Buzz Aldrin Describes His 'UFO' Encounter During Apollo 11

Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. walks on the surface of the moon, July 30, 1969, with seismogaphic equipment which he just set up. The flag like object on a pole is a solar wind experiment and in the background is the Lunar Landing Module.

"Engineer, American astronaut, and the second person to walk on the moon during the Apollo 11 moon landing" Buzz Aldrin participated July 8 in a Reddit AMA for the promotion of the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, happening on July 20.

He touched on a sensitive topic: his apparent admission that he and other astronauts had seen a UFO during the Apollo 11 mission.

This is an old favorite of internet UFO conspiracy theorists (and, sadly, the Science Channel), who are convinced that Buzz Aldrin saw an alien ship of some kind during the Apollo 11 ride and that he's been covering it up and hiding that he's a UFO believer.

According to an article on OpenMinds (a UFO truther website):

In an interview on the Science Channel in 2005, Apollo astronaut "Buzz" Aldrin said that the crew of the famous Apollo 11 mission had seen a UFO on their way to the moon. However, later Aldrin would say that his words were taken out of context, even though his story was supported on the program by senior Apollo 11 scientist, Dr. David Baker. Aldrin has also made other strange statements that some believe allude to Aldrin knowing more about an extraterrestrial presence in space than he would like to share.

The Science Channel show, "First on the Moon: The Untold Story" spurred a lot of talk about Buzz Aldrin's UFO-friendly leanings. Aldrin clarified what he saw during the July 8 AMA:

On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world - it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be "unidentified."

We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network. And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that i had not given them the information. It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That's what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost CERTAIN that there is life somewhere in space. It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today.

But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away.

To be fair, this has all been out there for awhile. Aldrin even appeared on "Larry King" to discuss it. After the Science Channel clip came out, NASA's David Morrison checked in on Aldrin in response to an "Ask an Astrobiologist" question:

I just talked to Buzz Aldrin on the phone, and he notes that the quotations were taken out of context and did not convey the intended meaning ... Apparently all of this discussion about the panels was cut from the broadcast interview, thus giving the impression that they had seen a UFO.