A resident of Nevada 43 a year ago bought a videotape written down: why is it now worth a fortune

Old films bought for almost $ 217, through 43, became a treasure from the trunk of an old car. Now they are valued at $ 2 million.

In 1976, American Gary George was 22 years old. Then he was a simple student: he studied at the university to become an engineer and did a short internship at the Johnson Space Center at NASA, says “Currently,«.

The American aerospace agency in those years was experiencing a shortage of funds and tried to save. Because of this, it regularly conducted sales of waste or decommissioned equipment. In one of these auctions, and took part Gary George. In total, for 217 dollars and 77 cents, he bought over a thousand reels of film, on which, presumably, were working materials from NASA or its contractors.

George himself did not need the recordings: he hoped to sell the film to the television channels so that they could use it again, writing their materials on top. For a while, the plan worked, and George managed to sell the television stations to as many as eight reels for $ 50 apiece. But then the reels changed video tapes, and it turned out that no one needs outdated equipment. The remaining film for many years lay idle in the car with the engineer, until he finally decided to get rid of her and pass the unwanted trash as a gift to the church.

Imagine George’s surprise when he discovered that three reels were marked “Apollo 11 EVA”: this was the abbreviation NASA used to denote the lunar program. The films that were so marked turned out to be the original footage of the landing of American astronauts on the moon on July 20, 1969. And the recordings, George believes, were made by astronaut Neil Armstrong's camera, the same one that the astronaut installed on a tripod on the surface of the Moon.

The recording of the 1969 moon landing was considered lost by NASA for many years: the agency officially admitted this in 2006, saying that the original “lunar footage” was lost due to an oversight. The inability to present the original footage of the lunar landing at one time gave rise to many conspiracy theories: that the American astronauts from Apollo 11 were never actually in space, and the entire “landing” was staged and filmed in Hollywood pavilions.

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George, according to him, all these years did not know what treasure lay in the trunk of his old car: he did not have film equipment and he simply could not watch the films. “I had no idea there was anything so valuable there,” he admitted to Reuters. He was able to view the films only in 2008, and it was then that they were first digitized.

Now the engineer expects to sell three “lunar” films at Sotheby's auction. Including a recording of Neil Armstrong saying the famous phrase “One small step for a man, one big step for mankind” and a conversation between astronaut Buzz Aldrin and then-US President Richard Nixon.

According to preliminary estimates, 20 July a man can get at least $ 2 million for his lot, that is, in 10 thousands of times more than he paid 43 a year ago.

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