The real story of that 'music' Apollo 10 astronauts heard at the moon
In 1969, astronauts flying around the moon on the Apollo 10 mission heard what was described then as "outer space-type music" as they came around the far side of the lunar body.
The high-pitched whistling sound was so weird that it led astronaut Gene Cernan to say "no one will believe us" at the time they heard it. The sound was probably especially weird because the astronauts were flying around the far side of the moon, where radio transmission between them and controllers on Earth was cut off.
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Today, however, Cernan has a pretty good explanation for what may have caused the moon music, and it runs contrary to many media accounts.
"I don’t remember that incident exciting me enough to take it seriously. It was probably just radio interference," Cernan told NASA Monday.
"Had we thought it was something other than that we would have briefed everyone after the flight. We never gave it another thought."
You can listen to the music yourself starting at about 2:50 in this audio clip that NASA released.
Some media reports are also claiming that NASA kept the recordings, transcripts and other material describing the music confidential until recently, but that isn't true, according to the space agency.
The documents were confidential in 1969 when the Space Race with the Soviet Union was in full-swing, but the Apollo transcripts and audio have been public since 1973, NASA said.
"Since the Internet did not exist in the Apollo era, we have only recently provided digital files for some of those earlier missions," NASA said in a somewhat snarky Tumblr post.
"The Apollo 10 audio clips were uploaded in 2012, but the mission’s audio recordings have been available at the National Archives since the early 1970s."
Much of the new, seemingly random interest in the space music recordings was likely spurred on by a new trailer for a new Science Channel episode of NASA's Unexplained Files.
The documentary series explores various mysteries in the space agency's history, and Tuesday's episode will focus in part on the Apollo 10 music.
A compelling trailer for the episode likely stoked the internet's conspiracy fires this week.
Apollo 10 basically acted as a dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 moon landing which took place that same year.
Astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young and Cernan did everything but land on the moon for the mission. The mission marked the first time a crewed Apollo space system operated at the moon, NASA said.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
