Several years ago, sad and at the same time very strange news spread around the world. NASA has lost unique video footage, including footage of astronauts landing on the moon. They say that old employees quit a long time ago, and newcomers do not know where the tapes are. You might think it was not about filming an outstanding event in the history of mankind, but about a home video from a picnic. However, ordinary people are better at keeping their amateur films than some employees of the US archives.
Pete Conrad holds an American flag (NASA archive).
What's that! The public was later told that around the 1970s and 1980s, NASA erased about 200,000 tapes. Do you know what for? You would never guess. It turns out to reuse them. This is how the lunar footage got "under distribution". Apparently, NASA had problems with video media, the budget is probably very limited, and you have to save on everything, that's how the moon film went into oblivion. And so that the public would not be too worried about the loss, NASA said that the originals are still, perhaps, already unusable, since they collapsed from long storage.
Skeptics who do not believe in the flight of the Americans to the moon paid attention to, to put it mildly, the low quality of the lunar video. In response, they were told that the world-famous picture was first received by several earth stations, then it was re-captured by a camera from a black-and-white monitor, and only after that it went on air. That is why the image quality was not at the highest level.
An American Family Watching the Moon Landing (Life Archive).
It was argued that the original is much better visible. But where is this original now? A special commission looked for him, looked for him, but never found him. Then NASA showed miracles of ingenuity. Without further ado, they decided to "restore" the video, calling for help from specialists from Hollywood. The work began to boil, they took four copies, which in 1969 NASA transferred to television companies. The grain of the image was lowered, the contrast of the video was changed, and the quality of the film was dramatically improved.
Of course, NASA representatives assured that there is not a single frame on the "restored" recording that would not have been on the original tape. The statement looks especially piquant considering that the source code has been lost and it is impossible to compare it.
This is not the only mysterious loss from the "lunar archive". The data on the health of the astronauts, various audio recordings related to the Apollo program, and a number of other documents also disappeared somewhere. NASA has managed to lose several hundred boxes of valuable materials!
Promotional video:
TV panorama "Apollo 16" (NASA archive).
As the sage said, it is very difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there. With regard to this situation with tapes: you cannot lose what never existed. In other words, the mysterious, inconceivable in its absurdity "fact of loss" or "destruction" of priceless originals of "moon films" is one more proof that the Americans did not fly to the moon.
Interestingly, uncomfortable questions about the lunar flight began to appear in the United States at the beginning of the 70s, and disputes on this topic have been going on for many years. It would seem that NASA should have shown the originals of the films to the world already then, in the 70s, and then it would not hurt to show them to the public sometimes. In order to nip all doubts in the bud. But no. This was not done, and only relatively recently, in preparation for the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first flight, NASA became interested in the location of the corresponding films. It was then that the "loss" of a lot of materials was discovered. That is, then it became clear to smart people that there were no tapes.
