Quote:
Originally Posted by JayUtah
Manned space flight has from its origin had to endure UFO enthusiasts trying to pin stuff on every statement radioed down from spacecraft. The Apollo astronauts even had to choose their words carefully when reporting sighting the SLA panels precisely so that "cranks and weirdos" wouldn't deliberately misinterpret the questions.
NASA can't win. If the flight crew reports something they can't immediately identify, UFO enthusiasts assume they're reporting alien spacecraft.
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The astronauts don't even have to be reporting something they can't identify for UFO enthusiasts to start talking about alien spacecraft. During Apollo 17, at 117:58:43 GET, Gene Cernan throws some object and says, "Look at that go! Did you see that?" In the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, Cernan says that statements like this were, "later taken out of context by a writer of UFO books to 'prove' that aliens had paid them a call." At 118:39:52, he says, "And these people, or this guy, took these kinds of things out of our transcripts, out of context, and put a whole story together that was almost believable. If I hadn't been there myself, I would have thought that an alien spacecraft landed next to us and these comments were referring to that. It was amazing what you can do with editing."