Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the Moon, alongside Neil Armstrong, during the Apollo 11 Moon landing, part of the Apollo 11 mission.1 His legal name is “Buzz”, as it appears on his passport and driving licence.2 During the descent of the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on 1969-07-20, Aldrin called out the distances the craft was moving left and right,3 and at touchdown said “contact light, engine stop”,4 after which Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed."5 Aldrin later said he regarded the line as a good one.6 He said the crew had been focused rather than worried about what they would say during the landing,7 though he also said he had been afraid Armstrong might tell him to go out onto the lunar surface first and think up his own words for the moment.8 There was no live television picture of the landing itself; what viewers watched at that moment was animation.9 On the surface, Aldrin became the first man to relieve himself on the Moon;10 since an astronaut could not unzip the suit to urinate, the crew used a device for this instead.11 In the Apollo 11 footage, Aldrin is the astronaut seen hopping up and down on the lunar surface,12 a two-feet-at-a-time move he calls a kangaroo hop rather than a bunny hop,13 performed to demonstrate on television how easily a person could move around on the lunar surface.14
Aldrin also handled the Lunar Module’s star-alignment procedure. Armstrong later said that from the surface neither he nor Aldrin could see any stars through Eagle’s window, though Armstrong could see Earth through the overhead rendezvous window and Aldrin intended to try to see stars through the optics.15 During the descent, Aldrin radioed that Tranquility was standing by for a go on Abort Guidance System (AGS) to Primary Guidance Navigation and Control System (PGNS) alignment and a lunar alignment.16 In his 1969 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) technical debrief, Aldrin disputed NASA’s official position on the Alignment Optical Telescope,17 stating that the procedure was to get a gravity direction, perform a two-star alignment, and check the torquing angles afterward to indicate drift since the last alignment, with the combined gravity and two-star alignment producing a new location for the landing site.18 Had Eagle landed straight ahead instead of yawed 13 degrees to the left, Aldrin had intended to use Rigel in the left detent and Capella in the right;19 the yaw moved Capella out of the right-rear detent, so Aldrin used Rigel first,20 before selecting Navi in the right-rear detent and finding it dim and slow to yield marks.21 Aldrin’s signature appears on the Apollo 11 star chart used in Eagle to triangulate its position on the surface.22 In Mike Bara’s assessment, Aldrin was using the telescope to look in the vicinity of Sirius while it passed through 19.5 degrees over the Tranquility Base landing site.23
In a July 2006 programme on the Science Channel, Aldrin admitted to and described the Apollo 11 crew’s encounter with a UFO.24 He described it as a double ellipse or bell-shaped object that seemed to pace the spacecraft for hours,25 and said that neither Armstrong nor Mike Collins believed it was anywhere near as far away as the S-IVB stage.26 Aldrin said he had feared the crew would be ordered home before the Moon landing if they discussed the object on an open broadcast channel,27 and he did not say whether a debriefing about it actually took place after the mission’s return to Earth.28
Aldrin performed a “communion ceremony” in Eagle before he and Armstrong made their first steps on the Moon.29 In his autobiography Men From Earth, Aldrin describes a small religious offering he made a short time after landing:30 on the surface, he took communion using a small amount of wine and a wafer, reading from a card on which he had written the portion of the Book of John used in the traditional ceremony.31 Aldrin later said Armstrong did not share his enthusiasm for the ceremony, looking on with an expression of faint disdain.32 The ceremony was taken from Webster Presbyterian Church rituals in Houston, which had in turn borrowed it from the Catholic communion ceremony.33 Richard C. Hoagland, however, believes its real roots lay in ancient Egypt, as an offering to Osiris.34 Hoagland and Ken Johnston used transcripts from the Apollo 11 mission logs to reconstruct the post-landing procedures, and determined that the ceremony took place precisely thirty-three minutes after touchdown.35 Aldrin himself radioed a message at Mission Elapsed Time 105:25:38 - three hours and forty-one minutes after Eagle’s landing, at approximately 23:59 UTC on 1969-07-20 - asking listeners to pause and give thanks;36 according to Mike Bara, a roughly nine-minute communications break followed, during which the astronauts likely performed the ceremony and ate their pre-Extra Vehicular Activity meal.37 According to Dark Mission, Sirius was positioned at 19.5 degrees elevation during the ceremony, rather than on the meridian or horizon.38 Hoagland believes this timing was deliberate, with Sirius representing Isis.39 He also found that Alnilam, the middle star of Orion’s belt, was exactly on the horizon as the ceremony concluded.40
Aldrin was a 32nd-degree Scottish Rite Freemason at the time of Apollo 11, according to Ken Johnston, who held the same degree.41 He belonged to the Scottish Rite Southern Jurisdiction, which controlled lodges in Washington DC, Houston, Florida, Alabama and every other major city with a significant NASA manned space flight facility.42 Aldrin took a Scottish Rite 33rd degree apron with him to the Moon,43 along with the official flag of the Supreme Council 33 degrees, Southern Jurisdiction, bearing the Scottish Rite’s double-headed eagle, aboard Eagle.44 Upon returning, Aldrin personally delivered the apron and flag to Luther A. Smith, then Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, at the Scottish Rite Temple in Washington DC, in a solemn ceremony.45 According to Dark Mission, the Grand Lodge of Texas has claimed that Aldrin staked a claim to the Moon in the name of Freemasonry through a ritual performed during one of the Apollo extra-vehicular activities.46 When Aldrin posed for the official Apollo 11 crew portrait, he made sure his Masonic signet ring was prominently visible,47 wearing it rather than his wedding ring;48 Hoagland has said that most sources crop the portrait to disguise the ring.49
In a C-SPAN appearance on 2009-07-22, Aldrin said there is a Monolith on Phobos, Mars’s moon,50 which he described as potato-shaped51 and orbiting Mars once every seven hours.52 Asked about its origin, Aldrin said he considered the universe a possible source,53 and God another.54 Responding to a caller’s question on a C-SPAN programme, Aldrin also said there were artificial structures on the Moon, namely the Lunar Modules and equipment left behind by the astronauts,55 and that he considered any attempt to investigate the kind of ruins alleged by Hoagland on the Moon a waste of time.56 Aldrin and Marvin Czarnik had been friends since the mid-1960s, when they worked together on NASA’s rendezvous and docking mission rules.57 According to Dark Mission, Czarnik related a story through a mutual friend in the late 1990s that Aldrin, asked about rumours of UFOs and strange ruins on the Moon during a round of golf, picked up his clubs and stomped off the course, and had not spoken to the friend since.58 In his autobiography Return to Earth, Aldrin recounts that during an early-1970s interview with the Palmdale Kiwanis Club in California, he was asked what it felt like to be on the Moon and was overcome with a panic attack, forcing him to abandon the interview and rush from the stage;59 he says he became violently ill in the alleyway behind the club afterward.60 In a 1999 interview with Salon.com, Aldrin said he had been frustrated since the day he left the Moon by the question of how it felt to walk there, and that he did not know how to answer it.61 He recalls watching a video tape of the television coverage of his own spacewalk with Armstrong while the two were in quarantine, and turning to Armstrong to say “Look: We missed the whole thing."62 Hoagland has said that Aldrin continued to struggle with an inability to remember certain parts of the Apollo 11 mission in the years since.63 During a 2001-04-13 interview with SPACE.com, Arthur C. Clarke made remarks about life on Mars while Aldrin listened;64 Aldrin did not comment on Clarke’s claim about photographic evidence of life on Mars, and instead raised the topic of zero-point energy.65 Aldrin said he believed it may take 200 to 400 years, but that zero-point energy would be needed to reach Alpha Centauri,66 and he asked Clarke to confirm his agreement with that view.67 Clarke said he was glad that Aldrin had raised the controversial question of zero-point energy.68