Did astronaut Neil Armstrong once say he saw UFOs and aliens on the moon? No, that's not true: The claim is completely fabricated. There is zero evidence that Armstrong ever told anyone that he saw UFOs and aliens on the moon, and no evidence or documentation is given in a post making the claim. Buzz Aldrin said in 2014 that he did not see an alien but did see a "light" outside the window that "technically, the definition could be 'unidentified,'" but clarified that it was panels that moved away from the spacecraft.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) where it was published on Facebook on June 19, 2024, under the title "Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin revealed what they truly saw on the moon! #neilarmstrong #buzzaldrin #moon #learnontiktok #conspiracytiktok". It opened:
Just moments before his passing, Neil Armstrong revealed what they truly saw on the moon.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Jun 25 20:05:12 2024 UTC)
The video claims astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin, who flew together on the Apollo 11 mission, saw unidentified flying objects and aliens on the moon. The claim comes at 48 seconds into the video:
This is when they saw it. Three round flying objects were seen in the distance going inside of a mountain and eventually gray figures were reported to be walking out of the mountain on two feet. Aldrin stated that they looked to be like mutated humans with balloon shaped heads. The two were terrified and immediately went back on board the rocket just as connection was regained with scientists.
Here are screenshots of the animated images of the UFOs and aliens from the video:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Jun 25 20:08:43 2024 UTC)
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Tue Jun 25 20:10:11 2024 UTC)
There is no evidence that Armstrong ever said that he saw aliens on the moon, as a Google search using keywords shows. Had he made the comment shortly before his 2012 death, it would have been national and international news.
Aldrin has spoken about seeing an object outside the Apollo 11 spacecraft. He participated in an "Ask Me Anything" forum on Reddit in July 2014, where he answered the question about seeing something outside of the ordinary on the mission. Here is his answer in its entirety:
On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us. There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world - it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft. So in the close vicinity, moving away, were 4 panels. And i feel absolutely convinced that we were looking at the sun reflected off of one of these panels. Which one? I don't know. So technically, the definition could be "unidentified."
We well understood exactly what that was. And when we returned, we debriefed and explained exactly what we had observed. And I felt that this had been distributed to the outside world, the outside audience, and apparently it wasn't, and so many years later, I had the time in an interview to disclose these observations, on another country's television network. And the UFO people in the United States were very very angry with me, that i had not given them the information. It was not an alien. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence. That's what Carl Sagan said. There may be aliens in our Milky Way galaxy, and there are billions of other galaxies. The probability is almost CERTAIN that there is life somewhere in space. It was not that remarkable, that special, that unusual, that life here on earth evolved gradually, slowly, to where we are today.
But the distances involved in where some evidence of life may be, they may be hundreds of light years away.
Here is a video of Aldrin's appearance on CNN's "Larry King Live" show on CNN in 2007 posted on YouTube where he spoke about the sighting:
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims concerning Neil Armstrong can be found here, and fact checks on claims concerning Buzz Aldrin can be found here.
A similar claim was reviewed by Reuters in 2021.
