That was what the people at home saw. But the people at NASA saw pictures [of the first moon landing] so clear you could swim in them. It wasn’t until years and years later that anyone realized, hold up, that original footage was still out there, waiting to be revealed to the world.
Except it wasn’t. After an exhaustive multi-year search, the official report was that, yep, the tapes had been taped over, presumably by an engineer eager not to miss an episode of Bosom Buddies. But a bright spot was also discovered. When NASA originally did the moon thing, a tracking station in Australia recorded the SSTV signal. And they made backup copies. The originals were shipped to NASA …
… and were also erased. Also, most of the backups were sent to NASA. And, uh, erased. But there still could still be some out there. Just waiting for someone to find them, and probably erase them.
