Gary George was an intern at NASA when he attended a government surplus auction at Houston’s Ellington Air Force Base back in June 1976.According to Reuters, he took home roughly 1,100 reels of videotape with NASA listed as the “Owning Agency or Reporting Office.”
The now-65-year-old ended up selling some of the recordings and donated others to Lamar University, as well as a local church. George’s father eventually did some digging into the remaining videotapes and found that three happened to capture the moon landing recordings, including Neil Armstrong’s iconic “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” statement, the outlet reported.
The former NASA intern eventually located a media studio with the equipment necessary to play the videotape recordings in October 2008.
George stands to make between $1 and $2 million, according to a pre-sale estimate of the videotapes, which total 2 hours and 24 minutes worth of footage.
NASA had reported back in 2006 that they were sifting “through 37-year-old records in their attempt to locate the magnetic tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 video in 1969.” At the time,the agency saidit didn’t believe the tapes to be lost.
source: people.com
