Astronauts from two separate moon missions reported hearing eerie, unexplained music that left them deeply unsettled.
While space is often thought of as silent, a few astronauts claim to have experienced strange cosmic melodies while traveling toward the moon.
Scientifically, this shouldn’t be possible. With space being a near-perfect vacuum, there are too few atoms or molecules to carry sound waves, making the idea of music in the void all the more mysterious.
The issue is so significant that astronauts can’t rely on their ears alone to hear one another while spacewalking. Instead, they must communicate using radio waves. However, inside their pressurized spacecraft, normal sound transmission is possible.
So, how did two separate astronaut teams report hearing music in space?
NASA astronauts from both the Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 missions claimed to have heard eerie, unexplained “space music” during their journeys to the moon.
The first occurrence was during Apollo 10’s dress rehearsal for the historic moon landing in May 1969. Astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan reported hearing eerie sounds while orbiting the moon.
It would take NASA 50 years to publicly release the recordings of what they heard, but that didn’t stop them from issuing an ominous warning to the Apollo 11 crew before their own mission just months later.
For Apollo 10, the mysterious sounds began when the lunar module separated from the command module. As they orbited the moon for over 10 hours, preparing to reunite with the main spacecraft, the unsettling noise continued.
While on the far side of the moon, completely out of contact with mission control, the trio heard a strange “whistling” sound. The audio recordings later revealed that it was far from any familiar melody or chart-topping tune.
Inside the shuttle, astronaut Eugene Cernan was the first to react. “Can you hear that? That whistling sound?” he asked his crewmates.
Thomas Stafford confirmed, “Yes.”
Cernan then mimicked the eerie noise: “Whooooo!”
John Young, also puzzled, added, “Did you hear that whistling sound, too?”
Cernan agreed, describing it in the only way that made sense at the time: “Yeah. Sounds like, you know, outer-space-type music.”
For decades, the eerie audio recordings remained buried in NASA’s archives.
But before Apollo 11 launched, NASA reportedly warned the crew, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong, to expect the mysterious “space music” as well.
Sure enough, they heard the same unsettling noise as Apollo 10, this time when the lunar module separated from the main module. The strange sounds continued until the module finally touched down on the moon.
Years later, Michael Collins reflected on the experience in his book, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, writing:
“There is a strange noise in my headset now, an eerie woo-woo sound.”
He admitted that had NASA not warned him in advance, “it would have scared the hell out of me.”
NASA eventually attributed the sounds to interference between the VHF radios of the lunar and command modules, though for those who heard it firsthand, the mystery still lingers.
