Although it is said that in the vacuum of space, silence reigns supreme, recently declassified NASA audiotapes have revealed that the Apollo 10 astronauts heard what sounded like weird music while conducting their mission. One astronaut described what they were hearing as “outer space type music.”
ABC News reported February 22 that astronauts Eugene Cernan and John Young can be heard on the NASA audiotapes discussing the strange whistling-like music they were experiencing. The Apollo 10 astronauts’ mission was to orbit the moon, sort of as a practice run for the upcoming attempt to land on the moon. Carried out in May 1969, the astronauts were on the far side of the moon where NASA could not track or hear them. However, their conversations aboard ship were taped. And as the Science Channel’s “NASA’s Unexplained Files,” which uncovered the intriguing conversation concerning possible “music,” have noted, the astronauts thought that the sounds being heard might be some sort of music.
On the audiotapes (transcripts of which can be found archived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center website), Cernan and Young can be heard talking about a “whistling sound” and “weird music.” Then one of the astronauts says, “Sound like, you know, outer-space type music.”
That kind of music of which the astronaut spoke was likely the sort of music popularized in science fiction shows and movies of the time. Often produced with a theremin (an electronic musical instrument invented in 1928) or some electronically synthesized sound (such as with a Moog synthesizer), the sound is oscillatory and wave-like in pitch and has become quite cliche in campy movies regarding the paranormal. But in the science fiction serials and radio shows, the sound could represent anything from some form of communication to the sound of a weapon or some futuristic device.
According to ABC News, one NASA technician posits that the weird music was caused by interference between two radios from two different spacecraft. “NASA’s Unexplained Files” offers that possible solutions to the mystery include a magnetic field or atmospheric interference. But as experts on the show explain, the moon is bereft of a magnetic field and its atmosphere is nearly nonexistent and would be unable to cause interference issues.
The Daily Mail asked cheekily if the astronauts might have been hearing Pink Floyd (because they were on The Dark Side Of The Moon). The media outlet described the sound as about an hour — the time it took the Apollo 10 capsule to traverse the far side of the moon — of “unearthly howling.” However, unless some form of time travel exists, the Pink Floyd classic would not be heard for nearly four more years. (Note: Of course, the English band had produced two albums and would release the soundtrack to the movie “More” in June of 1969, just a month after the Apollo 10 mission, so, technically, Cernan and Young could have heard Pink Floyd, just not The Dark Side Of The Moon.)
The Apollo missions provided scientists and the public with countless phenomena that begs to be scientifically explained. And much of it can be clinically analyzed and understood. Still, some things, such as the Apollo 10’s weird music and photos that captured UFO images during the Gemini 11 and 12 missions, have been difficult for NASA to simply and definitively explain away.