“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,” Allan Needell wrote in a blog on Friday. “Needless to say, for a curator of a collection of space artifacts, it is hard to imagine anything more exciting.”
Exciting indeed. The bag was nicknamed the “McDivitt purse” after the Apollo 9 astronaut who suggested it be brought aboard Apollo 11 and had been kept a secret by Armstrong until the day he died. Armstrong never even mentioned the historic artifacts to his authorized biographer while they worked on his story.