If you’ve been listening to Daft Punk’s new album Random Access Memories lately, you may have noticed that at the start of the song Contact there’s an astronaut talking about some sort of UFO in space. Who’s talking, and is it a genuine transcript?Well, apparently Daft Punk actually asked for a transcript to use at the start of the song, so NASA gave them this excerpt from the Apollo 17 mission. The person talking in the song is Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17, as he along with fellow astronauts Jack Schmitt and Ronald Evans made their way to the Moon in December 1972. Here’s the quote in full:
Cernan: “Hey Bob I’m looking at what Jack was talking about and it’s definitely not a particle that’s nearby. It is a bright object and it’s obviously rotating because it’s flashing, it’s way out in the distance, certainly rotating in a very rhythmic fashion because the flashes come around almost on time. As we look back at the earth it’s up at about 11 o’clock, about maybe ten or twelve diame…Earth diameters. I don’t know whether that does you any good, but there’s something out there.”
And the song (just a fan video synched up with 2001, but it's pretty appropriate )
[video=youtube_share;FbCTG0-PkRA]http://youtu.be/FbCTG0-PkRA[/video]
060:45:46 Armstrong: Do you have any idea where the S-IVB is with respect to us?
[The crew have noticed an unexplained flashing object out of the window, which appears to be catching the sunlight as it tumbles. Neil is wondering whether it is the abandoned third stage of the Saturn launch vehicle.]
060:45:50 Duke: Stand by.
[Long comm break.]
PAO: This is Apollo Control at 60 hours, 47 minutes. We just got a call from the spacecraft requesting that we give them the position of the S-IVB in respect to the spacecraft and we're currently coming up with that bit of information, so we'll stand by.
060:49:02 Duke: Apollo 11, Houston. The S-IVB's about 6,000 nautical miles from you now. Over. [Pause.]
060:49:14 Armstrong: Okay. Thank you.
[The answer from Mission Control indicates that the mystery object is highly unlikley to be the S-IVB stage, given its great distance from Apollo 11. Although the object's identity was never resolved, it is quite possible that it is one of the SLA panels which covered the Lunar Module during launch.] [Aldrin, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "Of course, we were seeing all sorts of little objects going by at the various dumps and then we happened to see this one brighter object going by. We couldn't think of anything else it could be other than the S-IVB. We looked at it through the monocular and it seemed to have a bit of an L shape to it."]
[Armstrong, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "Like an open suitcase."]
[Aldrin, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "We were in PTC at the time so each one of us had a chance to take a look at this and it certainly seemed to be within our vicinity and of a very sizeable dimension."]
[Armstrong, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "We should say that it was right at the limit of the resolution of the eye. It was very difficult to tell just what shape it was. And there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size."]
[Aldrin, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "So then I got down in the LEB and started looking for it in the optics. We were grossly mislead because with the sextant off focus what we saw appeared to be a cylinder."]
[Armstrong, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "Or really two rings."]
[Aldrin, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "Yes."]
[Armstrong, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "Two rings. Two connected rings."]
[Collins, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "No, it looked like a hollow cylinder to me. It didn't look like two connected rings. You could see this thing tumbling and, when it came around end-on, you could look right down in its guts. It was a hollow cylinder. But then you could change the focus on the sextant and it would be replaced by this open-book shape. It was really weird."]
[Aldrin, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "I guess there's not too much more to say about it other than it wasn't a cylinder."]
[Collins, from the 1969 Technical Debrief - "It was during the period when we thought it was a cylinder that we inquired about the S-IVB and we'd almost convinced ourselves that's what it had to be. But we don't have any more conclusions than that really. The fact that we didn't see it much past this one time period - we really don't have a conclusion as to what it might have been, how big it was, or how far away it was. It was something that wasn't part of the urine dump, we're pretty sure of that."]
[MP3 audio file. 1,556 kB.]
Myth: Armstrong observed UFOs on the way to the moon, and again once he was down on the surface.
Fact: Most Apollo crews on the way to the moon noticed flashing lights "pacing" them, which turned out to be segments of their Saturn 5 launch vehicle, and especially the four panels of the "LM garage," which got jettisoned soon after launch.
"Secret moon transcripts" from science fiction writer Otto Binder and in tabloid newspapers of that era seem to have been entirely fabricated, since amateur radio operators back on Earth independently monitored many of the actual transmissions and heard the same things that NASA officially released live.
