I'm glad someone else remembers John Glenn's "constelation Urine."
Virtually every sighted human being who has looked up at the sky has seen something up there that they weren't able to identify. By definition those are all "unidentified flying objects."
Buzz Aldrin doesn't say he saw a flying saucer. He says they saw something close enough to observe which they couldn't identify, ergo it's a UFO. I'll bet the way he phrases the "we didn't tell anybody" comment makes it clear that he knew it was nothing, but that fruitcakes would claim it was an alien and try to force them to come back.
I've met and spoken briefly with Aldrin. He's one of the most clear headed engineers I've ever run across. No nonsense at all. That's why I was so offended by the way he was portrayed in From The Earth To The Moon. Tom Hanks couldn't resist at least one attack on a great person for simply daring to express his belief in God and Jesus Christ.
You said it well. There's nothing here about a flying saucer. I'm not in the least surprised that up there where we had not been before, didn't know exactly what to expect that an astronaut would see something that he couldn't identify.
Didn't Gordo Cooper also have some experience? Seems to me he became quite religious as a result. Wasn't that in the Right Stuff?
I would assume an Occam's Razor treatment of an UFO sighting to be one of the myriad objects that fall (can something fall in zero G? what would the verb be?), eject, or are otherwise shed in the process of spaceflight as it occurred in the 60's and 70's. We do need to consider that these guys are promoting their film so of course the teasers will exxagerate. But unless Aldrin contends that the object maneuvered, it is hard to assume it was an alien spacecraft as the colloquial usage of UFO implies.
I remember there were discussions at the time of the Apollo 11 mission, that they saw something. The speculation at the time was that they were seeing sunlight reflect off the SIVB third stage of Saturn V rocket. The third stage had an engine that got them to earth orbit and could be refired for what they called translunar injection. It also housed the Lunar Module in a shroud which the Command Module extracted after docking with the LM. To get it out of the way, Mission Control fired the third stage engine after the LM's extraction and sent it out of the way of the CM/LM combination. Later Apollo missions actually crashed the third stage into the moon to generate seismic waves for the seismographic package Apollo 11 left behind.
Enroute to the moon during TLI, they reported seeing an object that appeared to be flying parallel to their trajectory and asked it it might be the SIVB, but no one had any good answers. All this is in the public record mission transcripts. They saw something and it was never identified. There was also some speculation that it might have been a Soviet Luna probe that was trying to beat the US astronauts to the moon landing with an unmanned sample-return mission.
There are also accounts of VHF channel comms with Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon that were overheard by HAM radio operators on earth about UFOs. These transmissions were not encrypted, but were on channels not provided for the media's use. Such channels were used so an astronaut could discuss medical or technical issues with some degree of privacy.
Aside from the Apollo 11 crew, Mercury astronauts Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, Gemini crews Ed White and James McDivitt, James Lovell and Frank Borman, among other reported seeing unidentified objects in the vicinity of their spacecraft during missions. Other astronauts, during their careers as pilots also reported seeing them.
I'm completely neutral on the whole UFO thing. So long as any potential extraterrestrials don't carry me or my kids away in the night, they're welcome to fly around and do acrobatics in the sky. It's always an interesting discussion. The reason we go into space is to look for others like us. If the point was go out and look for rocks with fossils of bacteria in them, the space program would be rather pointless. I'd personally be pleased to find out that NASA may have gotten some encouragement from "out there."
Tom Hanks couldn't resist at least one attack on a great person for simply daring to express his belief in God and Jesus Christ.
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I agree entirely. Very hideous. I've lost most of whatever respect he earned with Forest Gump.
I can identify the sun, moon, big dipper, North Star, Little Dipper, Venus, the ecliptic and the "Seven Sisters". Everything else up there is a UFO.
What was the attack?