"Their ships were far superior to ours"

A certain professor, who wished to remain anonymous, was engaged in a discussion with Neil Armstrong during a NASA symposium.
Professor: What REALLY happened out there with Apollo 11?
Armstrong: It was incredible, of course we had always known there was a possibility, the fact is, we were warned off! (by the Aliens). There was never any question then of a space station or a moon city.
Professor: How do you mean "warned off"?
Armstrong: I can't go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology. Boy, were they big! ... and menacing! No, there is no question of a space station.
Professor: But NASA had other missions after Apollo 11?
Armstrong: Naturally, NASA was committed at that time and couldn't risk panic on Earth. But it really was a quick scoop and back again.

        The above is a made-up fantasy. No conversation even remotely like it ever happened. Yesterday I was googling around, as you do, trying to pin down the origin of this piece of UFO flim-flam. I failed, because it's been taken up, believed, and re-posted by just about every crackpot and cock-and-bull UFOsite on the net.

Above Top Secret first re-posted it on 3 August 2015. OneBigMonkey, who also comments here, quite rightly called it a complete fabrication.
See also: snopes.com >  Urban Legends > Questionable Quotes re-posted in Oct 2014.
UFOblogger 2009
circusbuoy  March 2015
Disclose.tv, UFO Casebook, The Alien Presence, Richard Dolan undated
Alien UFO Sightings attributed the quote to Buzz Aldrin, undated.

And that brings me to Linda Moulton Howe
        People who browse LMH's web presence, and/or who listen to her monthly reports on Coast-to-Coast AM, probably know that she is not a reliable source, notwithstanding her slew of awards^{note 1} for documentary television. Linda's problem is that she's gullible. Like Robert Morningstar, she'll believe anything that portrays NASA as a deceptive agency that tells lies. Like Robert Morningstar, she routinely ignores the heroism of the Apollo astronauts (managers and engineers, too, let's face it) in favor of daft rumors about "what really happened." These people are in love with the idea that they're in possession of arcane information that most people aren't aware of.

        So it wasn't much of a surprise, to me at least, when she resurrected this piece of dreck last Thursday night, attributing the quote to Buzz Aldrin in an interview for Atlantic Productions on 29 July 2015^{note 2}. It's also on her web site, if you scroll far enough.

Update 8 July:
Linda has now removed it.

        She also re-tells the old, old story of the "UFO" that followed Apollo 11 on its trans-lunar trajectory (she refers to the S-IVB rocket stage incorrectly as the 1-SB.) She writes of Aldrin:

"Now, he’s come forward and said it was a light that got close enough. It had size and shape to it and followed them all the way to the moon! It was some kind of craft or something like that."

        Buzz Aldrin has done nothing of the sort.  He has always stated that the object was an SLA panel^{note 3}, and it was only visible for a short time, NOT all the way to the Moon.

        By sheer coincidence, I came across a wonderful picture yesterday.

Know what that is? Here's the official description:

"A unique view of the Apollo 13 CSLM: the center dot is the Apollo 13 Command/Service/Lunar Module (CSLM) as seen [from] Table Mountain through the 24-inch telescope. The four dots around the CSLM are the tumbling SLA panels. The diagonal jagged white lines crossing the picture from the lower left to the upper right are star trails during the 5 minute exposure. The actual exposure was taken by guiding on the distant S-IVB upper last stage spent rocket body of the Saturn V launch vehicle. This was very difficult, since the brightness of the S-IVB was extremely faint in the 1200X magnification guide eyepiece, thus the jagged star trailed images."

        So there you have it. SLA panels did indeed "follow" the CSLM for a while. Not surprisingly, since  they would have been given the exact same impetus by the Translunar Injection burn of the S-IVB. They would eventually diverge because of the very small additional thrust they would have had from the explosive bolts that detached them.

Does Linda Moulton Howe have any shame? I doubt it.

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[1] As a former TV documentary producer myself, I can let you in on a secret. We're ALL award-winners. It's really just a matter of filling out a form and entering your work for festival showings. You need to enclose a fat check, of course.

[2] Here she surely must be referring to Apollo 11: The Untold Story. This 60-min docco featured Aldrin, was produced by Atlantic, and aired on the Discovery Science Channel. However, that was 2006, not 2015.

[3] SLA = Spacecraft Lunar Module Adaptor. A semi-conical shroud that protected the LM during launch. Once en route to the Moon, it was discarded. The CSM then detached, turned around, and extracted the LM.