Buzz Aldrin's name has resurfaced in an unexpected corner of the news cycle this week, after newly released Pentagon UFO files in Washington revealed that the Apollo 11 astronaut reported seeing 'strange lights' and at least one sizeable object during the 1969 mission to the moon.
The fresh material comes fromdeclassified Defence Department records on unidentified anomalous phenomena, released on the orders of US President Donald Trump. Among hundreds of videos, photos and transcripts, the documents include post‑mission debriefing notes in which Aldrin calmly described three separate, unusual visual events on the way to the lunar surface and while trying to sleep inside the Apollo 11 cabin.
Buzz Aldrin described 'unusual' phenomena during Apollo 11 mission, UFO docs revealhttps://t.co/E4EIilCo9Hpic.twitter.com/t2x9KIKy6x
The first incident Aldrin recalled occurred roughly a day out from Earth, as the spacecraft was heading towards the moon. In the debriefing, he said, 'The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was one day out or something pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it.'
The language is typically measured. There is no talk of 'aliens,' no melodrama, just an experienced test pilot noting an object large enough to warrant a closer look. What that object was remains unspecified in the documents now in the public domain.
Aldrin went on to describe what he called an accumulation of odd observations over the next nights in space. He was trying to sleep, he said, with the lights out in the cramped Apollo 11 cabin when something began to nag at his attention.
'The other observation that I made accumulated gradually. I don't know whether I saw it the first night, but I'm sure I saw it the second night,' he told the post‑flight interviewers. 'I was trying to go to sleep with all the lights out. I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart.'
Buzz Aldrin’s secret UFO files revealed as astronaut spotted 'strange lights' on Moon missionhttps://t.co/k3DMz8xrFNpic.twitter.com/EBSadXJncG
Again, there is no leap to an extraordinary explanation. Aldrin describes what he saw, notes that it repeated every few minutes and leaves it on the record. The newly released Pentagon files, as cited in Daily Star, do not include a NASA engineering breakdown of possible causes such as cosmic rays, static discharges or reflections. Without those, anyone trying to retrofit a definitive answer is guessing.
Aldrin also reported a separate bright light that caught the crew's attention. 'I observed what appeared to be a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser,' he said. The use of the word 'tentatively' is doing quiet work there. Apollo astronauts and ground controllers were used to hunting for prosaic explanations before anything else, and the debriefing suggests the crew themselves were looking for a technical cause.
Source: International Business Times UK
