SYDNEY - The printed version of Australian newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, has published an article reporting the loss of the original recordings of the Apollo Moon landings.

Under the title “One giant blunder for humankind: how NASA lost moon pictures”, the article reveals that the famous tapes went missing from the Goddard Space Flight Center and that an intense search is underway to find them. The tapes were originally stored at Goddard, but without any explanation were taken to the US National Archives in 1970. Few years after, in 1984, about 700 hundred boxes of tapes were returned to Goddard along with documents stating that the tapes were withdrawn.

When the Australian scientist John Sarkassian who has been working at the Parkes Observatory for more than decade, initiated a study about the participation of Australia in the Apollo Mission, he requested the tapes to NASA and they told him the tapes were missing.

The missing tapes contain original recordings of five (5) Apollo Moon Landings. Due to the format incompatibility between the Apollo recordings and the commercial TV, the public transmissions were projected in a screen from which they were filmed using conventional TV cameras which substantially degraded the quality of the picture.