The Missing Apollo 11 Data and Videotapes

Science advisor Richard C. Hoagland reported on the nearly 700 boxes of missing Apollo 11 data and videotapes. “Someone has stolen our heritage,” he declared.These recordings were made using slow scan TV (SSTV) and were of higher quality than what was seen on network broadcasts of the moon landing.

Hoagland pointed toward lunar images he’s labeled as ‘The Tower’ and ‘The Shard,’ as the reason why these boxes may have disappeared. ‘The Tower,’ described as a glass ruin 10-15 miles high, is an artifact of an ancient civilization that was once on the moon, he believes.

Steve Troy has studied blow-ups of NASA’s lunar negatives and come to the same conclusions, said Hoagland. The two of them will be presenting new evidence at the Joshua Tree Retreat in October. For more on the missing tapes, see this 22 page report (PDF file) by John M. Sarkissianof the CSIRO Parkes Observatory.

Note: Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin is interviewed at the top of the second hour.

Biography:

Buzz Aldrin was educated at West Point, graduating with honors in 1951, third in his class. Buzz flew Sabre Jets in 66 combat missions in the Korean conflict. Returning to his education, he earned a Doctorate in Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Manned Space Rendezvous. In 1963, Buzz was selected by NASA as one of the early astronauts. Buzz has logged 4500 hours of flying time, 290 of which were in space. Then, on July 20, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo XI moon walk, thus becoming the first two humans to set foot on another world. This unprecedented heroic endeavor was witnessed by the largest worldwide television audience in history.

Biography:

Richard C. Hoagland is a former space science museum curator; a former NASA consultant, and during the historic Apollo Missions to the Moon, was science advisor to Walter Cronkite and CBS News. For over 20 years, Hoagland has been leading an outside scientific team in a critically acclaimed independent analysis of possible intelligently-designed artifacts on Mars. Richard and his team’s investigations have been quietly extended to include over 30 years of previously hidden data from NASA, Soviet, and Pentagon missions to the Moon.

The Apollo 11 missing tapes are missing slow-scan television (SSTV) recordings of the lunar transmissions broadcast during the Apollo 11 moonwalk, which was the first time human beings walked on the Moon. The tapes carried SSTV and telemetry data recorded onto analog data recording tape. The SSTV data was recorded as a backup against any failure of the live television broadcasts. To allow broadcast of the SSTV transmission on standard television, a real-time conversion from SSTV format was done. The converted video of the moonwalk was broadcast live around the world on July 21, 1969 (UTC). Many videotapes and kinescopes were made of this broadcast as it happened, and these have never been missing.[2] Meanwhile, the missing tapes which carried recordings of the SSTV signal as transmitted from the Moon, but before undergoing scan conversion, are believed to have been erased and reused by NASA, along with many thousands of other tapes. (NASA was faced with a shortage of quality data tapes in the early 1980s due to a change in the manufacturing process in the mid 1970s. This caused tapes that were no longer needed to be reused.) If the original SSTV format tapes were found, modern technology could be easily and cheaply used to make a higher-quality conversion, yielding better images than those originally seen. There are several still photographs, along with a few short segments of super 8 movie film taken of a video monitor in Australia, which show the SSTV transmission before it was converted.

In 2009 NASA gathered old copies of the converted video and paid to have them processed by Lowry Digital. These restorations were released in 2010.

News that these analog data tapes were missing broke on August 5, 2006 when the printed and online versions of The Sydney Morning Herald published a story with the title One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures. The missing tapes were among over 700 boxes of magnetic data tapes recorded throughout the Apollo program which have not been found.