U.S. Customs Declaration, Signed by the Returning Apollo 11 Crew

U.S. Customs Declaration, Signed by the Returning Apollo 11 Crew

Facsimile of the U.S. Customs General Declaration Form signed by the returning Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. The form is also signed by Ernest Murai, the Customs District Director for Hawaii at the time.

The document is the first record of an importation to our planet from another celestial body, with astronauts signing to confirm departure from the ‘Moon’ and arrival at ‘Honolulu Hawaii’. Cargo is noted as ‘Moon Rock and Moon Dust samples’, and, in the section relating to the ‘Declaration of Health’, the question ‘any other condition on board which may lead to the spread of disease’ is answered ‘TO BE DETERMINED’. The form indicates that even trips to the Moon were subject to the red tape of the U.S. Treasury's Customs Service. The story of the Apollo 11 Customs Declaration form is a well-known piece of space related trivia.

The authenticity of the form has been called into question by historians Stephen Garber (NASA History Program Office at NASA Headquarters), David McKinney Chief Historian at U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Department of Homeland Security) and Jennifer Ross-Nazzal (Historian for the NASA Johnson Space Center) in an essay in The Federalist – the Society for History in the Federal Government Newsletter. Garber, McKinney and Ross-Nazzal argue that there is no clear evidence that the Apollo 11 crew signed the form, and that it is more likely that it was signed by auto-pen. The biggest problem that they discovered was that the three astronauts were never at Honolulu Airport during their quarantine period, and they also pointed to a non-official publicity stunt when the Apollo 14 crew completed a customs declaration in 1971.

Although it appears likely that the Apollo 11 form is not official, National Space Centre research suggests that the signatures may not be auto-penned. Regardless, the story of the Apollo 11 Customs Declaration remains enigmatic and inconclusive. The original document has been lost, so only facsimiles such as this one are available for study.

The document was sent by the U.S. Treasury Department by the Commissioner of Customs to Sir Louis Petch KCB the Chairman of the UK Customs and Excise Board (1968 – 73). It was commonplace at the time for Customs departments to send copies of documents of interest to one another and this further confuses the issue of why the original document was produced.