A post shared on Facebook claims Astronaut Buzz Aldrin told NASA he saw aliens during his moonwalk, and a lie detector test allegedly proved this was true.

Verdict: False

While Aldrin did initially say he saw an unidentifiable object during the mission, he never claimed to have seen aliens during his moonwalk. He and NASA later clarified that what he saw was likely panels from the astronauts’ spacecraft.

Fact Check:

Aldrin, now 88, was the second person to step foot on the surface of the moon during NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 mission. An image on Facebook claims that Aldrin told NASA that while he was on the space mission, he saw aliens. The post further claims that Aldrin later took a lie detector test, which he passed.

Aldrin has said he saw an unidentified object during his moonwalk, according to NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI), but both NASA and Aldrin have clarified that what Aldrin saw was not extraterrestrial.

“On Apollo 11 in route to the Moon, I observed a light out the window that appeared to be moving alongside us,” Aldrin wrote in a 2014 Reddit “Ask Me Anything” forum. “There were many explanations of what that could be, other than another spacecraft from another country or another world – it was either the rocket we had separated from, or the 4 panels that moved away when we extracted the lander from the rocket and we were nose to nose with the two spacecraft.”

Aldrin further wrote that he is “absolutely convinced” that what he saw was “the sun reflected off of one of these panels” and that while he’s “almost CERTAIN” there is life elsewhere in space, what he saw was not an alien. (RELATED: Do Neil Armstrong’s Boots Not Match A Footprint He Left On The Moon?)

NASA spokeswoman Stephanie Schierholz supported Aldrin’s statement in a comment to USA Today in 2018, explaining that “the panels would have had the same momentum as the rest of the spacecraft and would have followed them along toward the moon.” A spokesperson for Aldrin also refuted the claim in a statement to Snopes that year.

The claim in the Facebook post appears to stem from an April 2018 article published by British tabloid The Daily Star bearing the headline, “‘I saw a UFO’ Buzz Aldrin PASSES lie detector test revealing truth about aliens.” The article talked about a voice analysis reportedly conducted by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology and Sound Health on old voice recordings of Aldrin.

The Independent refuted the claim about the lie detector test in 2018, saying that modern science does not have the capability of determining whether a person is lying solely on the basis of their voice.