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On 8 April 2018, an English tabloid attempted to pass off a long-debunked conspiracy theory about astronaut Buzz Aldrin and three of his peers as an exclusive by involving a questionable research group. According to the London-based Daily Star, Aldrin — as well as Gordon Cooper, Edgar Mitchell, and Al Worden — took part in a study by the Institute of BioAcoustic Biology in the United States. The fact that Cooper and Mitchell are both dead is not mentioned until the story's penultimate paragraph. Despite stating in its headline that Aldrin (who piloted the Apollo 11 mission in 1969) passed a lie detector test, the Star reported that the four astronauts' participation consisted of an alleged analysis of recordings of the two men's voices. But there is no mention of which recordings were covered by the complex computer analyses of their voice patterns; instead, the Star reported that these studies are claimed to be more reliable than current lie detector tests and could soon replace those used by the FBI and police, without stating exactly who is making said claim: The tabloid also reported that Sharry Edwards, who heads the Ohio-based institute, said that even though Aldwin cannot explain it, he is somehow sure that he saw a non-terrestrial spacecraft. But the tabloid did not mention that Aldrin himself said during a Reddit Ask Me Anything chat session on 8 July 2014 that what he saw was likely not anything extraterrestrial: We reached out to Aldrin seeking comment but did not hear back prior to publication; a spokesperson for him told the Australian web site Pedestrian, This is bogus and we don't know where it came from. Aldrin's spokesperson also emailed us to rebut the allegation, saying: Bioacoustics — the institute's alleged field of expertise — is a legitimate realm of scientific study, dating back to the work of biologist Ivan Regen in 1925. But as ScienceAlert.com once said of Edwards' group, the institute's line of study bears the hallmarks of pseudoscience.
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