Tech
Astronauts heard spacey music on the real dark side of the moon
by Richard Howard
February 24, 2016
In 1969, NASA's Apollo 10 crew heard some of the spookiest music this side of Pink Floyd.
There’s nothing creepier than hearing inexplicable noises in the dark, right? Well, imagine if those noises sounded like the weirdest music you’d ever heard and the ‘dark’ place was the absolute darkness of outer space? That’s some bonafide “permission to shit my astro-diapers, sir” business, and it actually happened to a trio of astronauts in 1969.
Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan were the crew of astronauts on Apollo 10, which, in a mission predating the moon landing, orbited the moon 31 times. During each orbit, there would be a period of a time when the vessel would lose radio contact with Earth as it slipped behind the backside or ‘dark side’ of the moon. During one such time period, the astronauts began hearing otherworldly noises in their headsets, the likes of which they had never heard before.
The men stayed relatively calm, asking each other if they could hear the “weird” and “outerspacey” music. Still, considering they went on to talk about the sounds for the hour or so before re-establishing contact with Earth, it’s safe to say they were pretty unnerved.
Why are we only hearing about it now? Well, the story is going to be told in an upcoming episode of NASA’s Unexplained Files, but the Apollo mission records had remained classified for nearly 40 years.
