Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing

Richard W.M. Jones writes "On July 21st 1969, Honeysuckle Creek observatory brought us the first TV pictures of men on the moon. The original signals were recorded on high quality slow-scan TV (SSTV) tapes. What was released to the TV networks was reduced to lower quality commercial TV standards. Unfortunately John Sarkissian of Parkes Observatory Australia reports that 698 of the 700 boxes of original tapes have gone missing [warning: large PDF] from the U.S. National Archives. Even more worryingly, the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes is scheduled to close in October this year. The PDF contains interesting comparisons which show that if all you've seen are the TV pictures from the landing, you really haven't seen the first moon walk in its full glory."

Comments

Re:Oh come on now, you can't possibly be serious!!

[R3d M3rcury]

The world saw it happen on TV [...]

Back in 1939, a large part of the eastern seaboard heard about a Martian Invasion on the radio. Turned out it wasn't true.

There is lots of evidence that we landed on the moon (900 pounds of moonrocks being a good part of it). But to say, "I know we landed on the moon 'cause I saw it on my Tee Vee!" is ridiculous.

Considering the low resolution television images that came back, it would have been very easy to fake it.

Re:Oh come on now, you can't possibly be serious!!

[mark-t]

TV may be low resolution, but there were several things you could see that still would have only been possible in an airless environment and a substantially lower gravity. Many of those scenes could not have been faked in a studio, even today, let alone in 1969. While one may try to argue that they were faked with photorealistic animation, that leaves the nasty problem of actually GETTING photorealistic animation.... in 1969. Oh... but that creates yet another conspiracy: that NASA and the government had more computing power available to them in 1969 than modern movie studios with huge render farms have today. And it just gets worse from there... one has to keep inventing more extravagant and obviously contrived excuses about why we can't possibly find any evidence for the truth while simultaneous suggesting that all the evidence that might contradict their theory is "obviously" planted which just goes to further "prove" the conspiracy. (insert rolling eyes expression here).

It's about on par with a Jehovah's Witness trying to say that the geological evidence for an old planet was just put there by God to test our faith.

Any attempt at a rational discussion with a conspiracy theorist quickly devolves into a flurry of conjecture and hypothesis with no logical foundation. Occam's Razor be damned.