UFO buzzed Apollo 11!

July 25, 2006 at 10:06 AM

Astronaut hero Buzz Aldrin says a mysterious flying object shadowed the first manned mission to the Moon in 1969, according to a shocking new documentary.

"There was something out there, close enough to be observed," says Aldrin in "Apollo 11: The Untold Story," which will be broadcast tonight by Britain's Channel Five.

"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? 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."

Aldrin says NASA covered up the UFO encounter. The Apollo 11 mission of July 1969 remains the highlight of manned space exploration, 37 years later.

It's just the latest bizarre news to come from mankind's first visit to the Moon.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that 698 of 700 boxes of Apollo 11 videotape has vanished. The boxes held high-quality footage of the landing, but all but two boxes mysteriously went missing from the U.S. National Archives.

The super high-quality "slow scan" mission footage was recorded to special 1-inch magnetic tape. The only machines that can play the tape are at Goddard Space Flight Center's Data Evaluation Lab ... which is being closed and dismantled by the government in October.

Apollo astronauts had been pleading with NASA to locate the tape and digitally transfer it so historians and scientists could study the high-quality footage. What the world saw on television was a heavily compressed and degraded version of the real video that hid all detail.