Anyone arriving at US Customs knows to expect a good grilling about what brings them to the land of the free, and what they've brought with them. But we're pretty sure Neil Armstrong and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew expected to breeze back to earth without any border hassle.

However, as we noted last week when we interviewed Steve Bellovin, one of the co-creators of Usenet, the men who Moon walked before Michael Jackson had to make a Customs declaration when they got back to earth on 24 July 1969.

Steve's site contains a link to the form here. . The document lists their departure point as "Moon"; and arrival as "Honolulu". Their bags contained "Moon rock and Moon dust samples" and no illegal aliens had joined them on the round trip.

It's not known whether Neil, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and Michael Collins got the rubber glove treatment.

A former Customs man passed the document to Steven M. Bellovin, an AT&T Fellow in the Communications Information Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey, according to today's Independent. We can't think where the Independent got the story from. As a couple of you have pointed out, it's a remarkable coincidence. ®

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Our Steve Bellovin interview last week