Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing, 1969

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CONFIDENTIAL

6-37

ALDRIN

The other observation that I made accumulated gradually. I don't know whether I saw it the first night, but I'm sure I saw it the second night. I was trying to go to sleep with all the lights out. I observed what I thought were little flashes inside the cabin, spaced a couple of minutes apart and I didn't think too much about it other than just note in my mind that they continued to be there. I couldn't explain why my eye would see these flashes. During transearth coast, we had more time and I devoted more opportunity to investigating what this could have been. It was at that point that I was able to observe on two different occasions that, instead of observing just one flash, I could see double flashes, at points separated by maybe a foot. At other times, I could see a line with no direction of motion and the only thing that comes to my mind is that this is some sort of penetration. At least that's my guess, without much to support it; some penetration of some object into the spacecraft that causes an emission as it enters the cabin itself. Sometimes it was one flash on entering. Possibly departing from an entirely different part of the cabin, outside the field of view. The double flashes appeared to have an entry and then impact on something such as the struts. For a while, I thought it might have been

CONFIDENTIAL