Four things signed his name and only one was him

The usual story about a scarce signature is that the person did not sign much. Armstrong signed enormously. He signed at charity golf days, where signing is more or less part of the arrangement, and he answered mail for three decades.

What went wrong is not a shortage of signatures. It is that four different things were producing signatures that read Neil Armstrong, and only one of them was Neil Armstrong.

The hundred thousand, with the caveat attached

The figure comes from Robert Pearlman of collectSPACE, who puts it at possibly more than a hundred thousand across the period from his selection as an astronaut in 1962 to 1994.

Pearlman is careful about what that does not mean, and so are we. It does not mean a hundred thousand Armstrong autographs are available. The great majority are held by people who would not describe themselves as collectors: they wrote to NASA as children, or met him once, and the item is in a drawer somewhere.

So the supply that reaches the market is a small fraction of what he actually signed, while demand is enormous. That gap is what the rest of this piece is about.

The first source: the autopen

NASA could not answer the volume of mail that arrived after Apollo 11 by hand, so it did what government offices did. It used machines.

Seven separate autopen patterns were used for Armstrong, and they have been catalogued and published by collectors. Later patterns end with a distinctive loop back under the signature, which is one of the ways they are identified.

An autopen signature is not a forgery. It is a real pen in a mechanical arm following a template cut from a real signature, sent out by the agency in good faith. It is also worth nothing as an autograph, and a great many people who wrote to NASA in 1969 have no idea that is what they received. We have written about how the machines worked and why NASA used them.

The second source: somebody at NASA, by hand

This one is stranger and the honest version is more careful than the version usually told.

For a period in 1969 and 1970, hand-signed proxy signatures were going out from NASA. Not machine signatures: somebody sitting down and writing his name.

Armstrong did not authorise this. Steve Zarelli, who authenticates astronaut material for RR Auction, JSA, SGC and PSA, is explicit that Armstrong never appointed a secretary to sign for him. And Pearlman has said he spoke with the Apollo 11 crew's secretaries and each told him they never signed an autograph, on a subject where they were otherwise forthcoming.

So somebody was signing, and nobody has identified who. The speculation is that a machine broke, or that the deluge after the moon landing simply overwhelmed the normal process and a person took it upon themselves to keep the replies moving.

That makes it different from the Disney studio, where a dozen staff signed with approval, and different again from a clubhouse attendant finishing a box of baseballs. Nobody sanctioned it and nobody has owned up to it.

The third source: someone on the world tour

After the flight the crew went on a global tour, and Michael Collins said at a private signing in 2005 that a member of their entourage became very skilled at forging all three of their signatures, and signed some of them in place of the crew.

That is a first-hand account from one of the three men whose signature was being copied.

The fourth source: forgers, after 1994

Armstrong stopped signing in 1994. He had discovered that his signature was selling for four figures and that fakes were already circulating.

He held to it completely. Requests received a form letter explaining that he no longer signed. He declined even the most prominent askers. He stopped sending congratulatory letters to new Eagle Scouts, which gives some measure of how total the withdrawal was.

And here is the difficult part. Stopping made the problem worse. The supply closed while demand kept growing, prices climbed, and a signature worth thousands is worth a forger's time in a way that one worth fifty dollars is not. The decision he took to protect his signature is what made faking it profitable.

One dealer estimates half of the Armstrong autographs he sees are forgeries. Pearlman describes it as one of the rare cases, alongside Yuri Gagarin, where the fakes probably outnumber the genuine examples.

The flag test

There is one check anybody can apply, and it is worth knowing.

In 2001 Steve Zarelli published what became known as the flag test, after examining a large number of Armstrong's signed white spacesuit portraits. His finding was that Armstrong did not sign over the American flag on the sleeve. If the ink crosses the flag, the item should be treated with serious suspicion.

Zarelli is careful about the limits of his own test, and we will be too. He notes that short of examining every such portrait in existence it cannot be claimed to hold universally. It is a strong indicator rather than a proof, and it applies to that one photograph type rather than to everything he signed.

But it has one great virtue: it requires no expertise at all. Most tells in this field demand a trained eye. This one asks whether a line crosses a flag.

Two more things worth knowing

His signature deteriorated. By the late 1980s Zarelli describes it as much less carefully applied and inconsistent, sometimes looking almost slapped on, with the earlier tall and lean hand giving way to something squatter and more blocked. The practical consequence is the reverse of what you would expect: genuine late signatures are sometimes rejected by people who only know the classic style.

And a dedication costs you. Unpersonalised Armstrong autographs sell for something like three times what personalised ones do. That is the same effect we described in the piece on inscriptions, and it is unusually pronounced here.

What to do about it

Three things.

Buy it certified, and by somebody who specialises. Astronaut material is its own field with its own reference literature, and the specialists who work in it are the reason the autopen patterns are catalogued at all.

Ask what it is, not just whether it is real. An autopen Armstrong is genuinely a NASA artefact from 1969 and a genuinely interesting object. It is simply not an autograph, and the difference between those two descriptions is most of the price.

And treat provenance as more useful than appearance. A signed item with a photograph of the signing, or a documented chain back to the person who asked, is worth more than a confident opinion about letterforms. That is true generally and it is doubly true for a signature this widely copied.

The thing worth sitting with

A man signed his name more than a hundred thousand times and the market still cannot be sure what his signature looks like.

Machines signed for him with his employer's blessing. Somebody signed for him without anybody's blessing. A travelling companion signed for him and for his crewmates. And when he finally stopped, the value of the signature he had been giving away for thirty years rose to the point where copying it became a business.

He is the most famous example in the hobby of a problem that has nothing to do with how much a person signs.

This index records documented sales of his signed material, and there are companion pieces on machine signatures, the investigation that created the modern authentication industry and the four different hands that signed Joe DiMaggio's name. You can read how we work the numbers out.

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