What if humanity’s greatest moment… simply disappeared?
In this haunting bonus episode of Phantom Bytes, we unearth the eerie true story of how NASA lost the original footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Deleted not by conspiracy, but by accident—erased during a magnetic tape recycling program meant to save money and storage space. Gone, too, were raw telemetry files and data vital to history.
But was it just oversight, or something deeper? We explore how fragile our digital memories truly are, from the vanishing of early internet archives to the impermanence of cloud storage. Through failed backups, obsolete formats, and bureaucratic errors, entire chapters of our collective past can be erased—with no one noticing until it’s too late.
Because sometimes, it’s not that history is hidden. It’s just… overwritten.