Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [140]
In recent years I’ve been approached by as many as ten separate television production companies and high-profile television producers who want to develop a space “reality” show or a competitive game show similar to American Idol, along the lines of Who Wants to Be an Astronaut? If we can put the right ingredients together, who knows? I might get back into space yet! But, even better, I’m working to find a way to give you a chance to travel in space!
20
A BLOW HEARD
’ROUND the WORLD
LIKE MOST AMERICANS, I’M QUITE SKEPTICAL ABOUT CONspiracy theories. I’m someone who has dealt with the exact science of space rendezvous and orbital mechanics, so to have someone approach me and seriously suggest that Neil, Mike, and I never actually went to the moon—that the entire trip had been staged in a sound studio someplace—has to rank among the most ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard. Yet somehow the media has given credence to some of the kooky people espousing such theories, and my fellow astronauts and I have had to put up with the consequences.
This is almost a no-win situation. If you ignore the panderers of nonsense, they say, “See! Buzz is afraid of the truth.” If you attempt to correct their error, you automatically lend undeserved credibility to their ridiculous suppositions. I am passionate about passing down accurate history to the next generation, so I must confess that I’ve had little patience with the conspiracy nuts. To me, they waste everybody’s time and energy.
Nevertheless, since I’m probably the most publicly visible of all the astronauts who walked on the moon, I get more of the close encounters of a kooky kind than my colleagues, although any one of them has a collection of stories they could share as well.
Because of the publicity the hoax theorists have garnered, occasionally even in a serious interview a reporter will broach the subject. One September morning in 2002, I was in Beverly Hills at the Luxe Hotel, filming a television interview for a Far Eastern TV network, when the interview began going in a direction that I knew was out of bounds. At first I tried to be cordial, adroitly answering the question, assuming that the interviewer would recognize my reluctance to talk about inanity, and bring the focus back to a bona fide space subject. Instead the interviewer began playing a television segment that had aired in the United States on the subject of hoaxes, including a section suggesting that the Apollo 11 moon landing never happened. I was aware of the piece and had been livid when it originally aired. I did not appreciate the interviewer’s attempts to lure me into commenting on it. Lisa had accompanied me to the interview following her early morning triathlon training in the Santa Monica Bay, and she immediately recognized that this was a flagrant violation of our willingness to conduct the interview in good faith, so she called a halt to the production. We weren’t belligerent, but we did not linger long over our good-byes, either.
We left the hotel room and walked down the hall to catch the elevator, only a matter of seconds away. I pressed the button for the ground level, and Lisa and I looked at each other and smiled. It had been a strange morning already. When the elevator doors opened on the ground level, it got worse.
As we stepped out into the hotel foyer, a large man who looked to be in his mid-thirties approached me, attempting to engage me in conversation. “Hey, Buzz, how are you?” He had his own film crew along, with the camera already rolling to document the encounter.
I greeted him briefly, acknowledging his presence, and kept moving— standard procedure for life in Hollywood. As Lisa and I walked through the foyer toward the front door of the hotel, however, the man kept getting in my way, peppering me with questions, none of which I answered. Lisa took my arm and glared at the man. “That’s enough,” she said, as I could