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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."
I knew I forgot to return those rental tapes.
I wonder if I can talk them out of the late fees again.
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Incontrovertible proof that the moon landing was faked is convenently "lost" by the national archives while Bush II talks about going "back" to the moon.
So the actual 'raw' proof that men were walking on the moon is gone. How convenient.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Quick! Convert them to HD-DVD, er, Blu-Ray, er...
"Anyone that has ever gotten an idea based on any of my work and done something better with it-good for you."--J.Carmack
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
They let me on the Warner Bros backlot where the first Apollo landings were filmed back in the 1960s (my dad was friends with the guy they hired to dump the "lunar sand" in the studio). I had my 8 mm Kodak movie camera with me, and I still have some reels that I filmed myself during the shooting of important scenes. I'll put them on Youtube soon. (If you ever see the finished films, you'll see the edge of one of my footprints from when I strayed into the actual set in the "lunar soil" near Neil at one time. I'm surprised that, perfectionist as he was, Kubrick did not catch that and edit it out.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Firstly, Isn't this a dupe? And secondly, have they checked ebay yet?
Uh... maybe it would be nice to find them, take them to the place that can read them, and COPY THEM ONTO SOME OTHER MEDIA? I dunno, just a thought.
In May, I was a speaker at the ACM Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Freedom (CFP). On the last day of the conference, one of the speakers was the guy in charge of digization efforts at the Smithsonian Musuem of the American Indian. (Granted, a different branch of the government than the National Archives, which this story pertains to). He said that digization efforts are hampered by a number of issues, not the least of which are the sheer size of the collection, the relatively small budget available, the extreme difficulty of digitizing some parts of the collection (like a 16-ton statue, for example). At this point, even getting an electronic catalogue of the entire collection would be a huge step forward.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Whoever has those tapes now,upload to youtube please! :p
Wincopy
I'll bite.
You don't lose 700 boxes, you lose the little piece of card/database entry which tells you which of the 100000 identical boxes are the 700 you are interested in.
These original DVD's from the CBS vaults were really interesting. They were mastered in 1969 using Amiga Video Toaster. It is probably no coincidence that they turned up missing about the same time Dan Rather left CBS. I wonder if Rather took the wrong boxes when he carted off those old 3.5" inch floppies containing the MS Word 97 docs George Bush's original military service records and archive copies of Bush's Myspace page from 1973.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I knew I forgot to return those rental tapes.
More like they'll show up on eBay.
There's always the possibility a retiring employee thought they wouldn't be missed. Or some overefficient bureacratic paper shuffler elected to do something about all those dusty boxes on the shelf which look utterly horrid (ever have one of these people sweep into your office and suggest your desk needs cleaning?) and would win some kind of medal if they could only dispose of them and put a spit shine on those shelves.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ok, seriously, how can you lose ~99% of the data from something that is such a HUGE part of history? It is not like this was video of the 30th space shuttle launch or something, this was the first time humans had landed on the MOON. I would think that somebody would realize this and would have taken much more care of those tapes.
Since the PDF is slashdotted so I can't read it I also am curious as to why if "the last place on earth which can actually read these tapes" closes down someone won't be able to save whatever is required to read the tapes, are they just going to trash the machines? That would seem pretty stupid to me. Anyone have any answers?
The worst part is the conspiracy theorists claiming the landing never occurred are going to go nuts over this. Almost all the tapes of the landing mysteriously disappear as well as the only way to read the tapes, if I was one of them I would go nuts too.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
I mean that's just taking it way too far. To think that they actually faked the moon landing. ... ... ..
So what if they did plan to invade Cuba by shooting down a civilian airliner over Cuba and
then blaming Castro for it (Operation Northwood, if you're into FOIA documents), so what
if George W(anker) Bush's Grandpa Prescott cut Onkel Adolf a cheque every now and then and now
they're friends with BinLaden Terrorgroup Inc. so what if these people used unsuspecting
civilians and military unwittingly as subjects in radiation experiments,
The world saw it happen on TV and just because some cooky people have come out of the woodwork
to point out that many lights and shadows on the official footage of the moon landing are obviously
not what they should be if the images were "real", that still doesn't mean they're right. If
they were right, don't you think it would have come to light decades ago and they would have
had this on TV and in the newspapers??!
Your sir, are in desperate need of a heavy dose of reality here. I suspect you have been dodging
your weekly Ritalin injections for months now or else you wouldn't be having so funny ideas.
Nearly 700 copies of "A Star Wars Holiday Special" appeared in the trash around LucasFilm that had been taped over some old media George had obtained from NASA years ago.
Do not worry, dear consumers! The tapes have not gone "missing". The studio that made the original landing footage simply took it back to their labs to Digitally Re-Master it for the Special Limited Collector's Edition DVD, which will be out by Christmas. Since the original director (Kubrik) is gone, they will have directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg collaborate on this wonderful new addition to the Disney(TM) Classics(TM) Collection(TM).
New, never-before scenes will be inserted into the middle of the old, staid footage!
Tom Hanks will replace Neil Armstrong through the magic of digital effects!
Kristie Alley will be Buzz Aldrin, adding an exciting new romantic subplot to the mission!
A lovable animal sidekick will have your kids squealing in delight!
Gagarin shoots first!
Master directors Spielberg and Lucas will also modernize the plot and imagery to give a fresh, "post-2001" look!
The American flag, such an archaic-looking symbol (that didn't test well with audiences overseas), will be replaced with a pleasant, pastel blue UN flag. The ugly SUV 'lunar rover' will be digitally removed, and replaced with bicycles which the astronauts will pedal about the moon. The President will be updated to be a Texan oil millionaire conducting a needless war in Asia, who commander Michael Collins (played by academy award-winner Liam Neeson) will denounce for "having turned to the dark side". The "Cold War" sideplot will be updated to be a "Temporal War On Terror", which will feature terrorists from the future attempting to fly the Space Shuttle Columbia into the White House! Can our heroes stop them 'in time'?!
This and other new changes will keep the franchise fresh and exciting to today's viewers, and like Star Trek: Enterprise, will boldly re-write history that no one but nerds cares about anyways!
Apollo 11: The Special Limited Collector's Edititon: Coming Christmas 2006 - collect all 6 covers!
It's been said that future generations will regard the next few decades as a dark age, where the culture lost most of its common heritage. This will supposedly come about because so much audio and video is mouldering away (sometimes literally), locked in vaults where it will rot before anyone can recover it. While such factors as copyrights much longer than the physical life of the archival media are likely to contribute to this, the loss of these tapes is an example of another cause.
Why do so many people think Colombus discovered America? He got it into the permanent record, where the vikings, chinese, etc. didn't. Will Neal Armstrong be the Lief Ericson of the 26th century, and some one from the Chinese, Indian or Nigerian space program get all the credit, because they kept thir records?
Who is John Cabal?
And you really don't want to look in all the boxes; you just might get your face melted.
Because most likely they were stolen by NASA employees/managers, government contractors, or "given" (improperly) to elected officials. There a case within the last few years where someone found a storage room at NASA chock full of stuff including two space suits. The stuff was supposed to have gone to the Smithsonian, but oops, gee, donchaknow, it just mysteriously ended up in a storage room nobody knew anything about.
Rumsfield had a piece of the airplane that hit the Pentagon, as a showpiece- almost like a trophy. There were plenty of other examples of thefts. I doubt any of the victim's families saw so much as a pebble. In the executive branch of the federal government the World Trade Center site was like a free-for-all memento/souvineer stop. I'd be astounded if visiting officials at NASA didn't have the same 'sticky fingers'.
Please help metamoderate.
Why were the original US moon landing tapes stored in an Australian observatory!!??
As it says in the summary, the tapes were stored in the U.S. National Archives. The man who reported them missing (John Sarkissian) just happens to work for CSIRO Parkes Observatory in Australia.
Just go to http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/Apollo_11/tapes/Se arch_for_SSTV_Tapes.pdf :) The story had Coral Cache URL. =)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
COPY THEM ONTO SOME OTHER MEDIA
That would be a violation of the DMCA.
Even if you find the actual tapes, it doesn't prove ownership. At best, it suggests a possible license. But even a certificate of authenticity doesn't prove a license.
Without proof of a license, I'm afraid I'm going to have to confiscate those tapes, and levy a fine.
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.
Born Canadian; I lived in Parkes between 1988 and 1989. Nobody else in /. can say that. Even the ozzies I meet say "wtf?".
My advice:
Can you trust somebody who lives next to a giant space telescope? Who knows what planet their allegiance lies with?
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What these conspiracy theorists always forget is that we placed beacons on the moon which we "ping" with lasers constantly.
Behold more mass-media lies (part of the conspiracy no doubt) here!!
Even if the footage was all faked, and NASA was nothing but a PR department gone wrong, *something* qwnt to the moon and placed very specifically calibrated censors there, coincidentally, these censors have been used WORLDWIDE for some 40 years now. Fade back...Occum's razor trumps David Duchovny for the win.
barack to the future?
I'm afraid sir, that Occams razor says that you are a conspiracy nutbag. I did some research, with my eyes open and my head soft.
From Wikipedia: Proponents of the Apollo Moon Landing Hoax have argued that space travel to the moon is impossible because the Van Allen radiation would kill or incapacitate an astronaut who made the trip. Van Allen himself, still alive and living in Iowa City, has dismissed these ideas. In practice, Apollo astronauts who travelled to the moon spent very little time in the belts and received a harmless dose. [5]. Nevertheless NASA deliberately timed Apollo launches, and used lunar transfer orbits that only skirted the edge of the belt over the equator to minimise the radiation. Astronauts who visited the moon probably have a slightly higher risk of cancer during their lifetimes, but still remain unlikely to become ill because of it.
Now I'm not saying this is the best authoritative source, but the citation
[5] The Van Allen Belts and Travel to the Moon. Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. Caltech: (2000). Retrieved on 2006-06-11
appears to have more rational arguments in favour than you present against.
If that bit of conspiracy nuttiness is the best argument you have, then I'd say you've got a pretty weak case. Unfortunately reality is much more boring than fantasy conspiracies, because generally the accepted hypothesis is correct, even if its boring because it does not involve secret cabals etc. Conspiracy theories generally fail because they assume that politicians and people in powerful possitions are very good at keeping secrets and not making mistakes. Whereas all evidence of their behaviour points to the absolute opposite. The general level of incompetency would prevent any major conspiracy from working, or being kept secret for more than a few days.
Hope you can open your eyes and not be so hard headed ;-)
Van Allen belts:
Fuel issues: Craters and the like: Lunar Module takeoff film:"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
Unlike SOME cooky crazy people I don't think the moon landing was faked, BUT it IS obvious that the tapes were taken by MIB in order to conceal alien spacecraft that were imaged on the tapes.....
That's a very valid point, I'm surprised I haven't seen it raised before.
...nah.
...THE SOVIETS WERE FAKED AS WELL !!!
Unless...
Unless of course...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
I've toured the archives for work purposes and planning purposes for large digitization efforts. The speaker from the Smithsonian is absolutely right- just how the hell do you digitize that much crap? The numbers are staggering- pick any task and multiply it by the billions of feet of film and you've got serious timeframes- in the order (of some estimates I did) 30 to 50 years.
But I find it odd that they could misplace all the boxes. The check-in/ check-out procedure used at the archives is fairly regimented- to screw something that large up requires a deliberate effort to delete or mis-file the boxes.
To give you an idea, a box is received / dropped off at the archives. It has it's master database that says "This box is #####". The organization that drops it off maps a number assigned by the archive to that box, and said org maintains all the details of what is IN the box.
The archives then move the box and it's paperwork to the specific row, shelf, and complex. I believe they are to make a total of 12 to 15 'pulls' per hour, which when we were wanding meant actively finding an item in about 2 minutes after you walk into a complex (this place is huge- each complex is a football field).
The paperwork is then returned to central processing for annotation and entry into the DB.
But to lose 700 CF (each box is 1 CF or so) requires serious effort- that implies that someone filed them all in either the wrong complex or completely off the wall location- and that NO ONE has tried to place another item on wherever they are currently sitting.
Now, assume they've been actively 'pulled' for a number of years. Your standard pull & return places a piece of paper at the boxes location- it's a copy of the form showing who pulled it and when. The paper sits where the box originated- I saw some papers from the 70's which implied that the organization pulled the item yet is still paying around 30 cents / month for that space.
A permanent withdrawl could have been done to 'stop the monthly fees', but that means the box wouldn't necessarily go back to the same spot. If all those boxes were moved around the entire archives it would be nearly impossible to locate- there's just not enough eyes to find them- and even then you can double stack boxes to boot so you'd never see them.
So... either the boxes are there or someone checked them out. If they were checked out and the paperwork was lost.... you'll never find them. If they weren't checked out, you would need a miracle (and yes, they do have 'reward' sheets for lost boxes posted around the area) to find them. Maybe there's a cache of boxes somewhere... and then maybe not.