Missing Episode/Real Life

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• NASA lost the original recordings from the Apollo 11 first landing on the Moon. The TV signals were beamed to Australia (to a dish in Parkes, NSW, to be precise), and then sent in reduced quality to the USA. All known copies are from the lower quality video. The original high quality ones have never really been publicly seen and NASA has lost them. This, of course, is fodder for those who think the whole thing is a Government Conspiracy.
  • All of the data from the receiving antennas was recorded on half-inch tape reels, so the original TV footage almost certainly survives in the archives. The problem is that the tapes were archived without reference to what kind of data they contained. Needle, meet haystack.
    • Not to set of the Epileptic Trees again, but you would think for something THAT important, they would have at least sent a couple of interns down to try and find it. It would seem like that would be a big priority if there was any hope of finding it.
  • For the minutia-minded, the quality reduction was because the Eagle's video camera used an exotic slow-scan format that was utterly incompatible with network TV. The broadcast version had to be sent out by filming a screen showing the high-quality version.
  • Update, 1 July 2019. It turns out that the tapes were (accidentally?) sold as part of a lot of government surplus to Gary George, a NASA intern, in June 1976. In going through the lot, George's father found labels on three of the reels identifying that they were footage from Apollo 11 -- and realizing their importance, George kept them safe for forty years. George claims that he "couldn’t come to an agreement" with NASA about the tapes, which at least one media outlet thinks means he wanted more money than NASA would pay for them. So he put them up for auction at Sotheby's, with an initial minimum bid of US$700,000. Gizmodo coverage here.
• Many sporting events from the early days of US television broadcasting are at least partially lost, including the first two Super Bowls and numerous World Series games.
  • NFL Films (and its predecessor) were at those Super Bowls, and footage from them is seen on various league-produced specials and DVD releases, but the entire games are not available.
  • In 2011, an apparently genuine copy of the CBS broadcast of Super Bowl I was found. While it was missing the halftime show and most of the third quarter, and was fast-forwarded and pixelated in spots, it's still about 90 minutes longer than anything previously seen.
  • One lost World Series broadcast which must be particularly galling for baseball fans is Don Larsen's perfect game at the 1956 Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The MLB Network reconstructed the game broadcast from existing film and audiotape, airing it as its first broadcast in 2008.
• Countless early news broadcasts are long since wiped, including the first televised address from the White House (delivered by Harry Truman), and the first commercial television broadcast, chronicling the opening of the 1939 World's Fair by Franklin Roosevelt.
• In truth, no signal is ever really lost. Every broadcast and transmission and reflected light image travels away from Earth at the speed of light, preserved for eternity... insofar as the inverse square law permits.
  • Of course, since it's impossible to move faster than the speed of light, and since the signal will eventually be so weak that it's clouded by background radiation, any signal that isn't recorded by some civilization is lost forever.
• The 18 minutes of missing Richard Nixon audio tape.
  • Maybe not; modern science is getting closer and closer to being able to restore the wiped tape.
• In a very loose definition of "Episode", the Imperial Faberge Eggs made for the Russian Royal Family. Of the 50 large eggs made, eight are missing and considered gone for good.
• The Internet in general displays a form of this. Sometimes, files, forums or entire websites can be taken down for any number of reasons. What is lost could vary from something as small as a funny post, to an entire series of files or fond memories of a community. A recent example was the sudden takedown of Megaupload by US authorities, permanently removing access to hosted files. For many such files, there was no backup. A lesser form of this is when old websites die out, along with whatever they hosted. Frequent mirrors of data by others can help alleviate this problem.
• Countless paleontological finds have been lost over the years. For example, the original specimens of Spinosaurus bones were destroyed during WWII during British bombing of Munich, so until the 1990s the only things paleontologists had about the species were some old drawings and descriptions of the original specimen.
  • In addition, due to the hit-or-miss way that fossilization occurs, and the difficulty in surviving eons of geological upheaval, and the fact that up until the 19th century or so bones were often discarded or reburied as being the bones of gods or dragons OR ground up to be used in traditional medicine, there are no doubt plenty of long-extinct species that we will never be able to find hard evidence of having ever existed.