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April 24, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:09:06
Edition 446 - Captain Lukas Viglietti

Swissair Captain Lukas Viglietti - based near Zurich - knows most of the Apollo team - and is close friends with some.... his book "Apollo Confidential" is well worth reading...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I'm recording this as it's still, I'm just going to peel this curtain back here.
You hear that?
I'm just going to take a look at the trees outside because it's, as I'm recording this, it's a quarter past seven in the evening.
It's an April evening and it is warm and lovely outside, but the world remains in lockdown.
So as I've said before here, normally I would look above the trees outside here and above the park that I can see.
And I would see planes weaving backwards and forwards and jet trails for Heathrow Airport.
Now there is nothing.
There's no one in the park and just the occasional car.
I hope that you're bearing up under the experience of lockdown.
I know some people are suffering psychologically because of the effects of being locked in.
It's never really been an issue for me.
I think I've said before on this show, you know, I've been a bit of a hermit for years anyway, so, you know, I'm getting by.
The only thing that I ever worry about is that military exercise, which I did today, of going to the supermarket and making sure you've got the hand gel and making sure you've got everything that you need to be able to do this quick execution of getting in, trying to remember, and I have forgotten a couple of things again, getting in, getting out, and then getting home.
And that's it.
And apart from 20 minutes, 30 minutes of cycling a day that I do, if it isn't raining, which, you know, we've been quite fortunate with the weather, that's it.
I've been preparing shows, doing live shows out of here, or my live Sunday show out of here.
And that's been my life.
It's been incredibly quiet.
Do let me know how yours is.
If you just want to shoot the breeze, make a guest suggestion, tell me what you think of the show, go to my website, designed by Adam, creative hotspot he's from.
The website is theunexplained.tv.
And if you feel like making a donation when you're there, then that would be very gratefully received.
And if you have made a donation recently, then thank you very much for doing that.
It's vital for this to continue.
I've got somebody very special on this show.
His name is Lucas Viglietti, and he is a Swiss airline pilot.
And not only, I mean, that's special enough, but he spent 20 years getting to know and researching the Apollo astronauts and one cosmonaut as well, as you will hear.
And he became very close to people like Edgar Mitchell, but he knew them all, and he's got stories to tell about them.
And he's written a book called Apollo Confidential.
He's absolutely charming to speak with.
You know, setting this up, I'm completely convinced of that, as you will be.
I have to say, and it's important because I know some people who listen to the show are concerned about this.
English is not his first language.
But please bear that in mind.
The stories he tells are wonderful.
And when you listen to Lucas Viglieti talk, you realize that he has actually given 20 years of his life to meeting these people, getting to know them, and then writing it all down in a book.
And it's a great book.
I actually speed read the book before I recorded the conversation with Lucas.
So, Lucas Viglieti, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, Apollo Confidential, and some stories about the Apollo astronauts that you may not have heard, and the whole Apollo program, to be frank and to be fair.
So that's it.
If you want to get in touch with me, please send me an email through my website, theunexplained.tv.
Like I say, to shoot the breeze or make suggestions, whatever.
And when you get in touch, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
And no shout outs on this edition, but I've had some lovely emails recently.
It means an awful lot to me as I sit here in the silence.
You know, that I'm actually reaching you and that you care.
It means a lot.
Thank you very much.
All right, let's get to Switzerland now and to Lucas Viglieti.
Lucas, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Yeah, thank you very much and who works.
It's a very great pleasure to be with you today.
Well, you know, great to have a guest from Switzerland.
Haven't had many of those.
Whereabouts are you?
I'm actually in the vicinity of Zurich and a city called Wintertur a few miles away from the Rick Airport.
Okay, and how is it now?
Because, you know, we have the coronavirus situation.
The United Kingdom is in lockdown.
It looks like we're going to be in lockdown for a number of weeks to come.
Do you have a similar restriction there?
Oh, yeah, of course.
It's quite similar.
We have great problems, of course, and everybody tried to stay at home and very cautious because it's a big problem.
But actually, it's going to be like in UK, I guess, in a few weeks.
We hope it's going to be just a bad dream.
Well, then that's a very good way of putting it.
I think we all here hope that in a period, we don't know how long that period might be, but we want to look back on this as a bad dream and we want to move on with our lives, I think, all of us.
Although we've all had to learn, I don't know about you, but we've all had to learn working from home.
Exactly.
For me, it's quite difficult because I'm an airline pilot, so I cannot work from my office at home, but I'm patient.
I'm waiting to fly again.
Do you fly for Swissair?
Yeah, exactly.
I'm a pilot for 20, 25 years, and I'm now captain flying long haul for Swissair.
Exactly.
A wonderful job.
I have some friends in the aviation industry.
I don't live too far from Heathrow Airport.
This is not a good time, is it, to be in that industry?
Yeah, exactly.
And we have to be patient, as I told you before, but I'm very optimistic.
And I think it's going to be a new flight within the next few weeks or months.
But we have to be patient, in fact, yes.
Well, I look forward to flying with you on Swissair one of these days soon.
What makes a pilot from Switzerland want to write a book about the Apollo 11, well, not just the Apollo 11, all of the Apollo astronauts?
Where's the fascination for you?
That's a good question.
Actually, Howard, you know, when I was a child, I was obsessed by the ideas that men walk on the moon.
And looking at the beautiful moon and during the night, I try to imagine what kind of person they are, these 12 people work of its surface.
And I was fortunate enough to met one of them, Jim Irvin, on Apollo 15, at age 12.
And after that, I always wanted to meet more and more people and to know all about their stories.
So, you've written this book.
How have you been able to do that?
Because there's a lot of detail in here.
Is the book just from other accounts that you've read, or have you done some research involving people who knew the astronauts themselves?
Actually, I'm fortunate enough to be close with a lot of astronauts, of engineer, people for mission control.
And after all these years, when speaking myself with these people, I always took notes.
And, you know, my grandfather was a watchmaker and precision, looking for details is very important.
And for me, for 20 years, I took notes and I tried very meticulously to make, I believe, to be the right account about these people.
So this is a 20-year project, Lucas.
Oh, yeah.
It took a long time because I wanted to be really accurate with a lot of details.
Boy, well, I have to say it's a beautifully written book.
The actual writing of it, it's a great narrative that you put together.
And I greatly, unfortunately, I had to do a speed read.
I had to do it really fast.
So I'm going to go back and read it again properly.
But I do recommend it for the story.
The way that you put the story together is really nice.
So well done.
Thank you very much.
Yes, I want it to be like a novel that people want to read more and more and to be some excitement going through the story of these people.
And it's also an inspirational book.
You got one of the Apollo astronauts to write the introduction for your book.
How did you do that?
Yeah, it's one of my best friends.
He's Charlie Duck, Apollo 16 astronaut.
And he was kind enough.
It's like a part of the family member, I will say, Charlie.
And it was quite natural, I will say, that he wrote that foreword for me.
We are very close.
He's a nice guy, really.
Yeah, you talk very fondly in the book of both Charlie Duke and Jim Irwin, who we'll talk about a little later, but those people appear to have made a big impact on you.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
And Edgar Mitchell and a lot of people, yeah.
Okay, let's get into the book then.
You say at the beginning, and this is absolutely true, nobody was sure of the physiological effects of space travel on the human body.
Some even doubted that it was possible to survive.
So how do you think, with so much doubt and skepticism about space travel, that America was able to get into a position where it had such a big and such a comprehensive space program?
How did that happen if so many people thought, well, this is going to be a big waste of money?
Yeah, it was a long process.
Indeed, the first man who actually flown in the vicinity of space was a Swiss scientist, Mr. Auguste Picard.
It was in the 20s.
And this guy showed the whole world that it's possible to survive in very high altitudes.
Later on, at around 1947, 1949, we sent a dog in space.
It was in Leica, but it was the first experiment done in America with a dog, almost in space, in very high altitude.
So we had a lot of, you know, and later on, of course, with apps like HEM or LEICA, we took confidence that it's possible to survive.
Possible to survive, but very difficult.
You quote John Glenn in the book, and I love this.
John Glenn said, they checked orifices on my body that I didn't even know existed.
You know, so rigorous was the testing for anybody who thought they had the right stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
Because at the very beginning, as you told me, the challenge was to survive.
So they looked for the physical of the astronauts to be really in the top form.
That's very important, in good shape.
So all of these people, whether you met them or whether you were able to be in contact with them indirectly, these, I get the impression that you have a lot of reverence for them.
You believe that, which they were, you believe that they were all very special people in their own ways.
Yeah, all these people with very, very different characters, personalities, I have to say, but all in common.
They have this ability to work very hard, to believe in their own dreams and to make it happen.
And that stuck me when I wrote my book.
They had all in common.
Well, we'll get into the personalities and the people.
Just to set the scene, though, of course, before Apollo, there was Mercury, there was Gemini.
These were proving missions.
These were missions to show that we could fly around the planet.
We could survive.
We could splash down.
We could take those things.
You give a great account of those programs and the people involved in them.
What are your thoughts on that time, the 1950s into the 1960s, and the time when the Apollo astronauts were selected?
What are your thoughts on that time where America was a little behind the Russians, but America was testing the ability of rockets to go into space?
Exactly.
I tried to explain in my book that, in fact, they were a little bit behind on schedule.
That's true.
But they had a total different approach as the Soviets.
The Americans wanted to be very accurate, to make small technical steps and with much more adapted and much more complex systems to go into space.
So they are sure that later they can reach the moon or the planet.
But during the same time, the Soviets was just looking for records.
So they sent in a can, like we can say, cosmonauts who weren't able to fly their own spacecraft because it was all automatic, more primitive systems for the Soviets, and so they were able to be first.
but much, much more risky.
America put safety a little higher up the agenda, I think.
Also, that's true.
At the Mercury program, there were six missions in the Mercury.
In fact, there were seven, but there was a problem with one of them.
Talk to me about the smooth operation of six missions on Mercury and one of them that went a bit wrong.
Yeah, exactly.
There were seven astronauts, there were seven flights planned, but actually Dick Slaton never flew because he had a problem with his heart.
And so he was grounded.
And the sixth of the flight, the first flight was a suborbital flight.
It was like a cannonball, we can say, like from Alan Shepard, who flew a ballistic profile with his Mercury capsule, flying higher as the boundary of space, but he never reached the Earth's orbit, what actually Gagarin did a month before him.
And the second flight from Grissom had some problem with the hatch, the automatic system of the hatch, and the capsule sunk, actually, and it was rescues in the last moment.
And it was a flight with John Glenn.
A few months later, he was able to make a real space flight and to go into orbit.
And then the other flight, it was just to make some tests to fly longer and longer and to see how long people can survive such a flight.
You talk about Gunter Wendt at the beginning of the book.
You can talk to me about who Gunter Wendt was, but he had a mission to be able to rescue the Liberty Bell.
That was the capsule that Grissom nearly sank in, but was able to get out of.
And sadly, of course, as we know, Gus Grissom died in Apollo 1.
Before Apollo 1 even got to space, he died in a fire on the launch pad.
But talk to me about Gunter Wendt.
Yeah, Gunter Wendt was a good friend of mine.
He was a German engineer who came in America after the group of Werner von Braun.
He wasn't part of that group.
He was an engineer.
He worked for McDonald.
And later on, he was implicated with the space program as the pad leader responsible for the white room and then looking at all systems inside the capsule and that's astronaut I was installed just before launch.
And Gunter was very accurate.
He did a lot of jokes.
So he became very famous and the astronaut loved them.
Right.
And because of what happened to Gus Grissom and the Liberty Bell capsule, which sank, Gunter Wendt in later years, I think was behind a mission to rescue that sunken craft.
Yeah?
Yes, exactly.
He told me that story a few weeks before he died, actually.
And I was a little bit shocked because he told me that actually he was on that ship to show to the Navy SEALs where are the bomb.
I was asking him, what do you mean a bomb?
And he told me, yeah, you know, during these times it was a Black Project, it was an X Project, it was a lot of the highest technology available in the United States.
And they didn't want that technology in hand from the Soviets and Chinese.
So in all capsules, they had auto-destruction devices like a bomb.
And during the recovery, he had to sign a contract, a secrecy contract.
But he told me that story a few times before he died.
And so what I wrote in my book.
That's amazing.
So Gunter Wendt told you the story that the capsules that they were testing had a destruct mechanism, a bomb effectively, so that the Russians and the Chinese couldn't get hold of the technology.
And they must have been, when they were recovering that craft, they must have been pretty scared that they weren't going to detonate the bomb.
Yes, that's why you told me it was a Navy SEALs with a capsule and a part of the boat and all the other person and the other part of the boat and hoping nothing happened.
Boy, that's a great story.
I've never heard that before, so you were told that.
Now, 1961, May 25th.
I didn't realize it was as early as that.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy announced to Congress, I believe, that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal of getting a man to the moon and returning him effectively.
That's what he said.
But the interesting thing that comes out of the book is that although Kennedy set out the mission, nobody in NASA had any idea how they might do this.
So they had to pretty quickly work out a way Yes and no.
Yes, because, of course, as Americans, they didn't have anything.
And people imagine themselves it looks like a white piece of paper and you have to invent everything.
But it wasn't a fact.
Because more than 300 years before the speech of Kennedy, it was great people, physicians, you know, who wrote all the mathematics, all the formulas, how to fly to another world, like Newton, like Kepler and all the scientists from these times.
So the question was only how to put all these pieces of the puzzle together and to make it happen.
And the rocketry was also well known and for different tests done in Russia in German and in Germany And also in America.
And so it was a question of putting the pieces of the puzzle together more than inventing everything.
And a big part of it, you said that immediately after Kennedy's speech, NASA signed a deal with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, for effectively for developing computers.
Yes, the computer we already invented during the Second World War, it was used also.
But we knew that the most delicate part of the navigation will require high capacity of calculations.
And that's why they knew that when we receive the money, we have first to develop the famous Apollo computer.
Right, which by today's standards, of course, was very rudimentary.
But for the standards of the day, this was absolutely groundbreaking stuff.
Yes, exactly.
And, you know, when we speak about Apollo guidance computers, a lot of people think, yeah, how it's possible to fight the moon with such tiny computers.
But don't forget, the small computer on board was just there to fly the next flight phase.
It wasn't there to make huge calculation because all the big calculations were done in fact on ground by the huge building with a huge computer.
And during the whole night, the computer on ground made the calculation.
And once the calculation done, they sent the results by a data link to the small computer on board of the Apollo capsules.
That was the way to do it.
Right.
So most of the big and serious and difficult calculations were done by a massive Earthbound computer.
And they were then communicated to the little computer that would be on board Apollo.
Exactly.
Wow.
There's something else I didn't know.
Okay.
June 1965, 3rd of June, two and a half months after the Russian Alexei Leonov did what he did, Ed White carried out the first American spacewalk.
This probably was one of those media events that impacted the world's population more than any other up to that date because we saw film of it, we saw pictures of this, and it suddenly became, I would imagine, for the people who were around then and read about this, the idea that we were going into space and the idea that we were going to go to the moon, suddenly, I guess, as we say here in the UK, the penny dropped and people realized we're going to do this.
Yeah, exactly.
It was really a huge step demonstrating that man can survive outside its capsule.
It was very important to be able to make a space hawk.
That was Gemini 4.
Simultaneously, at the same time in the US, NASA was beginning to recruit tranches of astronauts, three of them.
How did they, you talk about how they went about doing this and the people they selected.
How did they go about picking these batches of astronauts?
Yes, it was a complicated process because at the beginning, they didn't know what are the quality required.
So they focused for the first group on physical qualities, as we discussed before.
And a very important also things they had to have in common, these astronauts, is the fact they are lucky.
So they were looking for capable people, but also demonstrating they could escape death, they have luck in life, because we wanted this kind of people to make those difficult flights, very dangerous flights.
And later on, the profile of astronauts changed and they looked for more test pilots, more background as engineer and even scientists later on like Jack Schmidt, Apollo 17 as a geologist.
Right.
So they were in later years they were more scientists, but at the beginning, and I've never heard anybody say this, that they were looking for, and you say it in the book, I've got the quote here.
Ever since the first astronaut group was selected, NASA had hoped to recruit, quotes, lucky aviators.
In other words, test pilots who'd managed to come out of testing planes alive.
Exactly.
And I was also very surprised when I heard that, but it came from a nurse, Diora, who told me that during a dinner in America.
And that was a very interesting discussion we had.
Okay.
Was there any more in that discussion that might interest my listener?
I ask her, obviously, you know a lot of things, why you don't write a book about that.
But she's not the kind of person to give all secrets or to tell the world about what she says.
So I was fortunate enough to have that small story.
Right.
You say in the book, the pilots soon learned that their luck extended to women.
Many females rushed to win their favors, and it was hard for many to resist the temptation.
The problem was this was the 1960s, and these guys were not rock stars.
They were doing a very serious thing as America saw it.
The media would have been all over the story if they had, you know, committed, if they'd married and committed adultery or there'd been any, you know, crazy affairs with crazy people.
And you talk about that in the book.
You say in 1960s America, a divorce was incompatible with the respectability that NASA wanted to display.
Deke Slayton was often obliged to warn his former classmates that each of them was expendable and that under no circumstances should news of an affair or a bad marriage get to the press.
This is something that's not talked about a lot, but these guys were warned about their conduct.
Yeah, exactly, because they were very wild.
And as I try to explain my book, it was also insightful NASA.
It was the people from the communication, Department of Communication, they had a big trouble to try to explain to the whole world that these people are perfect, just a perfect men.
But in fact, they were just normal human beings and they loved to take a risk, maybe even more risk than the average person on the street.
So that was a big problem.
You said that some of them had, because they obviously had access to very nice cars by our standards here, that some of them had a bit of a love of speed driving.
Oh, yes, exactly.
And I had a lot of stories.
I wrote my book with the ways I drove too fast and with the police, I had a lot of problems.
So it was a time, you know, the 60s.
We cannot compare with now.
But for me, it was very important to explain all of these stories because it's part of the bigger story.
And it's very important to understand the epoch, very important to understand that moment in history.
And was NASA adept?
Was it good at keeping negative stories about the astronauts?
Perhaps if they'd been stopped by a cop speeding or whatever, or done something else, maybe had a fight or whatever.
Was NASA good at keeping those stories out of the newspapers then?
Yeah, it was also very easy back in these times because no internet, no cell phones, so it was quite easy to keep this story quite secret.
We talked about Apollo 1 when, sadly, Gus Grissom and two other men lost their lives in a fire on the launch pad.
I think it was to do with the introduction of pure oxygen into the capsule, which ignited.
And those poor men were incinerated in the capsule, which was a terrible tragedy.
You've obviously talked to many, most of the astronauts.
How did they and how did the program react to that terrible tragedy?
How did they manage to get themselves through it?
It was a shock because losing his friends in that way and for a pilot to die on ground or for the colleagues, it was very hard.
But it was a chance and they were, you know, all military pilots.
So they lost a lot of friends already in combats or in Vietnam or in Korean war.
So it wasn't something new to lose friends, but they took the loss of their friends as a motivation to work even harder to achieve the dream.
Now, it's understandable that the guys themselves, because they lived with risk and they were, some of them, lucky test pilots, so, you know, they knew the score.
But what about the wives and the girlfriends and the children?
Did NASA do anything to try to explain to them, you know, obviously they would know there's risk, but did NASA do anything to explain the sorts of risk and what they would do to mitigate the risk?
No, actually, it was very hard to be a wife or girlfriend of astronauts.
And they had a hard time because they had to look after the family, to do all the jobs.
They had the press always hanging in front of the door, the house door.
And so it was quite difficult.
And they weren't really prepared for that.
But, you know, that was just love.
And they were trying just to make it possible for their men to go to the moon.
Because we get the picture, and certainly through documentaries that I've watched, of the wives being at home, fully supportive, watching coverage of the guys on television, being a good American and massively proud of these people.
But there must have been difficulties and tensions and fear as well behind the scenes, I would have thought.
Yes, exactly.
It was very difficult and was tragedy inside these families.
But as I said before, back in the 60s, it was completely another way of life also inside the families.
And the housewives were very brave in the sense that I accepted everything.
But that was a real burden.
The astronauts that you spoke with, did they feel that they had to sacrifice a lot of their personal life because of who they were and what they did?
Oh, yeah.
Everyone.
I mean, when you speak, they are very aware that a lot of them lost their wives.
I mean, they were divorced after the flight or later on.
And so the children also, they were very difficult for the children to accept the risk.
And that's why I wanted also to write about the children, what happened during the flight.
And for the whole family, it was a tremendous stress.
Of the families that you spoke with, of the astronauts that you spoke with, can you think of any who had regrets about getting involved in the program?
Or were they all delighted that they did it and proud to have done it?
Yeah, everyone is very proud.
And of course, going to the moon is such an amazing occasion in a lifetime that, of course, it's no regrets at all.
Now, we all think of the big, risky mission as Apollo 11, you know, first time on the moon.
That's the one that has to go right.
That's the one that everybody's watching.
But in fact, Apollo 8 was a massively important mission.
This is the one where the actual craft was catapulted around, you know, they didn't land, but the craft was catapulted around the back of the moon with the entire world watching, And it was Christmas.
Talk to me about that mission and the people on it.
Yes, the flight of Apollo 8 was very important.
It was the first time in human history that people left Earth's orbit and flew to another world, the moon.
And the three guys, it was Commander Frank Borman, a very hard guy, a scientist, very quiet.
And together with him was Jim Lovell, I will know later on to be the commander of Apollo 13, and Bill Anders for the third one.
And all three knew about the risk.
It was the most risky mission in all history of NASA with a chance out of two to come back alive.
But they did it very well, and that's all that we remember, fortunately, for that mission.
But there were problems, as you talk about in the book, and delays in the mission, and even the switching of crews between Apollo 8 and Apollo 9.
Yes, exactly.
It was a lot of problems during the Apollo program.
But what you mean is during the summer of 1968, it was a secret agent that came to NASA and told, oh, we believe that the Russians are preparing a flight around the moon because the rocket we see on pictures by Konur is huge.
And so they decided to switch the mission 9 and 8.
And instead of testing the lunar module in Earth orbit with the next mission, they decided to take the big, huge risk to send three men around the moon.
And it was correct to do that because my dear friend Alexei Leonov, the first man who did a spacewalk in 1965, this man, Alexei Leonov, was preparing a flight around the moon for October 68.
And he didn't fly around the moon just because of the bureaucracy, because no one in Moscow wanted to sign the paper to send Alexei Leonov around the moon.
And these delays, it was good for American NASA, so they were able to be first with Apollo 8.
Wow, so it wasn't the crews that were switched.
It was the actual whole mission that was switched.
And 9 became 8.
And that was all because of, as you say, secret agent and intelligence that the Russians were going to do that.
And the only reason that Alexei Leonov didn't do it before the US was because of bureaucracy and somebody wouldn't sign a piece of paper.
Exactly.
Wow.
And talk to me about Alexei Leonov.
You know him.
What sort of person was he?
He was one of the nicest person I ever met.
He was very down-to-hears, very polite, very calm, very humble, you know.
And I remember the last time I went to visit him in Moscow and we had a drink together.
And he told me he was very sad that he didn't get his chance to fly around the moon.
And he was still sad 50 years later, you know, because he knew he lost something incredible.
He was a great man, Alexei.
When he was behind the Iron Curtain, obviously training and doing the missions and the exercises that he was involved in, was he much aware of what NASA was doing?
Were they telling the cosmonauts what the astronauts were up to?
Yes, and you know, it was a beautiful friendship between cosmonaut and astronauts.
They had a few occasions to meet each other.
For example, in Athens, in the mid-60s, and later on.
So it was a great camaraderie.
They didn't understand each other, but they respect each other.
And the cosmonaut, they had time-to-time live magazine when they could see how the colleagues in America are living like rock stars.
And they were amazed.
Gagarin, Leonoff, everyone were amazed to see that.
So were the Russian guys jealous that the American guys were being fated like stars?
Not at all.
Not at all.
Because they were just surprised.
But no, not at all, because it was the way of living and they were happy like that.
Right, and how did they feel?
And, you know, I'm sure you will have talked to Leonov about this.
How did they feel when America, having been on the back foot at the beginning, then got the upper hand?
Actually, it was, let's say that way.
You have two parts of the answers.
The political answer is, of course, it was terrible for the Soviets to see Americans taking advantage, of course.
But on the technical and the scientists, at cosmonaut side, they were more pragmatic.
They didn't really care about what concerned the cosmonauts to be first or not.
They were just doing their job.
That's it.
For the astronauts, it was more a political aspect also for the astronauts.
But in fact, they were all pilots, astronauts, cosmonauts, they just wanted to do their job.
As far as you know, did they have the same attitude, the cosmonauts and the astronauts, to the possibility of dying?
I guess you had to be philosophical on one level.
Yes, they are soldiers that just follow orders.
And like in combat, you are always ready to die, so it was no difference.
Apollo 11, the big mission, of course, the one where man got to the moon.
You describe the characters involved here, and a lot has been written about the dynamic between Neil Armstrong, who was very much the technocrat, and the man you describe as truculent, Buzz Aldrin, who was also known in earlier years for mischief, big character, versus Neil Armstrong, who was a much more recessed character, if that's the word to use.
So what did you, what impression, because I think you met Neil Armstrong, what impression did you get of that dynamic between the two men?
Yes, I had a chance to meet both of them several times and they are completely different.
You have Neil Armstrong who impressed me a lot, was very calm, brilliant, a big aura, like a president, like very ralliant, somebody, amazing guy.
And on the other hand, you had Buzz Aldrin who was very colorful and he loved to speak a lot, maybe too much for some people.
And it was quite interesting because in aviation we called a threat who says a reverse of command if someone tried to take advantage of the other one.
But in the case of Apollo 11, the commander was actually Neil Armstrong and then his deputy was Buzz Aldrin.
And it was sometimes difficult for Neil Armstrong to keep the command.
Really?
Because Buzz was such a powerful character that he wanted to take over.
Yeah, exactly.
So they had some fights sometimes, some bad words.
You met them, presumably you met them separately?
Not always, no.
Once they were together for the 40th anniversary Apollo 12 in Florida and in 2009.
But they were in different table and they never interacted.
Isn't that interesting?
So they didn't bother with each other.
Oh, yes, that's amazing.
Isn't that?
You describe Neil Armstrong in the book as discreet, almost self-effacing, often distant.
And yet you say that he was also, and I think you've alluded to this already, but he was also one of the people, you say, whose presence impressed me the most.
Yeah, exactly.
He says, you know, when you are in front of you, the first man who walked on the moon, of course, you have an impression like meeting Christopher Columbus, you know.
But in fact, you have so a gentle, humble man, very kind and empathic, always asking, what do you think?
How are you?
And that impressed me a lot, you know.
You talk about, and we always think, certainly from what I learned about Apollo 11, that it was something that went fabulously well and that there were no problems at all.
But you talk about something.
I've never read about this.
Maybe it's been written about many times before.
I've just missed it.
But you talk about the tasks on the moon for Apollo 11 going well.
But there was a problem.
You say the two astronauts tried to sleep, leaving it to Houston to find a solution to a problem that they had.
But they were too cold and the oxygen passing through their suits made them more uncomfortable.
The windows were not well covered.
There wasn't much light.
Then it was time to wake up and they had no more hope of falling asleep.
There was still no solution to a problem that they had.
And mission control, yes, there was a switch.
There was a problem with a switch.
So as a last resort, you say, Buzz Aldrin took a felt-tip pen out of his pocket and forced the connection from a broken switch with a pen.
And that was a crucial problem with the mission because that switch controlled the rocket motor and that was the rocket motor that was going to get them off the moon.
Yeah, it's a tragedy.
Can you imagine you have a cockpit of the Lunar module with a lot of switches, almost 400 switches, but just one is broken and is the only one who could bring you home?
It's amazing.
It's tragic.
How did they feel about that?
I'd have been scared.
Do you think they were scared?
No, they weren't scared because as a test pilot, engineers are just looking for solution and they knew it's always a solution because it's a technical item, quite not easy, but they could figure it out as possible to find a solution.
But of course, it's a lot of pressure, a lot of, yeah, we are on the moon.
So of course it wasn't that easy to manage.
So Aldrin was the one who was the maverick.
He was the guy who thought out of the box.
And he was the guy who came up with the idea of let's shove a pen in it and see if we can, which is what I'd have done, and see if I can make the thing work.
And it worked.
Yeah, exactly.
Amazing, but true story.
What did they think about people who say to this day that there was no lunar landing and that man did not go to the moon and that the film that we see is all faked?
How did both of them, two most important people in the whole story, how did they react to that?
Yeah, actually, it was really a burden.
Every time they heard about that, it was a sad situation because, of course, they almost lost their own life to achieve that flight, that mission.
And yeah, it was very sad because they were confronted and also all the astronauts Also, in front of me, I experienced myself a few times, people coming in and showing up and asking the guys and telling them, actually, not asking that they never went to the moon.
Right, so I just need to clarify that.
So, when you were with the two guys, Armstrong and Aldrin, there were times when people came up and said, you never went to the moon?
Not with Buzz and Neil, but with Edgar Mitchell, with Charlie Dook experience.
But what concerned Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, we all remember the reaction of Buzz Aldrin on the video with a journalist from the US and he punched him.
And it was, Buzz had quite a violent reaction.
Yes, we saw that.
I mean, we have to say that he was pushed a very long way before that happened.
But, you know, I think if somebody pushed me that far, I might have reacted the same.
But there's a whole other story.
Now, Apollo 12 obviously follows in the footsteps of Apollo 11.
And you talk about the crew there.
And you say that for Conrad, he was deeply, deeply emotionally affected by being on the moon.
But Alan Bean, who you describe as a nice man, Alan Bean wasn't really...
Sorry, I've got that wrong.
Alan Bean, you say, stepping onto the lunar surface was a mystical experience.
Conrad was deeply emotionally affected by the moon.
Have I got that right, or which way around was that?
Sorry.
That's my typing.
That's my bad typing.
No problem.
Actually, yes, you said correctly.
The commander, Pete Conrad, didn't care about if he went to the moon or not because he wasn't his character, his personality.
He just enjoyed every day, Carpedium, and he just enjoyed the next days, the next things to do in life.
And he never really reflects on his own life.
But Alan Bean, he was very sensitive, he was an artist, a painter, and he was very affected by his experience.
And he spent actually all the rest of his life to paint his experience.
Did you meet him?
Yeah, a lot of times.
He was also a good friend.
And we miss him because actually just a few weeks before he died, I asked him to make a paint for the cover of my book.
He accepted that, but actually, unfortunately, wasn't able to do that.
Yes, we were close.
It was really a good guy, and I miss him a lot.
Yes, I read about the astronaut who was the painter.
Of course, that was Alan Bean.
So obviously it was a big, transformative and mystical experience for him, something that changed his life.
All of their lives were changed, but he was turned into somebody who was more artistic and more appreciative of the sights around him, perhaps, than the others.
Yes, and this point of the story is important for me to enforce us about what actually I discovered after my studies of this case, of these astronauts.
No one changed themselves, but they became more profound.
The guy who loved to paint after his flight, he became a painter.
The guy who believed a little bit in God after his flight, he became a priester.
So, you know, we can compare this guy after such a dramatic experience.
It's like soldiers coming back from war.
They are more profound and they just want to enjoy life with something they love at most.
And for Alan Bin was painting.
Apollo 12, and I hadn't read this, had a technical problem, didn't it?
Something to do with the artificial horizon system.
There was a problem with that.
I think the guidance system, the inertial guidance.
And of course, if that has a problem, you don't know where you are.
Yeah, it was actually during a launch.
It was some thunderstorms around.
And during launch, they were hit by lightning and they lost all their systems inside a command module.
But in that particular phase of flight, it's not the capsule who is a master, he's a rocket himself with his electronic unit, own computers, own navigation systems, and so it wasn't a big deal.
They just had to make a reset inside the command module.
So system restore.
System restore.
Okay.
That's fine.
I didn't realize that was on the ground.
Now look, Apollo 13 is something that I was just a little boy at school, but I remember the impact that that had on the entire world because we all thought these guys were superstars and they were invincible and nothing could ever go wrong.
And of course, as we discovered, there was an explosion on board.
Apollo 13 never got to the moon and an ingenious solution to get them home had to be discovered.
Did you meet the crew of Apollo 13?
Yeah, I know well the commander, Jim Lovell and Fred Hayes.
I met a few times.
And this is just an incredible story.
But for Jim Lovell, it was very hard for him because he wanted really to work on the moon.
And as a commander, he took that experience as a big disaster.
And he had this impression that he have all the responsibility of that failure.
But during almost the first 20 years after the flight, he was really not very happy with what happened.
But in 1995, when the movie came with Tom Hanks, Apollo 13, suddenly Apollo 13 became such a famous mission and such successful failure, and suddenly Jim Lovell was a hero.
And it helps himself a lot to recover and to see in retrospective in another manier what's happened.
Did Lovell or any of them talk to you about how they felt?
Maybe in particular, there were times when the TV transmissions were turned off.
I mean, they had to turn them off to save battery power at one time, but you know, the guys had to sleep.
Did they talk to you about what it was like to be up there and out of communication for a period in that way?
Yeah, Jim Lovell told me that actually they were very calm.
They never suffer any kind of crisis or to be depressive or bad words between the crew members.
All three were calm and they were just absorbed by the task to stay alive.
And the biggest one, or one of the biggest ones, as is indicated, demonstrated in the movie, which I've seen so many times, is where they have to have, it's a carbon dioxide scrubbing filter, isn't it?
That they had to make themselves out of parts that were available to them.
Now, I have to say that if I had to do that in space, knowing that my life depended on it, my hands would be shaking like a jelly, and I'm not sure I could do it.
But amazingly, they were able to construct this thing exactly as they were directed from ground control, and they did it, and the air got clear again, and they survived.
Actually, that's in the movie of a few small mistakes.
And the story of the canister is one of this mistake.
Actually, they had already solutions how to use, for example, Lunar Module to rescue the crew if something happened in the command module.
They had a few solutions already discussed and on papers.
And what the canisters, they had the canister, but the problem was how to connect the canister together because it was another kind of tube used and connection between lunar module and command module.
And that was the problem.
But it worked fine, and it looks dramatic in the movie, but in real life, it wasn't a big deal, actually.
How did they feel when they splashed down, when they knew that they'd survived and they were home?
I don't know exactly, to be frank with you.
I see the pictures.
I know was they were, you know, the flight was so demanding, was so tired, that's, of course, they were like empty, without emotions.
That's personally, I see on the pictures.
And Fred Hayes was in bad shape.
He was very ill.
And so it wasn't easy for them, but for sure happy to be back.
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14.
Now, Edgar Mitchell is the only Apollo astronaut that I've ever spoken with.
You knew Edgar Mitchell.
He was a man whose life was changed profoundly by it all.
If he was spiritual beforehand, he was even more so afterwards.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, before I met Edgar Mitchell, I heard a lot about him.
You know, like, ah, that's a crazy guy.
Oh, that's a guy who believe in you for blah, blah, blah, blah.
But in fact, is the most intelligent among all the astronauts, even if you compare him with Buzz-Aldrin.
Around inside the core of astronauts, his nickname was the brain.
Edgar Mitchell was brilliant, almost a genius, and was very, you know, someone who reflect a lot, who think a lot.
And so, of course, it happened to him that during his flight, he had big, big impact on his life.
And that changed his life a lot, completely.
And after the flight, he was conscious that we know nothing about purpose of life, about philosophy, if we can say.
And so he devoted the rest of his life to understand what is the meaning of human consciousness.
He told me.
Absolutely amazing man.
The interview that I did with him was on Skype, and he sent me video, and I didn't tell him to turn the video off.
We were only doing audio because I could look across my room, and I could see Edgar Mitchell sitting in his library with all the books behind him doing this thing.
Such an intense, imposing character, an amazing man.
I asked him, as you must have asked him, what it was like to step out onto the lunar surface, and he said it was a wow moment.
What did he tell you?
Yeah, exactly.
In fact, the problem with all astronauts, if you ask them what was emotion on the lunar surface, they tell you, oh, you know, I don't like that question because we didn't have any kind of emotion.
We were so concentrated and we wanted to do the job.
But they had emotion, of course.
And what it's typical Edgar Michel, after his flight, he decided to recover the emotion he had, but he wasn't conscious about.
He did hypnose.
And do you understand hypnose?
Yes, he had to have hypnosis.
Yeah, hypnosis.
And after a few times, he did hypnosis.
So he was aware about what kind of emotion actually he had on the lunar surface and what he wrote in his book.
Now, that's interesting.
And what did the hypnosis bring out for him?
I didn't ask him about that.
I have to say I should have.
And of course, I can't now.
But what did he tell you about the hypnosis?
Yeah, it was just to try to recover the kind of emotion he had on the lunar surface because he was so concentrated because the timeline was very tough, very tight, and they have to do a lot of things in the short period of time.
So it was a lot of stress, stressful moment on the lunar surface.
And later on, while writing his book in autobiography, he was frustrated because he didn't remember any kind of emotion.
So he did hypnosis and that's just perfect.
And apart from helping his book, do you think it helped him?
Yeah, of course.
It helped him to better understand his own experience on the lunar surface.
You seem to have a lot of time for Jim Irwin from Apollo 15.
Talk to me about Jim Irwin.
Actually, I spend a lot of time with Edgar Mitchell, who was like a mentor for me, and he's a godfather of my son, Nicola.
And Jim Irvine, I met just once at age 12, and I was very, very, very impressed because, you know, you are a teenager, you expect to see an astronaut who is big, muscular, arrogant, chingum, you know, the typical American guy you see on the screen in television.
But in front of me was a small guy, very humble, with a lot of jokes.
And it didn't match with the image I had from such astronauts.
And it was, in fact, the first role model in my life.
Really?
Yes.
So how do you think you tried to be like him?
Because I realized that in life, you can be normal, you can be yourself and achieve amazing things.
And for the child I was, it was a big lesson.
Right.
I've known in my own field a lot of accomplished people.
And sometimes they've been a lot like their image in the media.
And a lot of the time they're very different as ordinary people.
They're just kind of, you know, quieter and just ordinary, as you said.
So that was a big thing for you to learn as a boy.
Oh, yeah.
It changed my life because I started to believe in my own dream.
Because myself, I'm a son of an immigrant, Italian immigrant, coming in Switzerland.
It wasn't easy every day.
And when I grew up, I never imagined myself to achieve my own dreams.
But thanks to Jim Irvin, I changed my mind.
And obviously, it was a success because myself, I became later on an airline pilot, what I always wanted to be.
And you'll be flying planes again soon once this lockdown situation is over.
Apollo 16.
Thank you.
Just finally, I want to talk about, I know the last mission was Apollo 17, but Apollo 16 and John Young from that mission, the ninth person to walk on the moon, you had a conversation with him, and he was very concerned about something that NASA is very concerned about, so is the European Space Agency at the moment, very concerned about the prospect of an asteroid hitting Earth.
What did he say to you about that?
Yeah, he was very concerned because John Young, he was the guy who was the longest in the astronaut office.
He was officially an astronaut for more than 40 years, can you imagine?
And so he spoke a lot with engineers, scientists inside NASA.
So he was very aware about the threat, about the problem that humanity could face in a few years.
And one of the subject was with asteroids, the risk of the collision of asteroid.
Right.
And what did he think we should do?
I think like the project that are coming, the first is to look after these threats, to try to discover them long before they are in the vinicity of Earth.
And the second point is to find a technical solution to deviate them of the trajectory if they become a traffic.
He also talked to you about the medical tests that he had during his preparation to become an astronaut.
And apparently they pushed him to the absolute limit.
They pushed his blood pressure to more than 200, which is, you know, that's, I don't know whether that's the upper or the lower, but that's a huge figure.
Oh, yes, exactly.
And he was quite shocked because all the astronauts don't have a good remembers about these tests, medical tests.
They all have bad recollections of them.
And we will talk about the final mission, Apollo 17.
It struck me that Gene Cernan, who was a veteran of the program, and Jack Schmidt, very different people.
Yeah, exactly.
Gene Cernan, actually, is a real space cowboy, as you may imagine.
He was a big, tall, good-looking man, taking a lot of risk and loving cars and loving girls.
And it was really enjoying life.
And flying together with him was a scientist, totally different personality.
And the two of them, they had, at the beginning, hard times to find each other.
But I guess they had to in the end.
They had to at the end.
And I asked Gene Cernan, I told him as commander, how did you do to try to make a team forming?
But because he was so different, it was really not very easy for him to get along with.
And he told me that, yeah, he just had some times to just in the military fashion just to give orders, but I obviously never became friends.
It's like that in a lot of businesses.
I really enjoyed the book.
It's a lovely piece of writing.
Thank you.
You spent 20 years meeting and knowing these people, and that was your research for this book.
What have you taken personally out of it?
I take a very, very important message.
The first message I will say is that don't let anyone tell you you can not do something.
I mean, everyone is different, different personalities, different character, but everyone has the potential to be successful in life.
And that's I tried to demonstrate by explaining the childhood and the story of these 12 people, because for some of them it was quite horrible what they experienced as a child.
And later on, they became obviously very successful.
So it's also for ourselves.
That's the first lesson.
And the second lesson is, you know, we have to take care.
We are all in the same spaceship.
We are actually 8 billion astronauts flying around the Sun.
And the problem, we are not aware about that situation.
And thanks Apollo, we have pictures, beautiful pictures of Earth taken from so far away, from another world, from the moon, and to try to make us conscious about our situation here on Earth.
Yes, we realize the beauty of this planet, but also for the first time its fragility.
Exactly.
Wow.
And I love the sentence of Jim Lovell telling people are seeking their whole life to go to paradise, but they forget that actually they are born in the paradise on Earth.
Yeah, that's true.
And when coronavirus is gone or abates, we're all going to hopefully appreciate it.
I know I will even more than I did before.
Lucas Viglietti, an amazing piece of work that you've done here.
And I do recommend people read the book because it's just nice.
It's a nice book.
And I thank you for speaking with me.
Oh, thank you very, very much, Ward.
It was very a great honor.
And I thank you very much for giving me the possibility to explain a little bit about my book because it's a book of inspiration, it's a book about man, is about human being.
And for sure people will enjoy it.
Absolutely.
Give my love to Switzerland and I'm sure you'll be sitting in that Swissair cockpit again very soon.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
And maybe we meet us.
I will be friends.
Leona, maybe I haven't been to Switzerland since what year 2002.
I love French Switzerland.
And I remember one of the places I visited was Chamonix.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it was July, and I remember we went up the mountain to Chamonix, and it was cold there.
And, you know, fondue and beer in Chamonix is one of life's great experiences, as you will know, Lucas.
Listen, lovely to talk with you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye-bye, Lucas.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye-bye, Mort.
Well, some remarkable stories there.
I didn't realize that he was that close to Edgar Mitchell.
That's astonishing.
So, you know, the guy knew these people.
And I love the way he tells the stories.
Your thoughts on this show?
Always welcome.
Please get in touch with me through the website theunexplained.tv.
Garago.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay at home, stay calm, and please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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