With so many things that could go wrong and plenty to keep his mind occupied, Neil Armstrong says he hadn’t actually put a lot of direct energy and thought into what he was going to say when first stepped off the Eagle and on to the Sea of Tranquility.
“I thought about it after landing,” Armstrong told the Associated Press, via The Daily Universe, of those famous words. “And because we had a lot of other things to do, it was not something that I really concentrated on, but just something that was kind of passing around subliminally or in the background.” The fact is, however, Armstrong did indeed say what he had intended to say and had thought he had said.
In 2006, Australian computer programmer Peter Shann Ford downloaded an audio recording of Armstrong’s historic proclamation from a NASA webpage intent on finding out the truth. After all, the transmission technology had relatively low bandwidth and bits of the recording could easily have been a little garbled.
The software he used produced a graphical representation of the words Armstrong spoke and while the word “a” could not be heard by the human ear it was represented graphically, revealing that Armstrong had indeed said it, the Washington Post notes. Of Ford’s finding, Armstrong said “I … find his conclusion persuasive,” adding, “‘Persuasive’ is the appropriate word.”