Documents / Official release
This is the Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, dated July 31, 1969 and prepared by the Mission Operations Branch, Flight Crew Support Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It is a confidential transcript. In it, Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins describe a bright L-shaped object seen about a day out from the Moon, which they could not identify and suspected came from the spacecraft. They also report light flashes inside the cabin and a bright light from Earth that was probably a reflection off a lake.
From the source:Release of 2026-05-08 Apollo 11 was the third crewed mission to the Moon and the first to land Astronauts on the lunar surface. This document is an excerpt from the Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing (Volumes 1 and 2) from July 31, 1969. The document highlights three observations: one, an object on the way out to the Moon; two, flashes of light inside the cabin; and three, a sighting on the return trip of a bright light tentatively assumed by the crew to be a laser. • Page 6-33 (Vol. 1). [Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin]: “The first unusual thing that we saw I guess was 1 day out or something pretty close to the moon. It had a sizeable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it.” The crew speculated that it could have been the S-IVB stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle. • Page 6-37 (Vol. 1). [Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin] “The other observation that I made accumulated gradually. I don’t know whether I saw it the first night, but I’m sure I saw it the second night. I was trying to go to sleep with all the lights out. I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart…” • Page 21-1 (Vol. 2). [Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 11, Buzz Aldrin] “I observed what appeared to be a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed to a possible laser.”
# CONFIDENTIAL ## 21.0 VISUAL SIGHTINGS ## ARMSTRONG Most of the items in Section 21, Visual Sightings, have been previously reported. ## 21.4 TRANSLUNAR AND TRANSEARTH FLIGHT ## ALDRIN There was only one minor observation returning from the Moon. Looking back at it, at a time after Mars had passed behind the Moon, there was one time period where I imagined that the image of Mars was coming from a region where it couldn't come from, because it was in a dark portion of the Moon. This obviously was an optical illusion of some sort. ARMSTRONG I suspect that it was, in fact, just immediately adjacent to the horizon. ALDRIN We must have looked at it immediately after it had come from the back side. ARMSTRONG Yes. ## 21.5 LUNAR ORBIT ALDRIN In lunar orbit, following ascent, we did note and mention to the ground that approaching CDH when the Earth came up above the lunar horizon, I observed what appeared to be a fairly bright light source which we tentatively ascribed CONFIDENTIAL
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 11 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.