Apollo 10’s crew in 1969 (Picture: Getty)

Travelling around the far side of the moon for the first time, these three astronauts expected radio silence in the hour or so radio transmissions from earth were blocked.

They were preparing for Apollo 11’s 1969 moon landing just a few months later and nobody knew quite what to expect on this pioneering mission.

NASA receives record number of CVs from people wanting to be astronauts However, it certainly wasn’t the otherworldly music that starting coming over the radio as they hurtled further through space than anyone had ever been.

Recordings from the spacecraft were classified until 2008 and nobody really knew about it. But now the tapes have been released, and make fascinating listening.




You can hear the astronauts saying this on the video:

‘It sounds like outer space type music’

‘You hear that? That whistling sound? Whooooooooo!’

‘Well, that sure is weird music!’

They were out of radio contact with Earth for around an hour, during which time they picked up the otherworldly sound. They weren’t sure whether to mention what they had heard to anybody on the ground:

‘Boy it got quiet, didn’t it?’

‘Who’s gonna believe it? Nobody’

‘Shall we tell them about it?’

‘I don’t know. We ought to think about it.’

When the three got back to earth they didn’t mention it. NASA has strict policies on who can go into space, and they knew they might be grounded if the space agency had any concerns over their state of mind.

Apollo 10 during its lunar orbit (Picutre: Getty)

Classic cars found abandoned in Welsh mine for more than 40 yearsForty years later, scientists think they might have a clue after identifying radio broadcasts from Jupiter and Saturn due to charged particles interacting with the planets’ magnetic fields.

But not everyone is convinced, as the moon doesn’t have a magnetic field, or enough of an atmosphere to cause interference.

The whole thing is discussed on the Science Channel’s ‘NASA’s Unexplained Files’.