From http://www.moondaily.com/reports/First_Men...Lander_999.html

The first men on the Moon had to use a pen to fix a broken switch on their lunar module and return home to Earth, British newspaper the Daily Mirror reported Monday ahead of a new television documentary.

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon, and Buzz Aldrin, his fellow astronaut, accidentally snapped off the switch of a circuit breaker, and found they could not take off without it.

Aldrin then jammed a ballpoint pen into the hole where the switch had been, allowing the astronauts' lunar module Eagle to leave the surface of the Moon.

According to the documentary "Apollo 11: The Untold Story", to be aired Monday on Britain's Channel Five television, the US was so eager to beat the Soviet Union to putting a man on the Moon, it launched its historic 1969 mission before it was completely prepared.

Then-president Richard Nixon even prepared an address to the nation announcing the deaths of Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins.

"In looking around at some of the lunar dust on the floor, I discovered something that really didn't belong there -- a broken end of a circuit breaker," Aldrin told Channel Five in excerpts printed in the Daily Mirror.

"In the countdown procedure I used a pen, one of several that we had on board that didn't have metal on the end, and we used that to push the circuit breaker in."

The documentary also shows how the US government ordered NASA to cut links with the astronauts if disaster was imminent, not wanting the world to watch images of American astronauts spinning off into space.

Aldrin revealed how the astronauts believed they saw an unidentified flying object during the flight as well, adding that NASA covered it up for thirty years.

"There was something out there that was close enough to be observed," Aldrin said.

I've heard of that address before. As far as I know, such addresses were routinely made in the case that something catastrophic happened.

You forgot to add the part of the article perpetuating the myth that
A&A saw UFOs while descending to the lunar surface and that their
descriptions were excised from the official NASA transcripts, of course.

For those who saw the program, what was its quality, exactly?

There was quite a buzz in the German media about the "news" of the broken switch, too. But, as is often the case the media sell old hats as new ones. The story about the broken switch can be read in Aldrin's book "Men From Earth" that he published about 17 years ago. You can also read about this in a student interview he gave in 1998: http://teacher.scholastic.com/space/apollo11/interview.htm
There are many other old sources available.
Obviously, some publicity was needed for the documentary...

Michael

I think if they were talking about UFOs, that answers your question.

Well - I liked the Honda advert in the middle of it. The one with the choir and the Civic.

The documentary itself was fairly shoddy to be honest - making massive death defying mountains out of barely a molehill

Doug

I hit the Mute button - it was then, a MUCH better program!

More science-drama slop for the masses i'm afraid.

Nick

I've seen the thing before, and watched through it again last night. It's not very good, gets some facts a little bit wrong, and spins a lot of the real facts to make things appear a lot more sensational than they really were.

For example, they discussed the crew seeing one of their SLA panels on the first night out, and wondering what it was. Aldrin talked about seing it, described what it looked like, etc. But at the end of that segment, the narrator intoned, "The exact identity of the object was never determined for certain. So, the crew had company from a UFO as they went on to the Moon."

Fact is, the object they saw was identified as almost definitely being a SLA panel. They even showed film of the same phenomenon that they said was shot on a different mission -- and on that mission, it, too, was ID'd as a SLA panel.

The object was identified as "most probably" a SLA panel, and the writers on this show glommed on to the fact that it was not identified "without question" to plug the UNidentified label on it, thus making it (technically) a UFO. They never even mentioned that it was identified as "most likely" a SLA panel -- that would have made their claim to UFOs following Apollo 11 sound like what they are, a bunch of b.s.

There were other rather severe exaggerations -- claims that the Apollo escape tower could not have saved a crew from an exploding Saturn V, claims that the "light flash" phenomenon was potentially deadly, claims that the program alarms on descent caused the LM to veer wildly and go far off course (that last was illustrated by the portion of the descent film from the planned yaw-around, trying to enhance an untrue claim with a falsely-sequenced and labeled film clip)... I could go on and on.

It wasn't well done, it was poorly written and poorly researched... but it had a lot of nice footage. Nick was right, it was better with mute button ON.

-the other Doug

And this differs from most space-related mainstream press coverage, how?

Heck -- I can't even tell you how it differs from *any* main-stream media coverage of, well, anything...

-the other Doug

technical UFOs? It sounds like "technical healing" for a patient who died of the treatment.

How to create a technical UFO (inspirited by dvandorn post):

1) start from a real observation which was not explained immediately
2) report it as unexplained
3) when it is explained later, don't mention it, or
3 bis) take a likely explanation as no explanation
4) years after, unearth it.
5) As the witness and responsibles don't remember or don't comment this insignificant event, say there is censorship. No risk, there are real examples of censorship
6) publish it in a mystery series or in "speculative science".
7) keep quoting 2) in the literature, avoiding thoroughly to give hints to allow to find 3)


The implications of real UFOs and technical UFOs are not exactly the same.

Real UFOs would mean that:
-there are intelligent beings out there in space
-there are science domains which are unknown to us
-the promise of a better life

Technical UFOs mean that:
-there are stupid beings down here on Earth
-there are sciences domains which are unknown to many
-the obstacles to a better life.


In the instance, an uncertain but likely explanation (SLA Panel) is enough, as there is no indication that anything more extraordinary happened. If the object was observed changing of trajectory, this explanation would not hold, so that it would be realy unexplained. This kind of reasoning is the basis of serious ufology.