Astronaut Horror Stories

In 2003, Yang Liwei became the first Chinese astronaut to jettison into space. He was aboard the Shenzhou 5, one of multiple Shenzhou voyages that would happen in years following. One silent, lonely night on October 16, he heard it — a strange banging sound outside. As he described it, “someone knocking the body of the spaceship just as knocking an iron bucket with a wooden hammer…it neither came from outside nor inside the spaceship.” Given that space is a vacuum and sound needs a medium to pass through such as air or water, Liwei’s eerie claims could’ve been seen as dubious. Well, except for the fact that on subsequent Shenzhou 5 and 6 missions to space, two other Chinese astronauts heard the same knocking.After four days shooting up to the great abyss, American astronauts Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, and John Young were on the far side of the moon. It was 1969. While photographing craters and sipping grape juice, the three began to hear otherworldly, organized noise coming from their headsets. It happened for one full hour. “Boy, that sure is weird music,” Commander Cernan said. “We’re going to have to find out about that,” Pilot Young replied. “Nobody will believe us.”

There were two minutes of radio silence after Armstrong set foot on the Moon. NASA claimed one of two television cameras overheated, disrupting the reception. (Right, NASA technology overheats at random just like my old, garbage laptop.) So what was that lost transmission to Houston?: “These babies were huge, sir! Enormous! Oh, God! You wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other spacecraft out here … lined up on the far side of the crater’s edge! They’re on the moon watching us!”

It only few straight, but then a kind of explosion happened, very beautiful to watch, of golden light. This was the first part. Then, one or two seconds later, a second explosion followed somewhere else and two spheres appeared, golden and very beautiful. After this explosion, I just saw white smoke, then a cloud-like sphere. Before we entered the darkness, we flew through the terminator, the twilight zone between day and night. We flew eastwards, and when we entered the darkness of the Earth shadow, I could not see them any longer. The two spheres never returned.” In September, writing for Space.com, American Astronaut Leroy Chiao noted that it would be the “height of arrogance to believe we are alone.” In 2005, he was commander of the International Space Station for six and a half months. While installing antennas 230 miles above the Earth, he witnessed something he has yet to understand. “I saw some lights that seemed to be in a line and it was almost like an upside-down check mark,” he told the Huffington post, “and I saw them fly by and thought it was awfully strange.” Some theorized those lights were simply those of a fishing boat hundreds of miles down, shooting upward.

“On two of my missions, and I still don’t have an answer, I have seen a snake out there. Six, seven, eight feel long. It is rubbery because it has internal waves in it, and it follows you for a rather long period of time. The more you fly in space the more you see an incredible amount of things out there, and that sort of thing brings to you, really, a certainty that other living creatures are out there.” “Living creatures far more developed as civilizations. They’ve been around for 100 million years, and we can’t even conceive how advanced they are and the kinds of things they’re doing. That’s why I make an effort to communicate, and might be considered eccentric because I do, because I know the probabilities are close to zero. But I do tell them to come down and get me.” 6