This may well be unanswerable, but I thought I’d open a question that’s been bugging me for years to the Dope Detectives.
When I was between the ages of 8 and 11 years old, which would be '91 to '94, an American guy visited my primary school, in England, who had ‘been to the moon’. I’m unsure if he had actually visited the surface, or merely orbited. He apparently had brought some footage taken on the mission he had been on, which may have clarified the situation, but my school didn’t actually have a projector, so he couldn’t show them. I do remember him being clearly somewhat bewildered at how tiny the school was, only 28 pupils total, and only the older half in the class he was talking to. We wound up with a talk that clearly wasn’t the one he was planning on, and a few rocks were handed round for us to look at- one moon rock that I think he said was collected on their mission, and one that was harvested from a meteorite and thought to originally be from Mars, which was encased in plastic. Why I can remember that, but not who the guy was, I have no clue.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the only astronauts I’d heard of at the time, and he wasn’t either of them. I think he had dark hair, maybe some grey, but he wasn’t elderly. Aside from that, I got nothin’.
None of the kids were massive space buffs, and frankly the fact that he was American made about as big an impact as the whole space thing. I remember thinking it was kinda cool, but I didn’t realise that it was actually a pretty big deal. I don’t think I even mentioned it to my parents that afternoon when they picked me up.
It does sound perfectly feasible that an ex NASA astronaut would do a tour of UK schools, presumably sponsored by someone hoping to drum up youth interest in space. Maybe the schools were decided by lottery, which could explain why he’d wind up in such a tiny place (he wasn’t just there to case the joint, unlike the only other random visitor I remember there, who nicked the teacher’s wallet).
The teacher who was there that day, who was the head and presumably arranged the whole thing, sadly died about 10 years ago, so I can’t use that line of enquiry.
Anyone got any guesses?