Pink Floyd and The Aliens, Man

April 19, 2026

I came across something the other day on social media that I probably should have ignored. One of those things that you read, roll your eyes at, and scroll on – Roll and Scroll. Except this one kind of stuck with me. Not because I believed it, but because it didn’t fall apart straight away as most conspiracy theories do. I guess the art of a good conspiracy theory is to be believable, but at the same time somewhat absurd.

It started with The Dark Side of the Moon record by Pink Floyd and the suggestion that if you play it at a certain point during the recent Artemis II mission, it kind of lines up. Specifically, the bit where the spacecraft went out of radio contact.

We’ve all seen this sort of thing before. The Wizard of Oz one has been around for years. Start the album at the right moment, and people start spotting connections. The band have always said it’s a coincidence, and they should know (unless they are in the pay of “the man“, man), but that hasn’t stopped anyone. I’ve never experimented, but I bet loads of folk reading this have.

There’s also that slightly blurry connection between Pink Floyd, space, and the BBC if you dig around a bit. Broadcasts, performances, bits of history that may or may not be entirely accurate. It all sort of blends together after a while. My assumption on the Floyd playing during the moonshot in 1969 was that they played the whole program, but after a bit of research, it turns out they only played for about five minutes…but there was some truth in this urban myth.

Which is usually where things start to drift a bit. Because once you start looking at the Moon, it doesn’t take long before it gets dragged into what you might call its own kind of Alpha Conspiracy orbit. The usual ideas are all present and correct. The landings were staged, the footage was faked, and Kubrick was involved. You don’t have to believe any of it to see how easily people get pulled in.

Keep going down the internet rabbit holes, and it gets properly strange. The Moon is hollow. The Moon rings like a bell. The Moon is something artificial. Clangers still live there. None of it really holds up to any real scrutiny, but that’s not really the point, is it?

What struck me about this Floyd/Artemis thing was something much simpler. In 1977, NASA sent up Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, each carrying a gold record. Music, voices, sounds from Earth. A message sent out into space with no idea if anything would ever hear it. I remember it well, as it was on Blue Peter and other kids’ television programs.

I quite liked the whole idea of sending a kind of time capsule into the depths of space. It’s quite a nice idea when you think about it. This is us. The human race. This is what we sound like. I do still think we’d have been better putting Hawkwind’s Master of the Universe on there just to put off any potentially aggressive alien lifeforms, mind.

Anyway, the record runs to about ninety minutes, so roughly forty-five minutes per side.

Cue The Twilight Zone theme music.

Those 45 minutes are important, so stick with me on this one. Why? Because the time the Artemis spacecraft disappeared behind the Moon was forty-odd minutes. And The Dark Side of the Moon runs to just over 42’ 50”. As Jimi Hendrix put it, “Close enough for rock and roll.”

At that point, it’s still just a coincidence.

We know we sent that golden record out for Aliens to bop along to. What we don’t know is whether any of them ever responded. Not because they couldn’t, but because we wouldn’t necessarily recognise it if they did. There’s so much radio noise around us that anything faint would just disappear into it.

Unless you were somewhere quiet! Really quiet. Deathly quiet. Dark Side of the Moon quiet!

Cue The Twilight Zone theme music again.

The far side of the Moon is about as quiet as it gets. No interference from Earth, no background noise. Just that short window when a spacecraft passes behind it and loses contact. For that period, it’s on its own. And if something did come back, and we are talking here, however unlikely, about a response from somewhere else, something not of us, then it probably wouldn’t arrive in a form we recognise.

Not a message you translate. Not a “We got your record, and we prefer Norwegian Death Metal or Hawkwind.” Something that just plays. Like a record. Like what we sent out for them to listen to. If you were an alien responding to that Golden Record, you’d likely try to respond similarly.

A single, continuous piece. About forty-five minutes long.

And if that was the case, you wouldn’t get a second chance at it. You’d have to record it as it happened, in real time, with no way of going back. One burst. One side. One side of a record. That idea will sound familiar to anyone who spends time around vinyl. It’s not a million miles from a Direct to Disc recording. One pass, no edits, whatever happens is what you get.

I’m not saying that’s what Artemis II was doing. Honestly, I’m not. I’m far too grounded for all that conspiracy theory nonsense.

But it’s an interesting thing to consider. Because then you end up back at The Dark Side of the Moon again. Not because it proves anything, but because it already exists as a complete piece that sits in that same sort of timeframe.

And then there’s Pulse. The record by Pink Floyd…again. But also a signal. A repeating signal. Something measured over time. Something you detect, rather than hear in any conventional sense. It’s a strange word to land on if you think about it for too long. Not a melody. Not a song. Not even sound, really. Just a sequence. Something that exists whether you understand it or not. If you were trying to describe a transmission, stripped of meaning, reduced to its most basic form, you could do worse than that. A pulse.

Come on, guys, join the dots!

A forty-odd minute window behind the Moon. A forty-two-minute and fifty-second album about it. A record sent into space, packaged as a complete listening experience that lasts about forty-five minutes on each side. And, years later, a live release with a title that describes the simplest possible form of a signal.

The aliens are talking to us, Man! They’re talking to us through the Floyd, Dudes!

You can ignore it, and you probably should. But like all good conspiracy theories, it’s also exactly the sort of thing people latch onto. We sent music into space as a way of saying “this is who we are”. If something answered, it wouldn’t know anything about us. Not really. Not language, not culture, not context. But duration is simple. Structure is simple. Repetition is simple.

A pulse.

Forty-something minutes long. And the only way to isolate it from the background radio chatter is to go to the Dark Side of the Moon.

Cue The Twilight Zone theme music again.

Look, I don’t think there’s a broadcast waiting for us behind the Moon. I believe the moon landings were real. In fact, I’m entirely confident there isn’t anything at all in the original conspiracy theory about Artemis, Pink Floyd, and my conspiratorial little expansion of it. I’m just playing here! I’ll leave all that urban myth nonsense to those more inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, and I’ll not repeat what my mate, Mingus, calls them…but it’s not very complimentary.

Now play the theme tune.

No, not that one. We’ve moved on from that.

Let’s have Julius Fucik – Entry of the Gladiators.

Until next week, stay safe, and don’t believe everything you read on socials!