Folklore
Soon after the mission a conspiracy theory arose that the landing was a hoax but this notion is widely discounted by historians and scientists. It may have gained more popularity after the movie Capricorn One (1978) portrayed a fictional NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars.
An urban legend suggests that they were being 'watched' while on the Moon and had seen alien vehicles in space. This grew in popularity after the book Somebody Else Is on the Moon was published. Aldrin did spot an unidentified object travelling relative to them late in the third day of the mission. After learning from Mission Control that it couldn't be the S-IVB stage, since that was 6,000 nautical miles (11,000 km) away, they concluded that it was most likely one of four panels that had linked the spacecraft and the upper stage. Later popular accounts often described this as a "UFO sighting" or claimed the widely reported incident had been "covered up."
At age 76, astronaut Buzz Aldrin said in a television documentary, "There was something out there, close enough to be observed, and what could it be?... Now, obviously the three of us weren't going to blurt out, 'Hey, Houston, we've got something moving alongside of us and we don't know what it is', you know?... We knew that those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people and somebody might have demanded we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is." They may have seen the Luna 15 spacecraft which the Soviet Union had launched at about the same time as Apollo 11.
There is a humorous and ribald urban legend that when Armstrong was a child, the wife of a neighbour named Gorsky, when asked by her husband to perform oral sex, had ridiculed him by saying "...when the kid next door walks on the moon!" and then decades later whilst walking on the moon Armstrong supposedly said "Good luck Mr. Gorsky", but nothing about this anecdote is true. In 1995 Armstrong said he first heard the story in California when comedian Buddy Hackett told it as a joke. This urban legend quote has been used in a humorous reference at the opening scene of Watchmen.
Read more about this topic: Apollo 11 In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word folklore:
“Someday soon, we hope that all middle and high school will have required courses in child rearing for girls and boys to help prepare them for one of the most important and rewarding tasks of their adulthood: being a parent. Most of us become parents in our lifetime and it is not acceptable for young people to be steeped in ignorance or questionable folklore when they begin their critical journey as mothers and fathers.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio—remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales—we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)