Did former astronaut Buzz Aldrin post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that the Apollo 11 mission, which allowed American astronauts to set foot on the moon for the first time, was "staged"? No, that's not true: Aldrin's official X account does not indicate that he ever made such a statement. Claims that Aldrin, who participated in the Apollo 11 mission, has called the moon landing fake or said it didn't happen have been repeatedly debunked.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on March 17, 2024. The post included an image appearing to be from Aldrin's Twitter account in 2014 and text that read: "It's time I confess; The Apollo 11 missions, which landed man for the first time on the moon, was staged, none of it was real." The caption of the post on Facebook read:
Buzz Aldrin, one of the first astronauts to land on the "moon"during Apollo 11, confessed that everything was staged and done solely to outdo Russia on that period.
And if you think it's fake go to his page on X and scroll all the way down and you'll see.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Mar 25 15:22:55 2024 UTC)
There is no evidence that Aldrin ever made this statement. Lead Stories has previously debunked claims that Aldrin said the moon landing never happened, that he admitted "we never went to the moon" and that he said the moon landing was faked.
Lead Stories also couldn't find any posts on X that matched the one cited in the post on Facebook making the claim. At the time of writing, the posts on his X account celebrate his participation in the Apollo 11 mission (archived here).
Since it wasn't clear whether the alleged Aldrin post was made on June 11, 2014, or November 6, 2014, Lead Stories used the Wayback Machine to look at Aldrin's X page archived closest to those dates (June 29, 2014, and November 11, 2014, respectively). The archived page from June 29, 2014, doesn't show any posts made on June 11, 2014, like the one that appears in the post made on Facebook. The archived pages from November 11, 2014, didn't load back far enough to see whether Aldrin made a post like the one shown in the post on Facebook on November 6, 2014.
However, per the instructions in the caption of the post made on Facebook, we searched for the purported Aldrin post on X and didn't find any results that matched the claim (archived here). The platform generated the following message in response to our query:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Mar 25 21:33:00 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories also used Google search to see if there were any credible mentions of the supposed Aldrin X post. There were only three search results: all of them were fact checks that concluded that the Aldrin X post was fake (archived here).
