so of course, we wondered what it could be. Certainly, we could see all sorts of stars outside, but traveling along close to us was this mysterious object. We could see it, but we couldn’t identify what it was, so in that sense, whatever it was, I suppose it could technically be described as an “unidentified flying object.”
Mike thought he could see the object with a telescope. When it was in one position, it looked like a series of ellipses, but when he looked at it from another, sharper view, it looked more L-shaped, so that didn’t tell us very much.
We were wary but nonetheless reluctant to blurt, “Hey, Houston, we have something moving along beside us, and we don’t know what it is. Can you tell us what that might be?”
We knew our transmissions were being heard not only by Mission Control, but by millions of other people as well. We were four-fifths of the way to our goal; we certainly didn’t want to endanger our mission or have to turn back now because somebody might be afraid that we would encounter aliens.
Neil calmly spoke to Mission Control, “Houston, do you have any idea where the S-IV-B is with respect to us?” The S-IV-B was the final stage of the rocket that had been jettisoned two days earlier, several hours after we had launched from Cape Canaveral, when we had made a midcourse correction that sent us off in the direction of the Moon. On later missions, that stage of the rocket would be sent crashing into the Moon so scientists could study the seismic effects, but on our mission, the discarded rocket made an evasive move to miss the Moon and continued on its way toward the Sun.
Houston reported back to us, “The S-IV-B is about 6,000 nautical miles from you. Over.”
Hmm, 6,000 miles away? If that was so, then what we were seeing couldn’t be the discarded fourth stage of our rocket. We didn’t think that the object following us was that far away, but we decided that because we could do nothing, we might as well go to sleep and not worry about it.
Of course, people who are convinced that aliens and extraterrestrials exist contend that we were being tracked by a UFO. It certainly seemed that way.
NASA encouraged Neil, Mike, and me not to talk about the strange object we saw in space for fear of public ridicule. We tacitly agreed, and despite the hopes of people wanting us to confirm the existence of a UFO, we kept our comments to ourselves. But we all knew that we saw something!
So if three fairly intelligent human beings, all of whom had flown in space previously, agreed that we saw something outside our window, something that appeared to be a UFO, that should be evidence enough for the existence of UFOs, right?
Not necessarily. Remember, things aren’t always as they seem.
All sorts of suggestions have been posed to explain the unidentified flying object that we three Apollo 11 astronauts saw with our own eyes. Some have even suggested that it was another spacecraft, sent up by Russia to keep an eye on us around the same time as our mission. That was ridiculous. How Russia could launch a rocket to the Moon without our noticing is totally incomprehensible to me.
Ruling out the outrageous possibility that we were being followed by a spacecraft from another country, we were left to believe that the object we saw was either the jettisoned S-IV-B section of our own spacecraft, or possibly one or more of the four panels that peeled away when we extracted the lunar module (LM)—the vehicle in which Neil and I would land on the Moon—from our command and service vehicle. In moving the LM, the command vehicle in which Mike, Neil, and I were traveling was nose to nose with the LM for a while, and the four panels that had protected the LM fell away in four separate directions. With the Sun reflecting off one of the panels, still moving along with our spacecraft, it seemed as though a brightly lit object was following us. Which of the four panels? I don’t know, so technically, there was an “unidentified flying object” in our rearview mirror.
After Neil, Mike, and I returned to Earth, we were debriefed by NASA scientists, and we mentioned the odd encounter with the unidentified flying object. NASA made little to-do about it, and we were thrilled with so many other aspects of the Apollo