Pat Flannery wrote:

Ellsworth Toohey wrote:
It was supposed to be "one small step for *A* man," Neil. What you
said was redundant and didn't make any sense.

We've been quiet on this issue for a while now, but that doesn't
excuse your error, Mr. Armstrong.

What he was supposed to actually say came out within a few years after
the flight, but it was claimed that the "a" was dropped by a
communication's glitch.

NASA claimed that.

I think he can be forgiven for being a bit excited at the time he was
talking. :-D

Armstrong thought he had said it right...

Luckily, the thing didn't turn into this, as reported by The Onion:
http://members.shaw.ca/rlongpre01/moon.html
And a video set to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIkHLO93lCA

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/onesmall.asp
Claim: Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong flubbed his historic 'one small step'
remark as he became the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon.

Status: True.
....
NASA obligingly provided the cover story that "static" had obscured the missing
word:
....
The "a" apparently went unheard and unrecorded in the transmission because of
static, a spokesman for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston said today in
a telephone interview.
....
But he knew what he said. "There must be an 'a', " Mr. Armstrong says of the event
in the 1986 book Chariots for Apollo. "I rehearsed it that way. I meant it that
way. And I'm sure I said it that way."

Then the Grumman representative, Tommy Attridge, put on a commemorative 45-rpm
recording of the flight. No matter what speed they played it at, there was no
"a".

According to the authors, Mr. Armstrong sighed, "Damn, I really did it. I blew the
first words on the moon, didn't I?"
....