The phantom story of the Apollo 11 alien encounter...
Besides the large crowd of deniers who stubbornly dispute the engineering feasibility of the lunar missions, as already explained in other chapters, there is a second and equally fanciful branch of conspiracy thinking: the UFO faction. According to this story, worthy of the plot of a sci-fi B-movie, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin not only really landed on the Moon, but at the very moment they set the Lunar Module down in the Sea of Tranquility, they noticed (is it possible they hadn't seen them from above while flying in toward the landing site?) that a row of gigantic alien spaceships was lined up on the rim of a nearby crater, watching them. In support of this dizzying thesis, the ancient astronaut theorists and the most extreme ufologists invariably cite an alleged secret radio intercept, in which Armstrong's terrified voice supposedly reported to Houston's Mission Control Center these disturbing words: "These babies are huge, sir... they're here on the lunar surface with us, they're watching us!!!". This sensational "revelation", periodically recycled by sensationalist tabloids and authors looking for easy sales, crashes miserably against the hard documentary reality, the physics of telecommunications and the rock-solid structure of NASA's flight protocols . A grotesque detail that immediately exposes the fabricated nature of this alleged audio recording is the very language used. In the conspiracy tape, Armstrong can be heard formally addressing the person he is talking to as "sir", as if he were reporting to a senior military officer or to a supreme government authority in a moment of total subjection. In the reality of the strict flight procedures of Houston's Mission Control Center , the only person authorized to speak directly by radio with the crew in space was the CAPCOM (Capsule Communicator). This pivotal role was never filled by a flight controller, a bureaucrat, a politician or a military officer, but strictly by another astronaut, a colleague qualified to fly the same mission and often a close friend of the crew. This choice was dictated by the absolute need to ensure clear, technically flawless communication free of unnecessary and dangerous hierarchical tension. The conversations between the lunar explorers and the CAPCOM (who during the dramatic minutes of the Apollo 11 landing was Charles Duke, and at other times Bruce McCandless or Owen Garriott) were marked by deep familiarity, pragmatic exchanges and often informal jokes to ease the stress. Imagining a cool-headed test pilot like Armstrong who, losing control, addresses a peer formally as "sir" is not only procedurally false, but psychologically ridiculous , and it betrays the obvious Hollywood script of whoever concocted the fake audio!
To pull this urban legend up by its roots, the most lethal and definitive tool available to any researcher is the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (ALSJ), together with its twin, the Apollo Flight Journal. These are not censored government summaries, but monumental public historical archives, meticulously curated by space historians and aerospace engineers, containing the complete, uninterrupted transcripts of all air-to-ground radio communications, the onboard conversations and the telemetry logs of every single Apollo mission. In these thousands of pages of cold, rigorous technical documentation, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, there is no trace of aliens, hostile spaceships or scenes of panic. Every single word spoken by the astronauts is recorded, time-stamped to the second (Time-Elapsed) and often accompanied by the original audio. There is no time gap, no sudden interruption and no anomaly in the tapes that could physically hold a secret conversation about a close encounter of the third kind...
Faced with this rock-solid absence of evidence in the official tapes, conspiracy theorists usually pull out the argument of the so-called "secret medical channel", a real procedural detail that they love to twist to their advantage. It is historically true, and should by no means be hidden, that NASA had a protocol called Private Medical Communication (PMC). During the 
The DSE, or Data Storage Equipment, of the Apollo Command Module. It was a magnetic tape recorder that stored the spacecraft's telemetry and the crew's intercom conversations when there was no radio contact with the MCC on Earth, and then transmitted them once the signal was reacquired. Confidential communications such as Private Medical Communications (PMC) could be stored on this tape. Photo courtesy of www.spaceaholic.comApollo 8 mission, for example, commander Frank Borman was struck by an unpleasant bout of "space sickness", with nausea and diarrhea and his clinical symptoms were reported to Earth using this procedure so as not to alarm or embarrass the crew in front of a worldwide audience. Deniers cling to this precedent to claim that Armstrong, during the landing, used the same encrypted frequency to report the alien sighting without being heard by millions of viewers. This deduction, however, makes no technical or electronic sense , because it confuses mundane administrative censorship with sophisticated military encryption. The medical channel was not a separate and invisible radio circuit. When a live voice PMC was activated, NASA's public affairs officer in Houston simply flipped the switch on the audio feed going to the press room and the television networks. This censorship switch, moreover, had not been designed to hide cosmic secrets, but met a much more down-to-earth social need: avoiding broadcasting to the world any offensive language or curses that could understandably slip out of the crew during dramatic, very high-stress phases of the mission. At the time, the use of foul language by astronauts was strictly forbidden; NASA was a civilian agency funded with taxpayers' money and a considerable part of the nation, particularly puritanical and sensitive, might have been scandalized, politically calling into question the funding of the program. A glaring example was the Apollo 10 mission: when, during the approach to the lunar surface, the Lunar Module began to lurch and spin violently and unexpectedly because of a switch left in the wrong position, pilot Eugene Cernan let slip a colorful and now famous expletive that horrified the right-thinking public on Earth, confirming the vital need for a "mute button" for the public relations staff. For this reason, sensitive data, such as the symptoms of any illness or indisposition, were recorded on the onboard tape recorder and downloaded later through a quick telemetry dump. But the radio wave itself, transmitted in S-band by the spacecraft, traveled freely, unencrypted and analogically identical through deep space toward Earth. The whole Earth! Any voice transmission inevitably passed through that same main carrier. The large tracking radio telescopes around the world, including the highly sophisticated listening centers of the Soviet KGB in Crimea or independent stations (amateur ones too), listened directly to the raw space signal at the source, bypassing any switch in Houston. If Armstrong had really whispered about alien spaceships using the medical procedure, the Soviet Union would have intercepted the conversation in real time and would immediately have used it to ridicule or expose the degenerate capitalists before the whole world. But, funnily enough, that never happened...
The origin of this UFO hoax lies, as so often, in the malicious distortion of a real and perfectly explainable event that took place during Apollo 11's translunar outbound journey. While they were more than three hundred thousand kilometers from Earth, the crew did notice a distant bright object flashing intermittently, outside the window. With the icy pragmatism typical of test pilots, Armstrong and his crewmates did not shout about flying saucers, but called Houston's Mission Control to ask for the exact coordinates of the third stage of their Saturn V rocket (the S-IVB stage), which was traveling on a nearby trajectory. When Mission Control confirmed that the S-IVB was more than 10,000 km away and in a completely different direction, the astronauts immediately understood what they were looking at from a rough observation of the object through the telescope of the onboard navigation station. Even though they could not focus on it properly because it was too far away, they realized from its rotating "L" shape that it was most likely one of the four giant adapter panels (SLA panels) that originally enclosed the Lunar Module during launch and had been jettisoned by special pyrotechnic separation lines during the extraction maneuver of the intrepid lunar spacecraft. Those aluminum panels, now drifting in the exceptionally clear vacuum of deep space, tumbled chaotically, periodically reflecting the harsh sunlight and creating the optical illusion of a pulsating light. The crew deliberately worded their request to Houston in a neutral, technical way, carefully avoiding the word "object" so as not to give ammunition to journalists looking for UFO sensationalism.
In the years following the achievement, countless charlatans have tried to put fake confessions about alien bases and extraterrestrial threats into the mouths of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, doctoring old interviews ad hoc or making them up from scratch. For decades, and to the end of their days, both astronauts categorically denied these inventions, consistently and with palpable annoyance. The Apollo 11 achievement was an absolute masterpiece of courage, ballistic calculation and extreme engineering, carried out in a sterile, magnificently desolate and irretrievably dead environment. Polluting this triumph of scientific rationality by adding alleged spaceships crouching behind craters is not only a historical falsehood established by the telemetry data, but above all a disrespectful attempt to steal the spotlight from the greatest and most authentic human achievement of all time!
