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It was interesting to note Aldrin's careful and measured responses when any suggestion of 'Aliens' came about...
Unfortunately the actual question from the host was not included in the clip
Interesting how Kerry's question has been edited out, and buzz's curt and premeditated reponse is the ony thing represented!
I then endeavoured to find this interview in full; but was unsuccessful ( which then brought me to thinking CONSPIRACY).
If you can get your hands on the original full interview, you will surely find the true gravity of the question that Kerry O'brien put forth.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Five years later, you went up on Gemini XII and set a spacewalk record of five and a half hours. How big a step was it to reach the moon and actually land there just three years later.
BUZZ ALDRIN: Well, it's a tremendous step from 200, 300 miles above the surface of the Earth, to going through the radiation belts and proceeding a quarter of a million miles to the gravity field of another object, establishing orbital paths with the attraction of the moon as the centre of our orbital motion, and then going around that and making a landing. And that's not the end of it, because you have to do - execute a rendezvous, a complicated series of manoeuvres to join up with the method that you have to get back home again. Now, all these building blocks were exercised very nicely in that Gemini program between Mercury and Apollo, and it gave us continuity of progression of achievements. And that was something that was sort of improvised on the spur of the moment.
...
KERRY O'BRIEN: However focused you were on what you had to do as you reached the moon, there must have been an element of the surreal in it all for you. Was there?
BUZZ ALDRIN: That's a very good descriptive word - the surreal. There was a reality, certainly we knew that, but at the same time, and I can't use the word alien because that gets people off on their own thoughts. But I think the words that I did use of "magnificent desolation" and the contrast of the achievement of humanity to evolve to that state of accomplishment of being able to put two creatures from the Earth up there, out there, on top of the moon that people had been looking at for centuries and centuries.
But then to find out what a desolate, lifeless spot it was, and just to think that for centuries and centuries, it hadn't changed at all, what we were looking at. Just been the same stillness, light lit by the sun for 13 and a half days, then blackness of night for 13 and a half. And it gets very hot and very cold. It's not a hospitable place at all.
KERRY O'BRIEN: You've talked subsequently about what you referred to as the trauma of being put on a pedestal. You'd think some people might lap up the glory, but you found it tough.
The real rub here is that currently Gravwave, LLC is in China (with Dr. Baker, the great US scientist) building for China a High Frequency Gravitational Wave Generator (as well as a detector). Why on Earth would we send OUR top scientist to build something for them that we haven't built yet for ourselves?
And the REAL kicker? Why did Buzz Aldrin get quoted as saying, "The next man on the moon will speak Chinese"?