Of Apollo 11 video tapes, australia, and... whale oil.
Everybody, once in its life, saw the video of Neil Armstrong setting his foot on the lunar surface. Well, as you probably notice, the video is of extremely low quality. All grey, with ghostly pictures.
Now fasten your seat belts, that's story is completely crazy.
Neil Arsmtrong and Buzz aldrin deployed the black and white camera. The signal was then send back to Earth. NASA had three DSN stations across the planet: Goldstone, Madrid, and one in Australia. It was the Australia antenna that got the pictures, so the operators there were the first, among mankind, to see the pictures.
So what did they saw ? well, one of them took a polaroid and snapped a picture of the TV screens at the station. 30 years later, the picture was randomly found in australia. and surely enough, Armstrong, as seen on the picture, didn't looked like a grey ghost on a grey background. The australian that saw the polaroid picture made a short inquiry, and his mind was blown.
Back to July 1969, in Australia. The pictures, as they come from the Moon, were just not compatible with any TV network. So, the operator (after snapping a polaroid) took the tapes and put them into a kind of primitive VCR. that peculiar NASA VCR then churned a second tape, that was perfectly compatible with TV networks - except the loss of signal had turned it into the grey shit we all seen since 50 years on every TV documentary.
So what the hell happened to the original tape that was a little better ?
NASA is no dunce, they send it to their archive. Except there were bazillions of tapes like this, from satellites and probes since 1961 or so. So the tapes got lost in the big pile. But at least they were NOT destroyed, and stored, because you never know...
and then, in 1972, the greens scored their first major victory: Congress passed a bill to stop killing whales. From this moment, the ubiquitous whale oil would be replaced by a synthetic oil.
One of the many use of whale oil was - you guess - magnetic tapes.
Alas, it did not went smoothly at all. By 1976, NASA was told that production of magnetic tape was going into a severe troubles, as that new synthetic oil was shit.
It was a catastrophe, as the number of satellites and probes and the coming Space Shuttle would ate large amount of magnetic tape to record data.
A panick-stricken NASA then went to its archives, and got a load of plain old, whale-oil tapes erased and fed to the new missions. As they had been lost somewhere in the pile, the Apollo 11 tapes were (probably) erased with a crapload of others. And this was randomly discovered by australians thirty years later.
There are plenty of similar stories related to Apollo, involving Moon rocks, Apollo 15 stamps, tree seeds (Moon trees !), the fallen, Lunar Orbiter pictures used to plot the landing sites... most of the time, it was people looking for either science data, or making a benefit seeling Apollo stuff, that re-discovered those peculiar stories. It is amazing what was forgotten or lost.
President Nixon happily offered some kilograms of Moon rocks to everybody and his dog; to every single State in the Union, and also American allies all the way from Honduras to Australia, and many others; only for some rocks to be lost for decades, then re-apearing on E-bay, sold at horrendous price.
It completely blew my mind. Nowadays, people would kill to get a gram of Moon rock, to the point that the 380 kg brought back by the astronauts have to be held in a Fort Knox like facility in Houston (no kidding !). One student that was granted access to the facility went nut and famously stole some samples to impress his girlfriend. He ended with a sting operation by the FBI, then in jail.
Back in the 70's, stupid politicians were offered Moon rocks by Nixon, and then lost them.