In September 2015, Buzz Aldrin gave an interview at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. Flat-Earthers misrepresented and quoted it out of context as if Buzz was admitting that the Apollo Moon landings never happened.
The original interview was 17 minutes long, and there were other occasions Buzz clearly said the Moon landings happened, without any possibility of misinterpretation.
The following is the transcript from the original interview:
ZOEY: Why has nobody been to the Moon in such a long time?
BUZZ: That’s not an eight years old question, but my question. I want to know but I think I know. We didn’t go there (in such a long time) and that’s the way it happened. And if it didn’t happen (in such a long time), it’s nice to know why it didn’t happen (in such a long time). So, in the future, if we want to keep doing something, we need to know why something stopped in the past we want to keep it going. Money (is the answer).
The original interview was 17 minutes long. Unscrupulous flat-Earthers deliberately showed us a specific segment without giving it the proper context. In another part of the interview, Buzz clearly said several times that the Moon landings happened.
BUZZ: … so, we did send people in it around the Moon, then we sent people —another crew— to go around the Moon and then practice everything but landing. And then, a very fortunate person, many things going right in my life gave Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins, Buzz Aldrin the opportunity to make an attempt to make the first landing. All of us wanted to succeed, and we did …
This is merely a language problem. It is common that we omit a portion of the question in the answer to the question. In this case, the question was “Why has nobody been to the Moon in such a long time?” Buzz answered like “We did not go there because of money,” omitting the “in such a long time” part of the question.
By examining the question, we can determine the context of Buzz’s answer. The modus operandi of these unscrupulous flat Earthers was to omit the entire question and other parts of the interview, hoping that the viewers do not learn the context of the statement.
The original video