In western Australia during the live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon landing, several people saw a very unusual occurrence. One viewer, Una Ronald watched the telecast and was astonished with what she saw.
The residents of Honeysuckle Creek, Australia, actually saw a different broadcast to the rest of the World. Just shortly before Armstrong stepped onto the Moons surface, a change could be seen where the picture goes from a stark black to a brighter picture. Honeysuckle Creek stayed with the picture and although the voice transmissions were broadcast from Goldstone, the actual film footage was broadcast from Australia. As Una watched Armstrong walking on the surface of the Moon she spotted a Coke bottle that was kicked in the right hand side of the picture. This was in the early hours of the morning and she phoned her friends to see if they had seen the same thing, unfortunately they had missed it but were going to watch the rebroadcast the next day. Needless to say, the footage had been edited and the offending Coke bottle had been cut out of the film. But several other viewers had seen the bottle and many articles appeared in The West Australian newspaper.
Western Australia received their coverage in a different way to the rest of the World. They were the only Country where there wasn't a delay to the 'live' transmission. Bill Kaysing says 'NASA and other connected agencies couldn't get to the Moon and back and so went to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) in Massachusetts and asked them how they could simulate the actual landing and space walks. We have to remember that all communications with Apollo were run and monitored by NASA, and therefore journalists who thought they were hearing men on the Moon could have easily been misled. All NASA footage was actually filmed off TV screens at Houston Mission Control for the TV coverage... No one in the media were given the raw footage.'
Bill Wood is a highly qualified scientist and has degrees in mathematics, physics and chemistry, and a space rocket and propulsion engineer. He has been granted high security clearance for a number of top secret projects and has worked with Macdonald Douglas and engineers who worked on the Saturn 5 rocket (the Apollo launch vehicle). He worked at Goldstone as a Communications Engineer during the Apollo missions. Goldstone in California, USA, were responsible for receiving and distributing the pictures sent from the Apollo to Houston. He says early video machines were used to record the NASA footage here on Earth by the TV networks. They received the FM carrier signal on Earth, ran it through an FM demodulator and processed it in an RCA scan converter that took the slow scan signal and converted it to the US standard black and white TV signal. The film was then sent onto Houston. When they were converting from slow scan to fast scan, RCA used disc and scan recorders as a memory and it played back the same video several times until it got an updated picture. In other words the signal was recorded onto video one then converted to video two. Movie film runs at 30 frames per second, whereas video film runs at 60 frames per second. So in other words the footage that most people saw that they thought was 'live' wasn't, and was actually 50% slower than the original footage!!!
