What did Neil Armstrong ‘steal’ from the moon?

Neil Armstrong might have been the first man on the moon, but it seems that he was also pretty nifty at hiding mementos from his time in space.

Following his death in 2012, Armstrong’s wife, Carol, was going through his belongings when she found a bag full of Apollo 11 artefacts hidden inside a wardrobe.

She gave them to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, where they were later confirmed to be the real deal.

While the items were supposed to left behind on the moon, the museum gratefully received them. They are now on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

For more than 40 years between the Apollo 11 mission and his death, Armstrong made no mention of the bag.

Alan Needdell, curator of the Air and Space Museum, wrote a post about the hidden items inside the bag, which was named the McDivitt Purse and was stowed in the Lunar Module during Apollo 11.

In a post on the museum’s website, published in 2015, he wrote: ‘I received an email from Carol Armstrong that she had located in one of Neil’s closets a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft.

‘She wanted to know if they were also of interest to the Museum. She provided the following photograph of the bag and the items spread out on her carpet.

‘Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting. Realizing how important it would be to determine whether any or all of these items were actually flown in the Lunar Module Eagle during the historic Apollo 11 mission, I decided to enlist the expertise of Eric Jones, Ken Glover, and the team of experts who have put together the incredible Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (ALSJ) website, an indispensable site of detailed information about all aspects of the Apollo program.’

He said he immediately recognised it as the McDivitt purse. Once they received it, he said they found nearly 20 artefacts from the mission, including helmet straps and tools, were taken aboard the Lunar Module for the landing, an extremely valuable 16mm movie camera that recorded Apollo 11’s descent to the surface of the moon, and an optical alignment sight used to assist the crew in docking manoeuvres.

There are even records of Armstrong talking about the purse to fellow moon-lander Buzz Aldrin.

Speaking after the pair returned to the command module, he said of the purse: ‘That [is] just a bunch of trash that we want to take back — LM parts, odds and ends’.

While the camera was the most valuable object captured in the remarkable horde, other bizarre objects include a cover for Apollo 11’s pressurised waste management system.

‘In the future, we hope to complete documenting and cataloging the entire collection of items and, as appropriate, to place them on public display,’ Needdell said.

‘Seeing such things with one’s own eyes helps us to appreciate that these accomplishments are not just in history books or movies, but involved real people and real things, and that they involved an extraordinary amount of detailed engineering and planning.’

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