- BEVERLY HILLS (Reuters)
- A man who publicly confronted astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin
over whether he actually went to the Moon said on Tuesday that the Apollo
11 hero almost sent him into space with a punch to the jaw.
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- Bart Sibrel, an independent filmmaker from Nashville,
Tennessee, said he was trying to conduct an ambush interview with Aldrin
outside a hotel in Beverly Hills on Monday when the astronaut punched him
and ran away.
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- "I approached him and asked him again to swear on
a Bible that he went to the moon, and told him he was a thief for taking
money to give an interview for something he didn't do," Sibrel told
Reuters.
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- The incident was videotaped for Sibrel's second film,
which claims to prove that the Apollo 11 astronauts faked footage of their
July 1969 trip to the Moon to fool the Soviet Union into thinking the United
States had won the 1960s space race.
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- Sibrel, 37, said he reported the assault to police and
was seeking an assault charge against the 72-year-old astronaut.
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- A spokesman for Aldrin could not be reached for comment.
Beverly Hills police confirmed that they are investigating the incident.
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- The encounter with Aldrin was Sibrel's third since he
said he discovered footage in NASA's archives showing that the Apollo 11
astronauts had placed a transparency of the Earth in front of their space
capsule window and videotaped it to simulate a journey to the Moon.
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- Aldrin was the second man to take a walk on the Moon,
a feat recorded on grainy black-and-white film footage and transmitted
around the world on July 20, 1969.
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- But Sibrel contends in his first film, "A Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon," that Apollo 11 never left
Earth's orbit and that no one has ever walked on the Moon. He also produced
a Fox TV show last year entitled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on
the Moon?"
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