An artifact that was used during the historic Apollo 11 lunar mission, the first manned mission to land on the moon, is now at the center of a legal dispute. U.S Marshals turned over these valuables to Gaston & Sheehan Auctioneers to be sold on the government’s behalf.
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The interesting tale of priceless bag started in 2005 when Ary was found guilty for stealing and selling rare artifacts. Numerous artifacts were on loan from NASA to the Cosmosphere. One of these items was the lunar bag that was found in a box stored in Ary’s garage during an official search conducted in 2003.
Over 10 years after locating the bag, it was sold during a government auction, and the buyer was Nancy Carlson of IL who spent just $995 to get the lunar artifact. Carlson has filed a lawsuit against the space agency in an IL federal court in June to get the bag’s possession.
Now, federal prosecutors are seeking aid from the federal judge from Kansas, who had handled Ary’s case, to rescind the sale and offer a refund to Carlson for the lunar artifact. As per the officials, the issue happened due to an internal clerical error in which two different lunar bags were given the same inventory identification number. One bag, which was sold to Carlson, was from the Apollo 11 mission, while the other belongs to a recent mission to the moon, Apollo 17 in 1972.
The white sample bag was in-tow when the first humans, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, arrived on the surface of the Moon, and was used to help bring 47 pounds of lunar samples back to Earth. Back in 2005, Max Ary – the founder and director of the Kansas Cosmophere and Space Centre – was found guilty of stealing and auctioning off space artefacts that NASA had loaned his institution for display purposes.
The bag was sold at a government auction on February 15, 2015 for $995 to Nancy Carlson in Inverness, Illinois.
Carlson sent it to the NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to be reviewed by experts and determine its authenticity. Once NASA had been notified of the sale, the artifact was withheld from Carlson, who had sued the agency in hopes of acquiring the bag back. In 2008, he made an unsuccessful bid to appeal his conviction. He’s since been released from prison after serving about 70 percent of his term.
Ary is now a free man but he maintained he is innocent, claiming that he accidentally mixed up the artifacts of the museum with those in his private collection. A small white bag, which was carried to the moon by astronauts on aboard the historic Apollo 11 spacecraft and was used to collect the first sample of lunar material, is now the main focus of a legal fight.
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The Cosmosphere discovered irregularities during an internal inventory in the fall of 2003.
