Not surprisingly, one of Armstrong’s boyhood heroes was Charles A. Lindbergh. Neil first met Lindbergh along with his wife, Anne, at the launch of Apollo 8. “I was given the job of helping with touring him around and taking him and showing him the facilities. The night before the launch, I took him out to look at the Saturn V; it was all illuminated with the xenon lights. As Frank Borman’s backup, I couldn’t spend more than just a little time with him.” At the launch, Janet also had a chance to meet the Lindberghs. “I thought Anne Morrow was just fabulous. I had read her book Gift from the Sea. Neil’s mother had given me a copy after Karen’s death. Anne’s description of the Apollo 8 launch, published in Life, was in my mind the only one that was able to communicate what it was really like to see and feel a liftoff.” Lindbergh himself was quoted as saying, “I have never experienced such a sense of power.”
Lindbergh biographer A. Scott Berg has written, “Lindbergh accepted an invitation from Neil A. Armstrong to attend the launch of Apollo 11 . . . quietly attending the event with his son Jon.” Neil does not specifically remember inviting the man whom friends called “Slim”: “I might have. Once we got into quarantine, the crew couldn’t be bothered anymore, so we never really knew who came and who didn’t.” Most likely, Armstrong did ask Lindbergh to come, because he attended, later calling the successful Moon landing a “fascinating, extraordinary, and beautifully executed mission.” Lindbergh, however, refused President Nixon’s invitation to accompany him to the USS Hornet for the astronauts’ recovery, later explaining: “My declining was based on the fact that I spent close to a quarter century . . . achieving a position in which I could live, work, and travel under normal conditions.” Apollo 11’s splashdown would naturally “attract the greatest concentration of publicity in the history of the world.”
Privately, Neil had the chance to talk with Slim “several times” following Apollo 11. “We both went to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots meeting in Los Angeles in late September 1969. He was being inducted as an honorary fellow, and we were seated next to each other at the banquet.” The two fliers also corresponded, as Neil would later do with Anne Morrow before and after Neil came to cochair the Lindbergh Memorial Fund. Lindbergh posed to Neil the rhetorical question: “I wonder if you felt on the Moon’s surface as I did after landing at Paris in 1927—that I would like to have had more chance to look around.”
Following Lindbergh’s death in 1974, when Armstrong was frequently asked to compare the historic flight of 1927 and the Moon landing, he’d note, “There are certain similarities in the two events.”
It was Armstrong’s conclusion, however, that “they are probably more unlike than alike—most important because General Lindbergh’s achievement was very individual. There were a limited number of people involved—just a financier, some investors, and him. In the case of Apollo it was an effort of national will, one in which hundreds of thousands of people were involved. We faced different degrees of complexity, but I wouldn’t make light of the general’s accomplishment. He had mastered the technology of his day no less than we mastered ours. One reason his flight was so well received is that many different kinds of people were trying to accomplish the same thing. We pretty much had the Moon to ourselves.”
The inevitable next question was an uncomfortable one for Neil: how the First Man and “Lucky Lindy” compared on the public adoration front. “I’m not called upon as much as I used to be,” Neil remarked in 1976, “but enough so I do understand his predicament.”
At the SETP banquet in September 1969, Lindbergh had offered Neil one, and only one, piece of advice: “He told me never to sign autographs.
“Unfortunately I didn’t take his advice for thirty years, and I probably should have.”
• • •
During the eight years he was at the University of Cincinnati, most of Armstrong’s fan mail came through the campus post office, his only well-known address. “That was a bit of an uncomfortable thing for me because the majority of the correspondence that I received was from people I didn’t know and the majority of that, ninety-eight percent of them, wanted something. Not more than two percent had anything at all to do with the university, so the university was forced to spend resources supporting all that mail, including a special secretary.39 Generally we didn’t get that kind of mail at home because most people didn’t know our home address.”
When he left the university, Neil soon realized that handling his mail on his own was an impossible burden. In February 1980 he rented a small office on Broadway in Lebanon, Ohio, then “I had my accountant put an ad in the paper, not with my name on it,” for an administrative aide.40 Vivian White of Lebanon had worked in the local real estate business for twenty-eight years as well as being a part-time secretary for the mayor of Lebanon. Vivian “worked out very well, a very good choice,” in part because, as Vivian explains, “I don’t ask! That has been my policy all along. You can tell what a private person he is, and I just made it a point that I don’t ask him anything that I don’t need to know to do my job.
“He didn’t even have any furniture in the office when we started. We sat down at a folding card table and he asked me a few questions, and he just happened to ask me things that I knew!” Then “he and his son Mark carried my furniture down the street and put it in this bare office.”
White worked full-time for about ten years; after that, she “cut back” to four and a half days a week. Armstrong’s countless correspondents received form letters that he himself composed.
“For the first twelve to fifteen years, he would sign anything he was asked to sign, except a first-day cover. Sometimes a letter would come in and I would think, ‘That name looks kind of familiar. I think this guy asked before.’ So I would go back through the files and check to see if Neil had signed for this guy before. If so, I would just send it back unsigned. Then about 1993, he realized that his autographs were being sold over the Internet. Many of the signatures, he found, were forgeries. So he just quit signing. Still, we get letters saying, ‘I know Mr. Armstrong doesn’t sign anymore, but would you ask him to make an exception for me?’ ”
Since 1993, form letters under Vivian’s signature have gone out in answer to 99 percent of the requests, which she categorizes into eleven boxes. First is “I want an autograph or an autographed picture,” second, “I want a congratulatory letter for becoming an Eagle Scout.” A third is individual youth requests for information about piloting or space exploration, a fourth for similar requests coming from entire classes. A fifth comes from students seeking astronaut qualifications. A sixth asks for donations or contributions for a charitable auction. A seventh responds to invitations for specific events, an eighth for requests for speaking engagements, a ninth for queries from authors wanting a foreword to their book. A tenth category handles media interview requests. Nearly all are declined via standardized letter. In the few instances that Armstrong accepts the invitation, he composes and signs a personal letter. If he chooses to answer someone’s technical question, according to White, “he will write out his answer, I’ll type it up and then put underneath it, ‘Mr. Armstrong asked me to give you the following information,’ and I sign it.
“We never answer personal questions—they’re just too much an invasion of privacy.” They go into “File Eleven,” the wastebasket.
On the outbound journey to the Sea of Tranquility from aboard Columbia, Neil made sure to pass along a “hello to all my fellow Scouts at Farragut State Park in Idaho having a National Jamboree there this week; Apollo 11 would like to send them best wishes.” For several years thereafter he took the time to write letters congratulating boys who had achieved the ultimate rank of Eagle Scout.
In the 1990s, Armstrong concluded that the practice had taken a disturbing turn: “Congratulatory letters should be from people who know the Scouts personally, who know what they’ve achieved and honestly want to congratulate them. When Scouts get letters from political potentates that have actually been written by staff members and signed by an autopen, perhaps it impresses the individual getting the award and receiving that message, but it’s the wrong message. It’s just something that the Scouts don’t do right.”
According to White, “In the first five months of 2003 alone, we received 950 letters asking for congratulatory letters for new Eagle Scouts. And he used to do this! But after people put his address on the Internet with the word he did this sort of thing, it just increased so much there was no way he could do it.”
“Over the years I have done a lot of work on behalf of the Scouts,” Neil relates, “but I have not done any of that in recent years.” Much to the chagrin of the BSA, “I have no official association with them.” As for congratulatory letters to Eagle Scouts, today he will only write them to young Cincinnati residents whom he personally knows.
Armstrong’s belated decision to follow Charles Lindbergh’s advice has provoked disappointment and even antagonism, mostly from profiteer, or more commonly, hobbyist “collectors” of autographs and space memorabilia.
One 2000 posting on collectSPACE.com, the Internet’s leading resource and community Web site for space history enthusiasts and space artifact collectors, growled: “I realize that many astronauts have been generous with their signing of autographs. And that is wonderful. But some have been stingy from day one. But do they have the right to totally cut the general public off? I do not think so. I am sorry to say this, but, yes, they do owe us something. I am not suggesting that they should sign anything and everything rudely thrust in front of them, anytime, anyplace. Certainly not. They are our cherished American heroes and, yes, they do have a private life. But why can’t there be some kind of middle ground? If an astronaut has a bad experience with an ugly collector, or is just plain tired of signing, by all means, take a break. But, please do not use that as an excuse to punish all of us by saying no forever.”
Robert Pearlman, the founder of collectSPACE, relates four primary reasons why collectors feel that all astronauts, but Armstrong in particular, should sign autographs. Primarily, “Armstrong was granted the opportunity to go to the Moon by virtue of American taxpayers footing the bill, so he ‘owes’ us his signature.” Pearlman and like-minded hobbyist collectors of space memorabilia rightfully reject this argument.
Pearlman explains the second argument of the “mad collector.” “There are tales—some more substantiated than others—of dealers or accumulators discovering that Armstrong would reply through the mail with twenty five or thirty autographed photos when a teacher would request signatures for his/her classroom and thus these ‘bad eggs’ began faking educational affiliations. Likewise, some dealers would pay or invent children to request signatures on the theory it would improve their chances of a positive reply. Some collectors feel they do not deserve to be penalized for something that they never would dream to do.”
Third, collectors suggest that Armstrong “could do a lot of good if he would only sign for a fee and donate the proceeds to a worthy cause.”
Finally, perturbed collectors believe that it was Armstrong’s disdain for “the autograph market” that provoked his stringent policy—which has served to drive the value of signed Armstrong items ever higher. On the Internet or at an auction in 2005, collectors faced the following high price list:
• Index card: $250 to $350;
• 8 × 10 photo/lithograph, other than portrait, personalized: $600 to $800;
• 8 × 10 photo/lithograph, portrait, personalized: $600 to $1,200;
• 8 × 10 photo/lithograph, without personalization: $2,000 to $5,000;
• typewritten letter on NASA letterhead, signed: $600 to $800;
• handwritten letter and signed: $1,500 to $2,500;
• magazines, books, event programs, newspapers: $250 to $500;
• covers (stamped, canceled envelopes), not flown: $800 to $1,500;
• commercial art prints (by Calle or Rasmussen), may include other signatures: $2,200 to $3,500 (will vary greatly depending on what the photograph depicts).
According to Pearlman, any of these items—index cards the exception—have sold in the past decade for upwards of $10,000, prior ownership, market venue, and the degree of provenance all being influencing factors. Today, Neil Armstrong forgeries far outnumber the authentic examples. One estimate places the fake Armstrong signatures as high as 90 percent of the eBay catalog.
The ultimate Armstrong memento, Pearlman relates, would be a signed picture or letter that includes Neil’s famous quote “one small step.” For years it was believed that no authentic examples of such an item existed. Recently, “an authentic example,” signed while Neil was still in quarantine, surfaced, and though it never sold, many thought it could easily reach $25,000, if not higher.
Armstrong categorically denounces any such item as a fake. “I know that to be false, because I have never, ever quoted myself. From day one, I never did that. So it doesn’t exist anywhere. Not for my mom, not for the Smithsonian, not for anybody—there is not one anywhere. Not in quarantine or any other time. I never did one.”
Without question, Armstrong’s signature remains by far the most popularly sought after astronaut autograph. Enthusiasts call it “the holy grail” of autographs. Armstrong handwriting “experts” have even published articles on how the downstrokes to his “N” and “A” and other characteristics of his signature have changed over the years. Though not rare (given how many signatures Neil provided for the public for over twenty years), given the perceived value and the desire to possess his autograph, demand is high.
One unhappy result is that the hundreds of children and teenagers who write to Armstrong yearly of their own fascination with flying or space exploration are disappointed. Questions such as “How did you feel when you were cramped inside the lunar module?” and “What did you learn about yourself after the trip to the Moon?” never cease to fascinate. Though these are the people Armstrong might wish to exempt from his no-autograph policy, it is simply not possible. As a last resort, he has gone with Lindbergh’s way.
• • •
On the third anniversary of Apollo 11 in July 1972, the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum opened in Wapakoneta right near the junction of Interstate 75 and U.S. Highway 33. The pride of Ohio governor James Rhodes, the facility began with half a million dollars earmarked by the state legislature even before the Apollo 11 mission was over—even before Armstrong’s likeness made out of butter melted at that summer’s Ohio State Fair. Its exterior designed to resemble a rising full Moon, the museum’s grand opening featured an appearance by the twenty-six-year-old presidential daughter Tricia Nixon, who said, “Because of what you, Neil, have done, the heavens have become a part of our world.” Before a crowd of five thousand, the blond Tricia then presented the museum with one of Apollo 11’s Moon rocks: “It is a rock which symbolizes mankind’s ability for great achievement to build a better America and a better world.”
Armstrong’s attendance at the grand opening was shrouded in rumor and uncertainty fueled by newspaper reports that his presence came at the behest of President Nixon, who didn’t want his daughter embarrassed. Frequently during Miss Nixon’s visit, she was overheard to say, “Daddy will be so pleased.” Armstrong told the press, “This is not a homecoming for me. I’m just here to see the museum.” After touring the exhibits, Neil indicated his preference for “the old displays,” notably the Aeronca airplane in which he had learned to fly thirty-six years ago.
Armstrong put on a relatively happy face for the crowd that day, many of them old friends and neighbors, but he was not at all happy with how the entire museum project had come together: “I should have been asked. The policy I followed from the start had been that I neither encouraged nor prohibited the use of my name on public buildings, but I did not approve their use on any commercial or other nonpublic facility.
“If the organizing committee had asked me I’m sure I would have said okay, because it was in the town where my parents lived. Nevertheless, I would have been happier had they not used my name or, if they used my name, they would have used a different approach for the museum.
“I did try to support them in any way that I could by presenting them with such materials as I had available, either gifting or loaning items.
“From the outset I was uncomfortable because that museum was built as the ‘Neil Armstrong Museum.’ A number of people came to believe that it was my personal property and a business undertaking of mine. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus was actually going to be overseeing the museum, and I told its director that I felt uncomfortable. I asked him as well as another member of the planning board if there was anything that could be done about the public image issue and to respond to me about what they thought. They said they would, but they did not.”
Armstrong’s relationship with the museum leadership has remained strained throughout the thirty-three years of the facility’s existence. In the mid-1990s, for example, came the issue of a picture postcard of Neil as an astronaut on sale in the museum gift shop. The image came from an official NASA photograph, taken when he was a federal government employee. For him it was a question of ownership. The rights to the picture belong to the people, the same visitors, Neil believes, who “think I own the place.” The seal of the Ohio Historical Society is displayed inside the main door, but according to Neil, “it’s so low profile that most people don’t notice it.” Eventually, Armstrong relented on the matter of the picture, granting then museum director John Zwez “my permission on a limited-time basis.”
As for the namesake Wapakoneta airport, “Again, they just didn’t ask. It’s a public airport so, had they asked, I probably would have said sure, okay. The problem is that there were businesses on that airport that took the name of the airport, like the ‘Neil Armstrong Electronics Shop.’ ”
• • •
In the 1990s Armstrong had a run-in with Hallmark, the greeting card company.
“The Hallmark case was simple,” Neil relates. “They put out a Christmas tree ornament. It had a little spaceman inside it. It also had a recording that played my voice, and it had my name on the box.” Hallmark advertised the product by saying, “The Moon glows as the famous words spoken by Neil Armstrong when he stepped out on the Moon and into history.” Unfortunately, Hallmark’s people had not received or even asked his permission. Nor did the popular card company follow NASA’s established procedures for such matters.
So in 1994 Neil sued Hallmark. Wendy Armstrong, the wife of his son Mark, served as his attorney. At the end of 1995, the two parties settled out of court: “Hallmark Cards announced today that it had settled a lawsuit with Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong over the use of his likeness in a Christmas ornament last year. Armstrong had claimed that his name and likeness was used without his permission on the ornament, which celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. The size of the settlement was undisclosed, but said by one source to be substantial. Armstrong plans to donate the settlement from the Kansas City–based company, minus legal fees, to Purdue University, his alma mater.” Purdue later confirmed that it received the money.
“NASA hadn’t been very careful about the matter, either. Up to then, it had been pretty careless in the treatment of individual rights. Now, I get letters that correctly state what NASA’s position is about getting my approval, and before that I never did. I get many such requests, some of which I’ve granted [some without charge and some for a fee] and some of which I haven’t.
“In many cases where they are either nonprofit or government public-service announcements, I will approve them. At first, I wasn’t very careful about keeping records of this and would just say, ‘Yes, that’s all right.’ Then, after being exposed to the legal world, I recognized that you have to have all kinds of files of proof.”
An even more loathsome legal matter concerned the sale of some of Neil’s hair. In early 2005, the Lebanon, Ohio, barbershop that Neil had patronized for more than twenty years sold some of its famous client’s locks for $3,000 to a Connecticut man who, according to Guinness World Records, had amassed the largest collection of hair from “historical celebrities.” In a private conversation in the back of the shop, Neil asked his barber to either return the hair or donate the $3,000 to a charity of Armstrong’s choosing. When neither result followed, Neil’s attorney sent the barber a two-page letter, one that referenced an Ohio law protecting the names of its celebrities. Instead of settling the matter quietly, the barber sent the letter to local media. The strange story attracted international attention.
• • •
Christian leaders the world over gave voice to the idea that humankind’s trip to the Moon was a “pilgrimage,” a “spiritual quest,” and that at the heart of all flying, all space exploration, was a religious truth.
NASA’s master rocketeer and builder of the Saturn V, Wernher von Braun, expressed the sentiment in 1969 for the scientific and technical community: “Astronomy and space exploration are teaching us that the good Lord is a much greater Lord, and Master of a greater kingdom. The fact that Christ carried out his mission on Earth does not limit his validity for a greater environment. It could very well be that the Lord would send his Son to other worlds, taking whatever steps are necessary to bring the Truth to His Creation.”
Pope Paul VI expressed it for the Catholic world, referring to the Moon landing as “the ecstasy of this prophetic day.”
The morning Apollo 11 launched, Reverend Herman Weber gave voice to it for Viola and for all American evangelicals from his pulpit in Wapakoneta’s St. Paul United Church of Christ: “As Thou hast guided our astronauts in previous flights, so guide, we pray, Neil, the esteemed son of our proud community, and his partners, Buzz and Michael, and all others who are involved in this righteous Lunar flight in every station.”
In a speech to his congregation days after the Moon landing, the Iowa minister to whom Viola later confided by letter that Neil had strayed from the truth of Jesus Christ, asked, “Could the external presence of Neil Armstrong, the courageous leader, be a symbol of the presence within of the strong arm of the Lord? . . . Their place was the Moon, their ship was the Eagle, which landed on a firm rock at a place called Tranquility Base. Could there possibly be a rock of ages which is a base for all tranquility, for all peace?”
Several theologians, Protestant and Catholic, concurred: “Armstrong’s boots, grating on the crisp, dry surface of the Moon, have announced a new theological watershed. That earthly sound on an unearthly body will lead to a profound shift in the faith and basic attitudes of Christians and other believers, a fact that gradually will become apparent with coming generations. . . . It will cause an eventual, and inevitable, modification in the way man comprehends the man-God relationship—perhaps the most important keystone in his ego-structure and in his concept of his place in eternity.”
These thinkers were of the mind that God put Neil Armstrong (but not Buzz?) on the Moon to show God’s greatness in a new light; to reveal God’s expansive presence; restore “proper balance” in humankind’s outlook on life; and make people believe in God even more deeply than before. “Of course, we knew that the astronauts were religious men. They had to be religious. We wouldn’t have sent atheists to the Moon or even let them into an astronaut program.”
A number of them were, in fact, religious men. A few turned more spiritual after their lunar experience. Apollo 15’s James Irwin, who walked on the Moon in August 1971, became an evangelical minister. “I felt the power of God as I’d never felt it before,” Irwin later wrote. Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke, one of the CapComs for Apollo 11, became active in missionary work, explaining, “I make speeches about walking on the Moon and walking with the Son.”
An Internet document entitled “Onward Christian Spacemen: A Call for Christian Leadership of Manned Space Exploration” calls Christians not only to participate in manned space exploration but also to command and lead it over the likes of the “theologically naïve.”
Another spiritual critic of the “godless” American space program and its “soulless” astronauts has written:
[The crew of Apollo 11] were not even high priests. They were altar boys: stand here, go there, do that, hold this. At best, they were vessels for others to find divine grace. We are taught nothing by [the astronauts], but we can learn from them. . . . The pilgrimage to the Moon exposed the limits of the mode of consciousness that it set out to glorify. It uncovered no new world except the one that it foolishly attempted to leave behind.
Assertions linger that the telephone number connecting President Nixon to Armstrong and Aldrin on the lunar surface was 666-6666, a sign of the Antichrist, as well as equally ridiculous claims that the Moon landing was a conspiracy of Freemasons. (The “evidence”: that Aldrin carried a Masonic flag with him in his PPK, which Buzz presented upon his return to the lodge’s Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the World, which is true, and, second, that Neil’s father was a thirty-third-degree Mason. Stephen Armstrong was a Mason, but Neil does not know his rank.)
• • •
Even more deeply entrenched is the rumor that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam.
For the past three and a half decades, stories have been repeated all around the Muslim world that when Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon, they heard a voice singing in a strange language that they did not understand. Only later, after returning to Earth, did Armstrong realize that what he heard on the lunar surface was the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. Neil then allegedly converted to Islam, moved to Lebanon (the country in the Middle East, not Lebanon, Ohio), and subsequently visited several Muslim holy places, including the Turkish masjid where Malcolm X once prayed.
The story of Armstrong’s conversion grew so far and wide by the early 1980s that, not only Armstrong himself, but also an official body of the United States government, found it necessary to respond. In March 1983, the U.S. State Department sent the following message to all embassies and consulates in the Islamic world:
1. Former astronaut Neil Armstrong, now in private life, has been the subject of press reports in Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia (and perhaps elsewhere) alleging his conversion to Islam during his landing on the Moon in 1969. As a result of such reports, Armstrong has received communications from individuals and religious organizations, and a feeler from at least one government, about his possible participation in Islamic activities.
2. While stressing his strong desire not to offend anyone or show disrespect for any religion, Armstrong has advised department that reports of his conversion to Islam are inaccurate.
3. If post receive queries on this matter, Armstrong requests that they politely but firmly inform querying party that he has not converted to Islam and has no current plans or desire to travel overseas to participate in Islamic religious activities.
Whatever help the State Department might have been in clarifying Armstrong’s views, it wasn’t enough. Requests for him to appear in Muslim countries and at Islamic events became so frequent in the mid-1980s that Neil felt compelled to act. “We were getting such a barrage of information, just inundated with questions about this, predominately from the Islamic world but also from the non-Muslim world, the latter of which was saying, ‘This can’t be true, can it?’ Finally we decided that we needed to have something official that journalists could refer to. We again used the State Department, this time to assist in setting up a telephone press conference to Cairo, Egypt, where a substantial number of journalists from the Middle East could be there to ask me questions and get my response. That way they all heard the same thing.
“Just how much that helped is impossible to know, but it certainly didn’t completely stem the questions.” Some clung to the notion that the U.S. government didn’t want their great American hero to be known as a Muslim, and thus was somehow forcing him publicly to deny his faith.
“Once I was visiting the Phi Delta Theta house at Purdue and a student came up that seemed to be living in the fraternity house. His father was a professor at Stanford. Apparently the young man was of Middle Eastern descent, and his father had told him about my conversion to Islam. So he asked me if it was true and I, of course, told him that it wasn’t true. I could tell that he thought I was lying to him. He did not believe me. He’d been convinced that I would lie about it.”
In recent years the story has even gotten embellished to include the assertion that Apollo 11 discovered that the Earth emitted radiation (which it does) and that the source of the radiation came from the Ka’ba in Mecca, proving that Mecca is “the center of the world.”
Today, Vivian White tries hard to set the record straight with a form letter that states, “The reports of his conversion to Islam and of hearing the voice of the adhan on the Moon and elsewhere are all untrue.”
Armstrong understands why such projections—phenomenal and otherwise—are made onto him. “I have found that many organizations claim me as a member, for which I am not a member, and a lot of different families—Armstrong families and others—make connections, many of which don’t exist. So many people identify with the success of Apollo. The claim about my becoming a Muslim is just an extreme version of people inevitably telling me they know somebody whom I might know.”
Armstrong, because he was so hard to know, turned out to be myth personified, an enigma prime to be filled with meaning.
In the late 1970s, Chariots of the Gods? (1969) author Erich von Däniken tried to turn Armstrong into a collaborator on his sensational (and bestselling) theory of “ancient astronauts,” extraterrestrial beings who had visited Earth in the remote past and left various archaeological traces of their civilization-building activities.
In August 1976 Armstrong had accompanied a Scottish regiment, Black Watch and the Royal Highland Fusiliers, on a scientific expedition into the vast Cueva de los Tayos (“Caves of the Oil Birds”) in a remote part of Ecuador first discovered by the Argentinian Juan Moricz.
At the time, Neil was unaware that in The Gold of the Gods, Von Däniken’s 1972 follow-up to Chariots of the Gods?, the controversial Swiss author had described his own exploration of the Cueva de los Tayos, in which he claimed to have found considerable archaeological evidence of an extraterrestrial presence, including that certain doorways in the cave were too square to have been made naturally. “But it was the conclusion of our expedition group,” relates Neil, “that they were natural formations.”
Newspaper reports of the Los Tayos expedition and Armstrong’s role in it made it clear that Von Däniken’s claims about the caves were false. In a two-page letter written to Neil from his home in Zürich, Switzerland, on February 18, 1977, Von Däniken told the world’s most famous astronaut that Armstrong’s “expedition cannot possibly have been to my cave.”
Von Däniken then urged Armstrong “to participate in a cave expedition which I am presently planning” whereby “relics from an extraterrestrial civilization—will be inspected.”
Armstrong responded politely: “Because of my Scottish ancestry, and the fact that the U.K. side of this project was largely Scottish, I was invited to act as honorary chairman of the expedition, and I accepted. . . . I had not read your books and did not know of any connection that you might have had with the caves. I made no statements regarding any hypotheses you may have put forth. . . . I appreciate your kind invitation to join you in your forthcoming expendition, but am unable to accept.”
• • •
What of “Mr. Gorsky”?
Just before reentering the LM after Apollo 11’s EVA, Armstrong supposedly made the enigmatic remark, “Good luck, Mr. Gorsky.” Some reporters at Mission Control attributed the remark as referencing a rival Soviet cosmonaut. However, there was no Gorsky in the Russian space program. Over the years many people questioned Armstrong as to what his statement about Mr. Gorsky meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.
The story resumes in 1995 during an address in Tampa, Florida, when Armstrong finally responded to a reporter’s question about the story. Mr. Gorsky had finally died, so Neil felt he could answer the question.
When he was a kid, he was playing baseball with a friend in the backyard. His friend hit a fly ball that landed in the front of his neighbor’s bedroom window. His neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Gorsky. As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky, “Oral sex! You want oral sex?! You’ll get oral sex when the kid next door walks on the Moon!”
As a story, “Mr. Gorsky” always gets a laugh, which was what comedian Buddy Hackett was counting on when he first delivered the joke (which Hackett apparently invented) on NBC’s Tonight Show sometime around 1990. In spite of the ease with which the story can be debunked, and in spite of various attempts on the Internet (a search for “Armstrong” and “Gorsky” generates 4,000 hits) to expose it for the urban legend that it has become, the story is funny enough that countless people continue to read it and pass it along, no matter its origin. “There is absolutely no truth to it. I even heard Hackett tell the story at a charity golf outing.”
• • •
Even during the time of Apollo 11, some believed that the Moon landings never really took place—that they were a fraud foisted upon the world for political reasons by the U.S. government. The Flat Earth Society maintained an active membership. But the idea of a Moon hoax picked up greatly in 1978 because of Capricorn One, a Hollywood conspiracy fantasy, not about the Moon landing, but about the first manned mission to Mars. In the tale, NASA attempted to cover for a highly defective spacecraft by forcing its astronauts before cameras in a desert film studio to act out the journey and trick the world into believing they made the trip. Though a mediocre movie, Capricorn One’s notion of a government conspiracy never fell out of favor with a small number of skeptics.
Inevitably, there were people who not only chose to believe in some version of the lunar conspiracy theory, but who saw a way to profit from it. In 1999, Fox TV broadcast a “documentary” entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? The program was based largely on a low-budget commercial video produced by a self-proclaimed “investigative reporter” from Nashville, Tennessee. Called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, it speculated that the Moon landings were an ingenious ploy of the U.S. government to win the Cold War and stimulate the collapse of Soviet communism by forcing the Kremlin into investing massive sums of money on its own lunar program, thereby ruining the Russian economy and provoking the internal downfall of the government.
No matter that every piece of “evidence” raised by the sensationalistic program was parroting the same uninformed arguments about Apollo that had been around for over two decades—i.e., that the American flag planted by Apollo 11 appears to be waving in a place where there can be no wind; that there are no stars in any of the photographs taken on the lunar surface; that the photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts are simply “too good” to be true; that the 200-degree-plus Moon surface temperatures would have baked the camera film; that the force of the LM’s descent engine should have created a crater under the module; that no one can travel safely through the “killer radiation” of the Van Allen Belts; and more. Some members of the TV viewing audience succumbed to the trickery, others to its darker legacy.
On his seventieth birthday in August 2000, Armstrong received a birthday card containing a belligerent typewritten letter from a teacher charging that the Moon landing was a hoax and inviting Neil to review the “evidence” on the Internet.
Dear Mr. Armstrong:
The least I could do was send a card for your 70th birthday, however over 30 years on from the pathetic TV broadcast when you fooled everyone by claiming to have walked upon the Moon, I would like to point out that you, and the other astronauts, are making yourselfs [sic] a worldwide laughing stock, thanks to the Internet.
Perhaps you are totally unaware of all the evidence circulating the globe via the Internet. Everyone now knows the whole saga was faked, and the evidence is there for all to see. We know the pictures have pasted backgrounds, who composed the pictures, and how the lunar landing and Moon walks were simulated at Langley Research Centre, in addition to why NASA faked Apollo.
Maybe you are one of those pensioners who do not surf the Internet, because you know precious little about how it works. May I suggest you visit [Web site withheld by author] to see for yourself how ridiculous the Moon landing claim looks 30 years on.
As a teacher of young children, I have a duty to tell them history as it truly happened, and not a pack of lies and deceit.
[Name withheld by author]
Armstrong sent the birthday card and letter on to NASA’s associate administrator for policy and plans. “Has NASA ever refuted the allegations or assembled information to be used in rebuttal? I occasionally am asked questions in public forums and feel I don’t do as good a job as I might with more complete information,” said Neil. Subsequently, in 2002, NASA commissioned distinguished space writer and veteran UFO debunker James Oberg to write a 30,000-word monograph refuting the notion that the Apollo program was a hoax. After news of the plan for Oberg’s book hit the papers, however, NASA quickly reversed course, judging that not even a judicious, well-argued refutation could successfully achieve its intended effect.
To all inquiries about the Moon hoax, Vivian White sends out the following letter:
I am responding on behalf of Mr. Armstrong to your recent letter regarding the reality of the Apollo program flights.
The flights are undisputed in the scientific and technical worlds. All of the reputable scientific societies affirm the flights and their results.
The crews were observed to enter their spacecraft in Florida and observed to be recovered in the Pacific Ocean. The flights were tracked by radars in a number of countries thoughout their flight to the Moon and return. The crew sent television pictures of the voyage including flying over the lunar landscape and on the surface, pictures of lunar scenes previously unknown and now confirmed. The crews returned samples from the lunar surface including some minerals never found on Earth.
Mr. Armstrong believes that the only thing more difficult to achieve than the lunar flights would be to successfully fake them.
Mr. Armstrong accepts that individuals may believe whatever they wish. He was, however, substantially offended by the FOX program’s implication that his fellow Apollo crewmen were possible accomplices in the murder of his very good friends, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, and he has indicated his displeasure to FOX.
We appreciate your inquiry and send best wishes.
Sincerely,
Vivian White
Administrative Aide
Neil understands the impulse of the conspiracy theorists, even if it is totally alien to his own rational mind. “One, people love conspiracy theories. They are very attracted to them. As I recall, after Franklin D. Roosevelt died, there were people saying that he was still alive someplace. And, of course, ‘Elvis lives!’ There is always going to be that fringe element on every subject, and I put this in that category. It doesn’t bother me. It will all pass in time. Generally, it’s almost unnoticeable except for the peaks that occur when somebody writes a book or puts out an article in a magazine or shows something on television.”
Armstrong has also experienced one man’s attempt to turn Armstrong’s personal life into a television event of the stranger’s own devising.
At the annual meeting of EDO Corporation stockholders in New York City in 2001, the man who made A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon showed up with a video-camera-carrying assistant. EDO president James Smith recalls the scene: “This guy shows up with a Bible and shouts out, ‘Neil Armstrong, will you swear on this Bible that you went to the Moon?’ Well, the audience immediately started booing the intruder very loud, but he went right on, ‘Everybody else in the world knows you didn’t, so why don’t you just admit it?!’ It quickly turned into a kind of pushy-shovy thing, so I and a few other men got the guy out of there. Subsequent to that, we never had a meeting where we didn’t hire special security.”
“Had I the opportunity to run that episode over in my life,” Armstrong comments, “I wouldn’t have allowed my company people to usher me out of the room. I would have just talked to the crowd and said, ‘This person believes that the United States government has committed fraud on all of you, and simultaneously he wants to exercise his right protected by the U.S. government to state his opinions freely to you.’ ”
A few months after the EDO meeting, on September 9, 2002, the same man with Bible in hand confronted Buzz Aldrin outside of a Beverly Hills hotel. A resident of the Los Angeles area, Buzz had arrived at the hotel thinking he was to be interviewed by a Japanese educational television network. At first Aldrin, his stepdaughter in tow, tried to answer the man’s questions, then did his best to get away from him. But the insistent independent filmmaker dogged him out of the hotel and kept directing his assistant to keep the camera running, while shouting at Buzz, “You are a coward and a liar.” Harassed to the point of complete exasperation, the seventy-two-year-old Aldrin, all 160 pounds of him, decked the thirty-seven-year-old 250-pounder with a quick left hook to the jaw. The man from Nashville filed a police report but, after watching the accuser’s own tape of the incident, the L.A. County District Attorney rather forcefully declined to file charges.
As the self-proclaimed “victim” later told reporters, “If I walked on the Moon and some guy said swear on a Bible, I’d swear on a stack of Bibles.”
Even before the EDO and Aldrin incidents, the same individual entered uninvited into the Armstrongs’ suburban Cincinnati home. Neil’s second wife Carol relates what happened: “Neil was at the office. This guy knocked at the door and there was a big dog with him, and he had a package. I opened the outside door while leaving the screen door shut, and the man said, ‘Is Neil here?’ I said, ‘No, he’s not. May I help you?’ He opened the screen door and just walked in, bringing along his dog. He said, ‘I want him to sign this,’ and I said, ‘Neil doesn’t sign things anymore.’ ‘He’ll sign this,’ he uttered, and then he left.
“It sort of hit me three minutes later. All of a sudden I felt shaky.”
In the following weeks, the interloper started putting letters and other things in the Armstrongs’ mailbox. Some of the materials had religious overtones and most were about the Moon landing being faked. The local police department responded, “It’s probably nothing, but why don’t you just bring the tapes and letters and we’ll take a look at them,” until a call to the ABC TV station in Nashville revealed that he had never worked there, but instead was an independent filmmaker who had operated a business called ABC Video.
A few weeks later, Carol received a phone call from her neighbor: “Carol, there’s this car parked out here and it’s been out here for a long time.” When the neighbor went out to investigate, she saw a lot of camera equipment in the backseat. The siege continued for three days, culminating in a car chase involving the Armstrongs, the intruder, and the police.
The high price of celebrity was a heavy burden that all of the early astronauts and their families had to pay, but none more dearly than the First Man—as personally unwanted as his status as a celebrity and global icon particularly was. It was an unwanted, unasked for, but inevitable, legacy that Armstrong shared with his hero, Lindbergh.