Current Owner Bought Them At A Surplus Auction In 1976

Three metal reels of videotape containing images of the first Moon landing will be auctioned by Sotheby's online on July 20th, the 50th anniversary of the historic event.

USA Today reports that the current owner is a former NASA intern, who stands to make as much as $2 million from the sale.

Gary George is now 65 years old, but in 1973, he was an intern at the NASA Johnson Space Center. In 1976, he purchased more than 1,100 reels of videotape at a surplus auction for $218, according to a report from Reuters. George, a mechanical engineer from Las Vegas, said he had no idea what was on the tapes when he bought them, and was selling them to television stations for reuse.

According to the Sotheby's bio posted online, George sold a few reels for $50 each before his father noticed that three of the reels were labeled "Apollo 11 EVA. The elder George decided to hang on to those tapes as "they might be valuable one day," Gary told Reuters.

He was right.

NASA admitted to losing the tapes in 2006 when the Goddard Space Flight Center tried to locate them. They finally gave up the search when they concluded they had been erased and recorded over.

But George contacted a video archivist in California who had the equipment to play the old tapes. They were played for the second time since their 1976 purchase in 2008.

The tapes run about three hours.  Whey show Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon, and Armstrong's and Buzz Aldrin's demonstrations of lunar gravity. They also captured the mission's solar wind experiment, the deployment of the American flag on the Moon's surface, and the phone call to the moon made by President Richard Nixon.

The bidding opens on Sotheby's online July 20th at 11:00 a.m. EDT. The opening bid has been set at $700,000.

(Image from Sotheby's auction site and from file)

FMI: Source report
Sothby's auction site