WAPAKONETA — A small, rare, treasure housed in the hometown museum of Neil Armstrong —the first man to walk on the moon — has been stolen.
Police in this Northwest Ohio town of about 10,000 people said they responded to an alarm at the Armstrong Air and Space Museum just before midnight Friday and discovered a 5-inch, solid gold replica of the lunar space module was missing.
How much the replica, made by Cartier, is worth is unclear.
Gold is selling for about $1,270 per ounce and authorities didn’t say how much the piece weighed.
But the replica may be worth more than its weight in gold because it’s so rare. Cartier presented replicas to Armstrong and his two fellow astronauts — Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — in Paris shortly after their historic 1969 space mission.
The Armstrong Air and Space Museum opened three years later on the third anniversary of Armstrong’s walk on the moon.
Armstrong died in 2012 and, as space exploration has evolved, the museum exibits have changed, according to its website.
“But the focus has remained the same: To stand not only as a repository of Ohio’s aeronautical history and a monument to Ohio’s contribution to aviation and space exploration, but also as a tribute to Ohioan Neil Armstrong, whose ‘one small step for a man’ was indeed a ‘giant leap for mankind’,” the museum’s website said.
The FBI and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation are assisting Wapakoneta police in an investigation of the missing treasure.