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" ....An exhaustive, three-year search for some tapes that contained the original footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk has concluded that they were probably destroyed during a period when NASA was erasing old magnetic tapes and reusing them to record satellite data.But, as NPR first reported back in 2006, the tapes were missing — no one had any idea where they were stored. That report helped trigger a massive search by NASA."We had hundreds and hundreds of leads coming to us during this period," says Lebar. "Every one of them was investigated."Lebar and others spent hours and hours in a vast government storage facility known as the Washington National Records Center, a place that Lebar compares to the giant warehouse at the end of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark.The search team combed through "racks of documents, tapes, all kinds of things from NASA and other agencies," says Nafzger.The search wasn't limited to that one place — the searchers went everywhere from storage businesses to private homes. They pored over logbooks, memos and all kinds of 40-year-old handwritten records."We went through old file cabinets that would have little record cards and give you an idea if a shipment went in with the name Apollo on it, and did it have 'Apollo' or 'tape'?" Nafzger says. Or did it have anything on there that could be a tape? So it went to the point of being able to look at anything Apollo-related or tape-related that wasn't distinctly not a possibility."They returned again and again to that vast government warehouse. But then they discovered something disturbing.Over the years, NASA had removed massive numbers of magnetic tapes from the shelves. In the early 1980s alone, tens of thousands of boxes were withdrawn...."Link:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106637066&#38;sc=fb&#38;cc=fp