranquility, for all peace?”
Several theologians, Protestant and Catholic, concurred: “Armstrong’s boots, grating on the crisp, dry surface of the Moon, have announced a new theological watershed. That earthly sound on an unearthly body will lead to a profound shift in the faith and basic attitudes of Christians and other believers, a fact that gradually will become apparent with coming generations…. It will cause an eventual, and inevitable, modification in the way man comprehends the man-God relationship—perhaps the most important keystone in his ego-structure and in his concept of his place in eternity.”
These thinkers were of the mind that God put Neil Armstrong (but not Buzz?) on the Moon to show God’s greatness in a new light; to reveal God’s expansive presence; restore “proper balance” in humankind’s outlook on life; and make people believe in God even more deeply than before. “Of course, we knew that the astronauts were religious men. They had to be religious. We wouldn’t have sent atheists to the Moon or even let them into an astronaut program.”
A number of them were, in fact, religious men. A few turned more spiritual after their lunar experience. Apollo 15’s James Irwin, who walked on the Moon in August 1971, became an evangelical minister. “I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before,” Irwin later wrote. Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke, one of the CapComs for Apollo 11, became active in missionary work, explaining, “I make speeches about walking on the Moon and walking with the Son.”
An Internet document entitled “Onward Christian Spacemen: A Call for Christian Leadership of Manned Space Exploration” calls Christians not only to participate in manned space explor
ation but also to command and lead it over the likes of the “theologically naïve.”
Another spiritual critic of the “godless” American space program and its “soulless” astronauts has written:
[The crew of Apollo 11] were not even high priests. They were altar boys: stand here, go there, do that, hold this. At best, they were vessels for others tofind divine grace. We are taught nothing by [the astronauts], but we can learn from them…. The pilgrimage to the Moon exposed the limits of the mode of consciousness that it set out to glorify. It uncovered no new world except the one that it foolishly attempted to leave behind.
Assertions linger that the telephone number connecting President Nixon to Armstrong and Aldrin on the lunar surface was 666-6666, a sign of the Antichrist, as well as equally ridiculous claims that the Moon landing was a conspiracy of Freemasons. (The “evidence”: that Aldrin carried a Masonic flag with him in his PPK, which Buzz presented upon his return to the lodge’s Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the World, which is true, and, second, that Neil’s father was a thirty-third-degree Mason. Stephen Armstrong was a Mason, but Neil does not know his rank.)
Even more deeply entrenched is the rumor that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam.
For the past three and a half decades, stories have been repeated all around the Muslim world that when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon, they heard a voice singing in a strange language that they did not understand. Only later, after returning to Earth, did Armstrong realize that what he heard on the lunar surface was the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. Neil then allegedly converted to Islam, moved to Lebanon (the country in the Middle East, not Lebanon, Ohio), and subsequently visited several Muslim holy places, including the Turkish masjid where Malcolm X once prayed.
The story of Armstrong’s conversion grew so far and wide by the early 1980s that, not only Armstrong himself, but also an official body of the United States government, found it necessary to respond. In March 1983, the U.S. State Department sent the following message to all embassies and consulates in the Islamic world:
Former astronaut Neil Armstrong, now in private life, has been the subject of press reports in Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia (and perhaps elsewhere) alleging his conversion to Islam during his landing on theMoon in 1969. As a result of such reports, Armstrong has received communications from individuals and religious organizations, and a feeler from at least one government, about his possible participation in Islamic activities.
While stressing his strong desire not to offend anyone or show disrespect for any religion, Armstrong has advised department that reports of his conversion to Islam are inaccurate.
If post receive queries on this matter, Armstrong requests that they politely but firmly inform querying party that he has not converted to Islam and has no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic religious activities.
Whatever help the State Department might have been in clarifying Armstrong’s views, it wasn’t enough. Requests for him to appear in Muslim countries and at Islamic events became so frequent in the mid-1980s that Neil felt compelled to act. “We were getting such a barrage of information, just inundated with questions about this, predominately from the Islamic world but also from the non-Muslim world, the latter of which was saying, ‘This can’t be true, can it?’ Finally we decided that we needed to have something official that journalists could refer to. We again used the State Department, this time to assist in setting up a telephone press conference to Cairo, Egypt, where a substantial number of journalists from the Middle East could be there to ask me questions and get my response. That way they all heard the same thing.
“Just how much that helped is impossible to know, but it certainly didn’t completely stem the questions.” Some clung to the notion that the U.S. government didn’t want their great American hero to be known as a Muslim, and thus was somehow forcing him publicly to deny his faith.
“Once I was visiting the Phi Delta Theta house at Purdue and a student came up that seemed to be living in the fraternity house. His father was a professor at Stanford. Apparently the young man was of Middle Eastern descent, and his father had told him about my conversion to Islam. So he asked me if it was true and I, of course, told him that it wasn’t true. I could tell that he thought I was lying to him. He did not believe me. He’d been convinced that I would lie about it.”
In recent years the story has even gotten embellished to include the assertion that Apollo 11 discovered that the Earth emitted radiation (which it does) and that the source of the radiation came from the Ka’ba in Mecca, proving that Mecca is “the center of the world.”
Today, Vivian White tries hard to set the record straight with a form letter that states, “The reports of his conversion to Islam and of hearing the voice of the adhan on the Moon and elsewhere are all untrue.”
Armstrong understands why such projections—phenomenal and otherwise—are made onto him. “I have found that many organizations claim me as a member, for which I am not a member, and a lot of different families—Armstrong families and others—make connections, many of which don’t exist. So many people identify with the success of Apollo. The claim about my becoming a Muslim is just an extreme version of people inevitably telling me they know somebody whom I might know.”
Armstrong, because he was so hard to know, turned out to be myth personified, an enigma prime to be filled with meaning.
In the late 1970s, Chariots of the Gods? (1969) author Erich von Däniken tried to turn Armstrong into a collaborator on his sensational (and bestselling) theory of “ancient astronauts,” extraterrestrial beings who had visited Earth in the remote past and left various archaeological traces of their civilization-building activities.
In August 1976 Armstrong had accompanied a Scottish regiment, Black Watch and the Royal Highland Fusiliers, on a scientific expedition into the vast Cueva de los Tayos (“Caves of the Oil Birds”) in a remote part of Ecuador first discovered by the Argentinian Juan Moricz.
At the time, Neil was unaware that in The Gold of the Gods, Von Däniken’s 1972 follow-up to Chariots of the Gods?, the controversial Swiss author had described his own exploration of the Cueva de los Tayos, in which he claimed to have found considerable archaeological evidence of an extraterrestrial presence, including that certain doorways in the cave were too square to have been made naturally. “But it was the conclusion of our expedition group,” relates Neil, “that they were natural formations.”
Newspaper reports of the Los Tayos expedition and Armstrong’s role in it made it clear that Von Däniken’s claims about the caves were false. In a two-page letter written to Neil from his home in Zürich, Switzerland, on February 18, 1977, Von Däniken told the world’s most famous astronaut that Armstrong’s “expedition cannot possibly have been to my cave.”
Von Däniken then urged Armstrong “to participate in a cave expedition which I am presently planning” whereby “relics from an extraterrestrial civilization—will be inspected.”
Armstrong responded politely: “Because of my Scottish ancestry, and the fact that the U.K. side of this project was largely Scottish, I was invited to act as honorary chairman of the expedition, and I accepted…. I had notread your books and did not know of any connection that you might have had with the caves. I made no statements regarding any hypotheses you may have put forth…. I appreciate your kind invitation to join you in your forthcoming expendition, but am unable to accept.”
What of “Mr. Gorsky”?
Just before reentering the LM after Apollo 11’s EVA, Armstrong supposedly made the enigmatic remark, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.” Some reporters at Mission Control attributed the remark as referencing a rival Soviet cosmonaut. However, there was no Gorsky in the Russian space program. Over the years many people questioned Armstrong as to what his statement about Mr. Gorsky meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.
The story resumes in 1995 during an address in Tampa, Florida, when Armstrong finally responde
d to a reporter’s question about the story. Mr. Gorsky had finally died, so Neil felt he could answer the question.
When he was a kid, he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. His friend hit a fly ball that landed in the front of his neighbor’s bedroom window. His neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky. As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, “Oral sex! You want oral sex?! You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the Moon!”
As a story, “Mr. Gorsky” always gets a laugh, which was what comedian Buddy Hackett was counting on when he first delivered the joke (which Hackett apparently invented) on NBC’s Tonight Show sometime around1990. In spite of the ease with which the story can be debunked, and in spite of various attempts on the Internet (a search for “Armstrong” and “Gorsky” generates 4,000 hits) to expose it for the urban legend that it has become, the story is funny enough that countless people continue to read it and pass it along, no matter its origin. “There is absolutely no truth to it. I even heard Hackett tell the story at a charity golf outing.”
Even during the time of Apollo 11, some believed that the Moon landings never really took place—that they were a fraud foisted upon the world for political reasons by the U.S. government. The Flat Earth Society maintained an active membership. But the idea of a Moon hoax picked up greatly in 1978 because of Capricorn One, a Hollywood conspiracy fantasy, not about the Moon landing, but about the first manned mission to Mars. In the tale, NASA attempted to cover for a highly defective spacecraft by forcing its astronauts before cameras in a desert film studio to act out the journey and trick the world into believing they made the trip. Though a mediocre movie, Capricorn One’s notion of a government conspiracy never fell out of favor with a small number of skeptics.
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