Neil Armstrong's wife discovers strange items in a bag — they were meant to be left on the moon

Neil Alden Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon in 1969, passed away at 82 in August 2012 due to complications from cardiovascular procedures. Months later, a fascinating mystery emerged when Armstrong's wife, Carol, discovered a white bag tucked away in his closet in Ohio. Inside, she found small, intricate parts that appeared to be from a spacecraft, according to My Modern Met. Carol immediately reached out to Allan Needell, the Apollo curator at the National Air and Space Museum. Needell had previously visited Carol to collect items the Armstrong family intended to donate to the National Collection.

“I received an email from Carol Armstrong that she had located in one of Neil's closets a white cloth bag filled with assorted small items that looked like they may have come from a spacecraft. She wanted to know if they were also of interest to the Museum. Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting," Needell revealed in a blog post published in 2015. Moreover, after recognizing the importance of determining whether the items in the bag had truly been brought to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission, he assembled a team that included Eric Jones and Ken Glover.

In the same blog, Needell revealed that the white bag Carol found was immediately recognized as the McDivitt Purse, a container held in the Lunar Module during launch. When the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal (ALSJ) carefully examined the photographs of the items inside the white bag, they confirmed the items came from the Eagle. Notably, the items, originally meant to be left behind, were collected in the Temporary Stowage Bag (TSB). This spared them the fate of the Eagle's ascent stage and its contents, which crashed onto the lunar surface.

Interestingly, Armstrong's bag contained the waist tether he used to support his feet during his only rest on the Moon, utility lights with brackets, equipment netting, a metal mirror, an emergency wrench, the optical sight above his window, and the 16mm data acquisition camera (DAC), which recorded the lander’s final approach. Armstrong left the bag as the crew had to manage weight for their return flight. Meanwhile, the mission transcripts recorded him telling command module pilot, Michael Collins, “You know, that—that one's just a bunch of trash that we want to take back—LM parts, odds and ends and it won't stay closed by itself. We will have to figure something out for it.”

"As far as we know, Neil has never discussed the existence of these items and no one else has seen them in the 45 years since he returned from the Moon. Each and every item has its own story and significance, and they are described with photographs in extraordinary detail in an addendum to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal," Needell shared. Besides, he reached out to James Hansen, the late astronaut's biographer, but even he knew nothing about those items. "I asked James Hansen, Neil’s authorized biographer if he had mentioned the items, and he had not," Needell added.