Either life imitates art or vice versa, but either way, something strange is going on. I recently wrote a satirical piece on Conspiracy Fiction explaining why 698 of the 700 or so videos of the Apollo 11 moon mission had suddenly gone missing. In it, I created a sort of fantastical scenario around Buzz Aldrin encountering some peculiar otherworldly presences on the moon. My version was extremely far-fetched, of course, but it turns out that there may be more to this story than I was consciously aware of.

The Daily Record, a UK paper, reports:

THE first men to walk on the Moon reported seeing a UFO, a new TV documentary reveals.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon’s surface after Neil Armstrong, says space agency bosses covered up their sighting.

And the Apollo 11 astronauts were also careful not to talk ab out it openly.

He said: “There was something out there, close enough to be observed, and what could it be?

“Now, obviously the three of us weren’t going to blurt out, ‘Hey, Houston, we’ve got something moving alongside of us and we don’t know what it is, you know?

“Can you tell us what it is?’

“We weren’t about to do that, because we knew that that those transmissions would be heard by all sorts of people and somebody might have demanded we turn back because of aliens or whatever the reason is.”

I was unaware of this when I wrote my piece, but I guess I’m not surprised that a story like this would come up. It’s very mythologically satisfying - whether or not you accept it as true. Apparently Aldrin first began talking about this sighting of something last year in another television special, although this is the first I’ve heard of it.