A mistake by the FBI has led to a priceless Apollo 11 artifact going to an Illinois woman.
The Johnson Space Center yesterday turned the priceless moon rock collection bag over to an independent security company after losing its court fight with the woman last week in Houston. Nancy Lee Carlson paid less than a thousand dollars for the bag used by Neil Armstrong to collect rock samples from the surface of the moon.
It has been seized during an investigation of the director of the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, who stole many of its artifacts. The items taken were ruled to be put on the auction block and the bag which was actually evidence was mistakenly added to the lot.
Carlson won the bidding and sent the bag to the JSC for confirmation that it was authentic, but then NASA decided to keep it.