In May 1969, Apollo 10 launched a hands-on test mission for the first human landing on the lunar surface. The mission was successful, with a crew of three orbiting the Moon for more than 10 hours and a lunar landing module detaching and reassembling.
The astronauts reported that when alone on the far side of the Moon, they heard a whistling sound that one of the astronauts described as “sounds like space music.” The sounds recorded by the cameras on Apollo 10 were not made public for nearly 50 years.
According to the transcripts of the recordings, Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan talked among themselves about the eerie sound they heard:
“Cernan: Wow!
Young: Did you hear that whistle too?
Cernan: Yes. It sounds – you know, like space music.
Young: I wonder what happened.”
NASA warned Apollo 11 crews to watch out for the sounds, including Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, who flew the command module alone as Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon’s surface.
“Right now I have a strange sound in my earphones, an eerie woo-woo,” writes Collins in his book Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. ) scared me a lot.”
This sound started after the Lunar module (LM) left the main module and ended when the module landed on the Moon. Fortunately, the source of the sound had already been disclosed when Collins heard this noise, which, as expected, had emerged as NASA had disconnected for an hour.
“Radio technicians (rather than UFO fans) had a ready explanation for this,” Collins writes. “(That voice) was interference between the VHF radios of the LM and the Command Module.”
NASA confirmed this statement when it released video footage in 2016.
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