I really like this story, "Dark Side of the Moon" was dark enough to hide some of the lost moon landing footage from Apollo 11
A REEL of film held for 20 years in a Sydney vault could unlock the mystery of what happened to the original tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
The reel belongs to Australian film producer and rock video director Peter Clifton, who had all but forgotten a pristine 16-millimetre film of the moon landing was part of his vast personal film catalogue.
Mr Clifton had ordered the reel in 1979 for a rock film he was making about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side Of The Moon but forgot he had it until seeing a news report on television recently.
The footage of Neil Armstrong's "one small step" is considered among the most important artefacts of the 20th century but the original NASA tapes have been mislaid somewhere in the US.
It is hoped documentation associated with Mr Clifton's reel will help direct researchers to the warehouse or museum where the missing tapes are stored - if they still exist.
The grainy black-and-white television images broadcast to 600 million viewers on July 20, 1969, were a photocopy of a photocopy of the original images captured on the moon's surface by a specially built camera.
Few people ever saw the high-quality original images shot at 10 frames a second and beamed back to the Australian tracking station at the CSIRO Parkes Observatory.
When the images reached the tracking station they were transferred onto a one-inch, 60-frame-per-second tape and sent to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre, at Maryland near Washington, DC, for safekeeping.
The footage broadcast to the world was shot by a television camera pointed at a monitor receiving the images from the moon.
"What was broadcast to the world was nowhere near as good as what was received," said John Sarkissian, an engineer at the Parkes Observatory.
All the Apollo mission flights and moon landings were captured in this way and transferred onto one-inch tapes at Parkes and Honeysuckle Creek in Australia and the Goldstone Observatory in California. The tapes were stored in 2614 boxes containing five reels of tape each and held for years in the US National Archives.
By 1984 most boxes were recalled and sorted at the Goddard Centre, but only two of 700 original Apollo 11 tapes have been found.
NASA announced last week it was launching a formal search and is recalling all the paperwork associated with the tapes.
In 1979, he ordered the film for $US180 from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, for use in The Dark Side Of The Moon.
Mr Clifton said: "On a visit to Washington I went to [the] Smithsonian and asked if they had any shots of rocket ships travelling. They said, 'Well, we can give you highlights of the moon shot.'
"A week later a delivery came to my film studio in Los Angeles with the can of film. When I opened it up I was gobsmacked because instead of getting a couple of minutes I got nearly half an hour of a complete film.
"So I took a couple of shots out of it and cut it together with the Dark Side Of The Moon demo for the Floyd film. But I was so busy I never got a chance to finish it and the film just went into the vaults.
"I didn't think another thing about it until a few nights ago when I was watching television and it came on the news. And I thought, 'I have got that stuff.' "
Mr Clifton's business partner and catalogue manager Drew Thompson said their 16-millimetre film version of the Apollo 11 landing contains images never released to the public.
Rare find ... Peter Clifton with his forgotten moon landing footage.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/...408073519.html
I'd really like to see that. I was 12 when it happened. All I saw were the tv images too.
How the HELL do you lose something like that!?
http://www.archive.org/details/flight_of_apollo_11Originally Posted by rainbowdemon
:icon_salu
Of course the lost it, otherwise it could be examined to show that no one landed on the moon. Wouldnt a moonbase been constructed or more people been back after the first success? =)
shawners there were 5 more moon landing missions after the first success, all were taped
Thanks, bud. That's cool!!
:icon_salu
If we faked the moon landings the Soviets and the Red Chinese would have been the first to bust us out on it.
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Thats the biggest flaw in the whole conspiracy argument, I mean the moon leanding was at the height of the Cold War, to prove it was a fake the Soviet's would've given anything to anybody just to say FU to the US...
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