NASA Recording Reveals 'Weird Music' Astronauts Heard Coming From Moon

Nearly 50 years ago, NASA astronauts reportedly heard eerie sounds they described as "weird music" coming from the far side of the moon.

On May 18, 1969, the Apollo 10 crew set out to orbit the moon in the Apollo program's fourth manned mission.

While on the dark side of the moon, the crew lost radio contact with NASA ground control for about an hour.

Recordings of a conversation between astronauts Eugene Cernan and John Young during this hour reveal strange, highly audible sounds the astronauts could not explain.

A transcript of this conversation was released in 2008, but the audio is only being made public now, according to CNN.

Cernan and Young can be heard referring to the noises as "outer-spacy... whistling sound" and "weird music."

The pair reportedly found the sounds so strange they weren't sure whether to report them to their superiors due to the risk of not being believed and losing their spots on future missions.

Scroll to the two-minute mark of this preview for a new edition of "NASA's Unexplained Files" to hear the noises.

However, Cernan released a statement through NASA this week to clear up any notion he believed the sounds were coming from an otherworldly source.

He said,

I don't remember that incident exciting me enough to take it seriously. It was probably just radio interference. Had we thought it was something other than that we would have briefed everyone after the flight. We never gave it another thought.

This assumption is supported by a NASA technician who appears on the aforementioned show.

He attributed the noises to the radios -- one in the lunar module and another one in the detachable command module -- "interfering with each other."

Michael Collins, the pilot of Apollo 11, heard strange noises while orbiting the moon as well.

His book, "Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys," gave the same explanation offered by Cernan.

In the book, Collins said,

Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared the hell out of me... Fortunately the radio technicians (rather than the UFO fans) had a ready explanation for it: It was interference between the LM's and Command Module's VHF radios.

Collins went on to note the noises started when the two spacecrafts were near each other and had their radios on.

The noises also reportedly stopped when the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon.

Citations: NASA releases recording of 'outer-space type music' from far side of the moon (CNN)