Where did the weird, outer-spacey music that Apollo 10’s astronauts heard on the far side of the moon come from? The case was solved decades ago. Or was it???
“NASA’s Unexplained Files,” airing on the Science Channel, leaves the mystery hanging in a show that’s due to air this season. The program also makes it sound as if the case was hushed up until 2008, for fear that its disclosure would unsettle the public.
“Shall we tell them about it?” astronaut John Young is heard saying on an audio recording. Crewmate Gene Cernan replies, “I don’t know. We ought to think about it some.”
The show’s narrator says the mystery continues to this day. “I suspect there’s a very, very clear cause of what they heard on Apollo 10, which maybe we haven’t uncovered yet, ” Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden says in an interview.
But the way NASA and other Apollo astronauts tell it, the mystery was solved soon after Apollo 10’s crew returned from their 1969 round-the-moon trip: They say the “woo-woo” music was VHF interference between the radios on the command module and the lunar landing module.
Far from being hushed up, the crew’s chatter has been included in publicly available mission transcripts and audio files since 1973, although NASA waited until 2012 to digitize the audio for its Internet archives.
#Apollo10 transcripts here for years: https://t.co/gHrrR0lxWr Audio uploaded in 2012: https://t.co/F8X8vaT4J2 (2/2) pic.twitter.com/hro7L8dYdG
— NASA History Office (@NASAhistory) February 22, 2016
The astronauts for the Apollo 11 moon landing – which came two months after Apollo 10 – were told about the VHF moon music before their launch. And it’s a good thing they got the word.
“Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared the hell out of me,” Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins wrote in his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”
Chalk this up as another Apollo X-Files case that needs to be re-debunked, alongside the Apollo 11 UFO sighting and the alien spacecraft and structures purportedly seen on the moon’s surface.
