Buzz Aldrin

Buzz Aldrin

Official Apollo 11 portrait, NASA S69-31743, 1969.

Real name	Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr.
Other names	Buzz Aldrin
Location	United States
Known for	Apollo 11 lunar module pilot. Second person on the Moon.
Profession	Astronaut
Teeth	1 trophy tooth from punching Bart Sibrel
NASA salary	Apollo 11. The check cleared in 1969.

This person is a glober

V • T • E

Buzz Aldrin (born Edwin Eugene Aldrin Jr., 20 January 1930) is the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot and the second person to walk on the Moon, on 20 July 1969. He is a glober in the literal sense: he went there, came back, and has spent the decades since describing the trip. Flerfs keep five interviews in which a clipped sentence sounds like he took it back. He did not. Every time, the question he was answering is still in the uncut tape, and the next sentences are him talking about having been there.

The trick is always the same. Stop the sentence on the word that sounds like a confession. Throw away the question.

When	The line they keep	What he was actually talking about
5 September 2015, National Book Festival	"Because we didn't go there."	Why crews stopped going after 1972. The next sentences are the money, and "WE did it" signs after they came back.
17 May 2000, Late Night with Conan O'Brien	"No, you didn't. There wasn't any television."	No camera filmed the touchdown. Networks used labeled animation over the real radio call.
March 2015, Oxford Union	"Scariest? It didn't happen."	There was no scariest moment. Then he tells the broken circuit-breaker story from the surface.
28 February 2016, Brian Cox at the Science Museum	"It's so well staged."	The visor photo. He means the composition, then describes Neil Armstrong taking it on the surface.
15 August 2013, Conan on TBS	"Humanity's first extraterrestrial prank."	A joke that he and Armstrong switched suits, so he was first out. The proof is a faked audio splice.

"Because we didn't go there"

On 5 September 2015, at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., Aldrin was in the children's pavilion for Welcome to Mars. An eight-year-old, Zoey, interviewed him for about seventeen minutes. The Roarbots posted it on 15 September 2015. The viral slice, the one that blew up in July 2018, starts there.

Zoey and Aldrin, National Book Festival, 5 September 2015. Her question was why nobody had been back in so long. Frame from the Roarbots upload, about 7:24.

Her question is not "did you go." It is why nobody has been back in such a long time.

Zoey: Why has nobody been to the moon in such a long time?

Aldrin: That's not an 8-year-old's question. That's my question. I want to know. But I think I know. Because we didn't go there. That's the way it happened. And if it didn't happen it's nice to know why it didn't happen so in the future if we want to keep doing something we need to know why something stopped in the past if we want to keep it going.

Money. It's a good thing. If you want to buy new things, new rockets, instead of keep doing the same thing over and over, then it's going to cost more money. And other things need more money too. So having achieved what the president wanted us to do ... and then what thousands, millions of people in America, and millions of people around the world ... You know when we toured around the world after we came back the most fascinating observation was signs that said "WE did it." Not just us. But we, the world. They felt like they were part of what we were able to do. And that made us feel very good.

That wording is Dan Evon's transcription for Snopes, 27 July 2018, of the full answer. Full Fact prints the same stretch. The ellipses are his pauses, not missing sentences. He is 85 here and the syntax is loose. "Why something stopped" is the tell. You cannot stop a program that never started. The cut usually ends on "we didn't go there" and leaves the bill for new rockets, and the world-tour signs, on the floor.

The rest of the seventeen minutes is a kid asking what space feels like, whether he was scared because nobody had been there, and what he wanted to be when he was six. None of that is a man unzipping a hoax.

"There wasn't any television"

Late Night with Conan O'Brien, aired 17 May 2000. The upload people share now is Team Coco's cut from 20 July 2020. Conan says his parents woke him to watch the landing. Aldrin says no, you didn't, because nobody had a television camera at Tranquility Base to film the touchdown.

Aldrin on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, 17 May 2000, during the landing-broadcast exchange. Frame from the Team Coco upload.

What America watched for the landing itself was network animation, cut against the real air-to-ground audio: "contact light," engine stop, then Armstrong's "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed." That is correct. CBS still has the stretch: Watch the moment men first landed on the moon, Walter Cronkite, 20 July 1969. The same coverage is on the CBS News YouTube channel: From the archives: Apollo 11 moon landing leaves Walter Cronkite speechless. The picture is the simulation of Eagle. The voices are the spacecraft. On that upload Cronkite calls the picture a simulation out loud. The Westinghouse slow-scan camera was in the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly. It did not see the landing. Armstrong deployed it on the way down the ladder, which is why the world saw the step and the walk, not the touchdown. Networks said so at the time. They had spent real money on models because they could not point a studio camera at the Moon.

Conan: Let's talk about this, because this is fascinating. I remember very clearly. I think anybody who was alive at the time does. I remember my parents waking me up and we went down and we watched you guys land on the moon.

Aldrin: No, you didn't. What? Because there wasn't any television. There wasn't anybody taking the picture. You watched animation. So you associated what you saw with...

Conan: I have very hazy memories.

Aldrin: But what we saw was, we all gathered around the old curve-top radio and listened, talking about, you know, how many feet we're going to the left and right. And then I said "contact light, engine stop," a few other things, and then Neil said "Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed." How about that? That was very exciting. Not a bad line.

Conan: Yeah. So were you self-conscious about all the, I mean, the entire Earth, you know, is watching and listening to everything that you guys do? Were you self-conscious at all about "what am I going to say, what if I say something that's kind of stupid, it's in the history books forever, like 'I want a cookie'"?

Aldrin: We were focused. You know, I was afraid that Neil might say "hey, you better go out first," and, you know, think up a couple of lines to say when you step on the moon.

The core of Aldrin's first answer is Reuters's quotation of the broadcast. The radio line and the "entire Earth" follow-up are from the same Team Coco upload. Auto-captions mangle "curve-top radio." A flerf transcript of the same stretch hears it the same way. About forty seconds after "you watched animation," Conan asks if Aldrin was nervous because the entire Earth was watching, and Aldrin talks about being afraid he would have to invent the first line on the ladder. You do not have that conversation if you have just announced the landing was a cartoon.

The rest of the segment is the urine-collection joke the upload is titled for, and then the bunny hop, which Aldrin says he did in front of the television camera that was actually on the surface.

"It didn't happen"

Oxford Union Q&A, uploaded by the Union on 6 June 2015. Full Fact and USA Today place the talk in March 2015. A woman asks for the scariest moment of the journey. He says it didn't happen. It could have been scary. Someone in the room feeds him "circuit breaker." He then spends five minutes inside the lunar module after the moonwalk.

"It didn't happen" is the scary moment, not the flight. The next story only exists if they are on the Moon with a broken breaker in the dust. The version that circulated again in 2025, including via Kim Kardashian, adds words he did not say ("there was no scary moment, 'cause it didn't happen") and drops the pen.

Audience: And what was the scariest moment of the journey?

Aldrin: Scariest? It didn't happen. It could have been scary.

Audience: Circuit breaker.

Aldrin: Oh, I'm glad somebody helps me.

We came back inside after kicking up dust and picking up some rocks. And of course we had to send them up the ladder, because that'd be hazardous, carrying a big rock box up the ladder. So we thought of that ahead of time, and we had a clothesline on a pulley so we could send that down. I sent the camera down to Neil so he could take my picture getting on down there. But then it was there so we could hook the rock box on there. That's why I got in first, see, so he could be the guy putting the rock box, and I would pull it up inside the cabin.

So we tracked a lot of dust inside. But then we were supposed to tidy up, and tidy up means get rid of stuff you don't need so you won't be as heavy to lift off. Well, the backpacks were pretty heavy. So we got in. We had to pressurize the cabin, disconnect from the backpack, hook up to the spacecraft system, and then depressurize again and throw the backpacks over. Now, there was a seismometer experiment out there, and the people back in Houston could hear those backpacks hitting the ground. They actually said they thought they could hear us on the seismometer, bouncing around on the Moon. I don't think so. We can see the tracks 40 years later with film.

Okay, so we get back in and we pressurize the cabin twice, and that's taking high pressure and low pressure. You guys in the thermodynamics, or something like that: it gets cold when you do that. Well, it got quite cold twice. So we tried to sleep, and it was very cold. Turn the heat up, put the suit on with the visors. Well, we had the suits on, put the visors over, and I said I take dibs on the floor. You know what dibs means? I volunteer to sleep on the floor. It was nice and flat there. And Neil sat down on the top of the engine cover, and he could kneel, lean back, and he was satisfied.

So of course I put my head on the right side, which is my side. The commander's side is the left. Pilot and commander, or co-pilot. So I looked down, and with all this sort of dust, there was something that didn't look like it belonged there. It was a circuit breaker. Broken circuit breaker. The end of it. You know what that means? I can see now you have circuit breakers, so you pull them out if you don't want to have that system accidentally go, like jettison the parachutes at the wrong time.

So now I got a broken one down here. I wonder what it is. So I got up, turned the light on, looked along the rows of circuit breakers, and there was one that looked like for sure it had a circuit breaker sticking out, but not anymore. It was broken off. Wonder what it said. In letters: "engine arm." Ah, that's the one. When you get ready to land you got to push it in so the engine will work, and after you land you pull it out, because you don't want that. Or the ascent engine. Yeah, you got to have the circuit breaker in for that to work. That's the one that gets us back in orbit and gets us home.

We missed a great line. "Houston, we got a problem." But that's okay. They used that line on Apollo 13. Besides, it wasn't our problem. It was their problem to figure out what we're going to do to get power, in case, pushing in that circuit breaker.

So anyway, I used a pen to push it in, because I didn't want my little finger, or a metal pen. It was felt-tip. Pushed it in two hours early and, piece of cake. No problem.

Wording follows the Oxford Union auto-captions, with the repeated lines collapsed and the obvious mishears fixed (ascent engine, felt-tip). A couple of mumbled words at the pen are smoothed. This is not a courtroom transcript. PolitiFact rates the "he said the landing didn't happen" claim false on this same answer.

"So well staged"

Science Museum, London, IMAX theatre. Professor Brian Cox. Published 28 February 2016. Cox puts up the visor picture, Apollo 11 magazine 40, frame 5903: Aldrin, with Armstrong and the lunar module in the gold visor. Aldrin says he was walking, Neil said stop, and took it immediately.

Cox: Speaking of that, we have a second picture that we wanted to talk about, which is this one from Apollo 11. And I should ask, who is that a photograph of? I suppose it's a fairly obvious answer that it would be Buzz, given the conversation we're having. But it's probably the most famous picture from the surface of the Moon, I would say. And many people say that's Neil Armstrong, but in fact it's you, and Neil in the reflection. So what was the story of that? It's probably the most iconic photograph in human history.

Aldrin: Actually, Neil was such an excellent photographer. See, I was walking along like this, and he said "hey, stop." I stopped, looked at him, and he took the picture right away. And you can see parts. Well, you can identify that I was still moving a little bit.

But people ask me, because it's so well staged. And we call it the visor picture, because the reflection in the visor will show the landing craft, and it'll show the white-suited astronaut, Neil, that took the picture. And you can see my shadow moving out. So we call that the visor picture.

But people have asked me, why is that such a perfect and iconic picture? And I've got three words: location.

Cox: You must have been asked all the time over the last decades what it was like to land on the Moon and to walk out. You've spoken about it many times, but it might be worth saying a few words about what that feels like, to come down the ladder and onto the surface of the Moon.

Aldrin: Well, we certainly knew that the pressure was going to be on us to be able to do that. Of course, to all of us, the most important thing in that mission was to make a landing. If you don't make a landing, you can't go outside. You have to do it again.

Cleaned from the Science Museum auto-captions. "Staged" here is the photographer's word: arranged, composed, the reason strangers ask why the frame is so perfect. He has just said Neil took it on the fly while Aldrin was still moving. His three-word explanation is "location." Cox's next question is what the ladder felt like. Reading the dictionary at the word "stage" and deciding he meant a soundstage requires ignoring the rest of the sentence, which is the reflection of Neil and the lunar module.

"Humanity's first extraterrestrial prank"

Team Coco posted this on 15 August 2013. A viewer ("Animation B") had caught an earlier bit that put a Batman mask on the visor photo and called the man in it Neil Armstrong. The photo is Buzz. Conan pretends the viewer is wrong, then rolls a pretaped Aldrin.

Conan: Sorry, Animation B. You are dead wrong. That is Neil Armstrong in that photo, not Buzz Aldrin. Now, you doubt me? Well, here's a message from a man who should know. The second man on the moon, Colonel Buzz Aldrin.

Aldrin: Thank you, Conan. Hey, Animation B, you're wrong, and I'm going to prove it. Let's look at the photo. You say that's me. Okay, check out the name badge. It says Aldrin. Looks like you're right. But notice the helmet. Can you see my face? No.

This is a secret I've been keeping for almost half a century. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong and I pulled off humanity's first extraterrestrial prank. Just before we left the lunar module, we switched spacesuits. You want proof? Push in on a reflection in the helmet. You can tell it's me.

This also means that I, Buzz Aldrin, was actually the first man to walk on the moon. I can prove that as well. Show the footage with state-of-the-art digitally enhanced audio.

Altered audio of the first step: That's one small step for man, one giant leap for me, Buzz Aldrin.

Aldrin: Thank you, Conan, for letting me set the record straight.

Cleaned from the upload's captions. The Facebook cut keeps "this is a secret I've been keeping" and "extraterrestrial prank," and drops Conan introducing "the second man on the moon," the suit switch, and the altered-audio punchline. Played straight, the joke says he went, and that he went first. It does not say he stayed in a studio.

The supercut

The reel that actually circulates is usually three of these glued together: the prank, "it didn't happen," and Zoey. Sometimes the 2000 animation line replaces the prank. Full Fact, Reuters, and CEDMO have all taken that reel apart.

Bart Sibrel gets stapled on the end of some of them. That is not one of these interviews. On 9 September 2002, outside a Beverly Hills hotel, Sibrel called Aldrin a coward and a thief, shoved a Bible at him, and demanded he swear he walked on the Moon. Aldrin told him to get a lawyer and punched him. A court later called it self-defense. Refusing a harassment stunt is not the same sentence as "we faked it."

See also

• Moon landings
• Full Zoey interview (17 minutes)
• Full 17 May 2000 Conan segment
• Full Oxford Union Q&A (about 64 minutes)
• Full Brian Cox / Science Museum talk
• Full 2013 Conan prank