I began writing this story a day or two after the Jupiter Watch event in 1994. Over the weeks and months that followed, it expanded and evolved, and I realized that I would need access to recordings of all of the NASA briefings in order to be able to attribute quotes correctly.

I paid a visit to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and obtained VHS videotapes of seven of the nine briefings (the last two I had recorded at home).

Well, life intervened, and my project got put on the back burner. I revived it for the 5th and 10th anniversaries, but I never could seem to finish it. When I renewed my effort in 2018 in hopes of finishing it in time for the 25th anniversary of Shoemaker-Levy 9, I decided to take advantage of 21st-century technology. I sought digitized versions of the briefings so I could play and replay snippets of them, an act that would likely have destroyed my 25-year-old videotapes.

Through much online searching, I was able to track down seven of the briefings on YouTube. However, even though I found records of "Comet Impact Tape 5" (the July 19 briefing) in various places, I couldn't find a copy online anywhere. Even more puzzling, I couldn't find any mention of a recording of the 8 a.m. briefing on July 18, even though I knew it was recorded, because I had a NASA videotape to prove it!

I made a number of phone calls and sent a number of emails to various people at NASA, but, to make a long story short, they didn't pan out. (Maybe I didn't push hard enough. For months I thought I had plenty of time, then life intervened, six more months went by, and suddenly it was too late to wait any longer.) I wound up digitizing the last two briefings myself. One thing that is different about those two tapes (and might be why they never made it onto YouTube) is that they both have significant power line hum. Tape 5 was particularly obnoxious in that regard. Eventually, I noticed that the noisy hum only seemed to be coming from the left speaker. Therefore, when I converted them from DVD to MP4 format, I used only the right channel audio, resulting in an audio track that is actually better than the originals (or at least the copies I got from NASA).

For the first time online (that I'm aware of), here are THE LOST TAPES:

Video: Tape 3A: 7/18/94 8:00 a.m. NASA Briefing (408 MB)

Video: Tape 5: 7/19/94 8:00 a.m. NASA Briefing (681 MB)