THE DOCUMENT
The Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, dated 31 July 1969, prepared by the Mission Operations Branch of the Flight Crew Support Division, in two volumes. It records the post-flight debrief of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, conducted days after their return from the first crewed lunar landing. The document was originally classified Confidential, “Group 4”, marked for declassification after twelve years. Released in PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov.
Why this one is worth your time
The “Apollo 11 UFO” is one of the most repeated stories in the subject: the first men to the Moon saw something they could not explain. For decades the story travelled ahead of its paperwork. The paperwork is now public: the crew’s own post-flight debrief, recorded days after splashdown, with the sighting discussed across several pages in the crew’s own voices. Whatever version of this case you have heard, this is the document underneath it, and you can read what Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins actually said.
What the file says
What kind of document this is. A technical crew debriefing: the formal, structured session in which a returning crew walks mission staff through the flight, section by section, so lessons carry to later missions. It is dated 31 July 1969, days after splashdown, and runs to two volumes; the object material sits in the early translunar portion of Volume I, and a separate “Visual Sightings” section in Volume II revisits sightings more formally. It is shop talk: three people reconstructing an observation together, interrupting and correcting each other, and not landing anywhere tidy. The document carried a Confidential marking, the lowest classification level, on the era’s routine “Group 4” twelve-year downgrade schedule applied to crew debriefs because they discussed spacecraft systems in detail. The sightings in it are, in the document’s own words, “previously reported”.
The object. About a day out, the crew saw what Aldrin called “the first unusual thing”, with “a sizeable dimension to it”. They put a monocular on it, then the spacecraft’s sextant. Their first thought was the S-IVB, the spent third stage of their own launch vehicle: “we weren’t sure but what it might be the S-IVB”, Aldrin says. They called the ground, which placed the S-IVB 6,000 miles away. Through the monocular it “seemed to have a bit of an L shape to it”, Aldrin says, and Armstrong adds: “Like an open suitcase.” In the sextant the appearance kept changing with focus, and the three did not agree on it. Aldrin says that with the sextant off focus it “appeared to be a cylinder”; Armstrong calls it “two connected rings”; Collins answers that “it looked like a hollow cylinder to me”, that you could see it “tumbling” and “look right down in its guts”, and that with the focus changed it “would be replaced by this open-book shape”. Aldrin’s last word on the shape is that “it wasn’t a cylinder”. Armstrong added the caveat that runs under everything: the object was “right at the limit of the resolution of the eye”, and “there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size”. One candidate is set aside, in Collins’s words: “It was something that wasn’t part of the urine dump, we’re pretty sure of that.” Otherwise the crew declined to conclude. Collins then connected the sighting forward to the later jettison of the lunar module, when an explosive charge sent pieces off the LM: “It could have been some Mylar or something that had somehow come loose from the LM.” Aldrin says they thought of a panel, “but it didn’t appear to have that shape at all”. Collins closed with the line the whole document is remembered by: “In the back of my mind, I have some reason to suspect that its origin was from the spacecraft.”
The cabin flashes. Aldrin describes lying in the darkened cabin trying to sleep and seeing faint flashes, roughly one a minute, sometimes single, sometimes “double flashes” separated by about a foot, sometimes a line. He reasons in the debrief itself: “some sort of penetration… some penetration of some object into the spacecraft”. Armstrong adds it could be “a neutron or some kind of an atomic particle”. The effect was later studied formally on subsequent missions, and the standard attribution since is high-energy cosmic-ray particles passing through the eye and visual system.
The bright light near Earth. In lunar orbit and again on the way home, Aldrin saw a bright point of light the crew “tentatively ascribed to a possible laser”. In the same passage he revises it: through the monocular the source “appeared as though it was the reflection of the Sun from a relatively smooth body of water such as a lake”, and the crew, he says, “revised our initial conclusion”. The correction sits on the page next to the observation it corrects.
What the file does not say
The object was never identified, and the crew said so in terms: no conclusion on what it was, how big it was, or how far away it was. The claim the legend carries, that the crew saw a craft, appears nowhere in the document. Neither does an identification of the object as spacecraft hardware: Collins’s suspicion is a suspicion, and the debrief records it as one. The release attaches no later analysis, no tracking data and no follow-up that closes the question in either direction.
From the record
“We weren’t sure but what it might be the S-IVB.”
Buzz Aldrin, on the crew’s first guess
“Right at the limit of the resolution of the eye… there was no way to tell the size without knowing the range or the range without knowing the size.”
Neil Armstrong
“We really don’t have a conclusion as to what it might have been, how big it was, or how far away it was.”
Michael Collins
“In the back of my mind, I have some reason to suspect that its origin was from the spacecraft.”
Michael Collins
Read it yourself
PURSUE Release 01 hosts an excerpt at war.gov rather than the full debrief: the covers of both volumes, pages 6-33 to 6-39 of Volume I (the object passage and the cabin flashes) and pages 21-1 and 21-2 of Volume II (the “Visual Sightings” section).
Read the file. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and the publisher behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- Primary document: Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, Volumes I and II, Mission Operations Branch, Flight Crew Support Division, NASA, 31 July 1969, excerpt in PURSUE Release 01, hosted at war.gov
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 8, on the Apollo 17 transcript and astronauts identifying their own hardware
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 13, on the Gemini 7 “bogey” and reading a famous astronaut sighting closely
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 15, on what a classification marking does and does not certify
- Signals from the Periphery, Release 01 Briefing 1, on PURSUE Release 01 as a whole and the evidence tier system