[CPProt.net] Ex-Space Museum Chief Says He Traded Items

[MSN CPPnet (Ton Cremers)]

Ex-Space Museum Chief Says He Traded Items 

By ROXANA HEGEMAN, Associated Press Writer
Fri Oct 28, 8:35 PM ET
 

A former space museum president testified Friday at his theft trial that he
sometimes traded his own space and astronaut artifacts to obtain items for
the museum.

Max Ary also is charged with fraud and money laundering for allegedly
stealing and selling items that belonged to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space
Center. His lawyer said Ary's personal artifacts and items that didn't
belong to him were accidentally mixed together.

Two former astronauts have testified in Ary's defense, including Eugene
Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon.

A NASA investigator testified earlier that Ary made about $65,000 selling
Cosmosphere and NASA items at space memorabilia auctions in 2000 and 2001.

Ary testified Friday that he often used some of his own artifacts to barter
for items for the Cosmosphere, which he helped found. He said he obtained 10
Apollo hand controllers, to use on simulators at the museum's space camp, by
trading a small rocket engine that was part of his collection.

"At no time while employed at the Cosmosphere did I ever intend to cheat or
do anything improper for the Cosmosphere," Ary told jurors.

Ary said he made $190,000 from auctions in which he sold artifacts. He said
some of the Cosmosphere's property may have been inadvertently mixed and
sold along with his artifacts.

High school volunteers sometimes helped inventory space items, and a fourth
or fewer of the 40,000 to 50,000 pieces of hardware that came into the
Cosmosphere were inventoried, Ary said.

Ary recounted how in the late 1970s, when the Cosmosphere's collection was
being assembled, he would often take students with him to pick up space
hardware NASA no longer wanted. He said the teen volunteers also inventoried
Ary's own artifacts - items used to start the museum's collection.

Under cross examination, Ary identified many items prosecutors contend were
stolen as actually being part of the original collection he brought to the
Hutchinson museum. He said obtained his collection entirely through trade or
gifts.

"It is hard to have documentation when you didn't buy anything," he said.

Ary left the Cosmosphere in May 2002 after 26 years at the museum.