TELEVISION - July 17, 1989

The executive producer of a CBS documentary on man’s first walk on the moon in 1969 said the program mistakenly showed clips taken on the moon during a 1972 flight. The program said the 1972 footage was of the historic first moon walk by American astronauts. “It was an honest mistake,” Perry Wolff said Friday of the error in “The Moon Above, the Earth Below,” a two-hour special that aired Thursday and saluted the 20th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon flight. The program was co-anchored by Dan Rather and Charles Kuralt. Two scenes showed two astronauts--ostensibly Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin--bouncing on the moon’s surface, and then their lunar orbiter blasting off from the moon. In a brief interview, Wolff said he had just learned that they actually were from the Apollo 17 flight in December, 1972. No deception was intended, he emphasized. He blamed the error on a “mislabeled tape” taken from a box of more than 100 tapes of footage of moon flights and landings.