Apollo 11 was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission that first landed a crewed vehicle on the Moon, carried out under a programme President John Fitzgerald Kennedy formally announced to a Joint Session of Congress on 1961-05-25.1 The Apollo, Project Mercury and Project Gemini names had been approved at a NASA conference in July 1960.2 During the descent to the Moon, Neil Armstrong took manual control of the Lunar Module Eagle (Apollo 11 Lunar Module) and flew it to a landing site roughly 8 kilometres further downrange than planned, over a crater surrounded by rocks.3 In doing so he came within a few seconds of having to abort and return to orbit as the module’s fuel supply was nearly exhausted.4 The resulting uncertainty over the exact landing location took several weeks to resolve after the crew returned and were debriefed, prompting NASA to refine its landing procedures for Apollo 12.5 Eagle later rejoined the Command Module Columbia (Apollo 11 Command Module) in lunar orbit for the return to Earth.6
In a 2006 Science Channel programme, Buzz Aldrin said the Apollo 11 crew encountered a UFO during the flight, which he described as a double ellipse or bell-shaped object that appeared to pace the spacecraft for hours.7, 8 According to secondhand testimony, the crew observed the object at length through the onboard telescope in Columbia because they were concerned about it, and asked NASA to relay the position of the discarded S-IVB (Apollo 11 discarded third stage), which mission control reported as approximately 9,700 kilometres away and well behind them.9, 10, 11 Aldrin said that neither Armstrong nor Mike Collins believed the object was anywhere near as far away as the S-IVB.12 According to the same secondhand account, the crew agreed to say nothing further about the object over the open broadcast channel to Houston until their post-mission debriefing, for fear that raising it in flight could disrupt the mission; Aldrin separately said he feared the crew would be ordered home before the landing if they discussed it openly.13, 14 Aldrin did not state whether that debriefing about the object ever took place.15
The Moon landing itself, on 1969-07-20 at USA, Texas, Tranquility Base (Moon), was broadcast to the world, though Aldrin has said there was no live television picture at the actual moment of touchdown - what viewers saw was animation.16 The lunar surface footage was sent from an antenna on the Lunar Module to three tracking stations: Goldstone Tracking Station in California and the Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes facilities in Australia, in a format called Slow Scan Television (SSTV).17, 18 Because this signal could not be broadcast directly, RCA built a Slow Scan Converter to produce a viewable feed, but the conversion reduced the resulting broadcast picture to only 262.5 vertical lines of resolution.19, 20 After the mission the original SSTV tapes were shipped to the USA, Maryland, Greenbelt, Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and, in 1970, moved to the US National Archives under Accession #69A4099.21, 22 None of the original tapes has ever been found: a group of enthusiasts that included some of the original tracking-station engineers searched for them over several years without success, and a story about the missing high-quality recordings broke in the national media in mid-2006.23, 24, 25
Apollo 11 also recurs in the graph through Richard C. Hoagland, who served as science advisor to Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) News Special Events and chief correspondent Walter Cronkite during the mission’s coverage.26 Hoagland has said that the Moon-landing-hoax conspiracy theory dates back as far as the Apollo 11 mission itself, a claim illustrated by an unidentified man who distributed a mimeographed broadsheet on 1969-07-22, while the astronauts were still roughly halfway home, alleging that NASA had filmed the landing on a soundstage in Nevada.27, 28 Hoagland’s broader interpretation of Apollo 11 and the wider Apollo programme in terms of Osiris symbolism and ancient Egyptian alignments is a separate line of argument developed at length in his writing and is treated on its own topic page rather than here. Three days after leaving lunar orbit, the crew splashed down in the USA, Pacific Ocean, South Pacific splashdown zone.29 The mission remains a reference point invoked elsewhere in UAP discussion, including a comparison drawn between Lunar Module docking manoeuvres and footage examined decades later, and continues to be cited in the Moon landing hoax conspiracy theory literature, with figures such as Ken Johnston associated with subsequent research into its photographic and documentary record.