1969 News reports Luna 15 lands on Moon!

I was going through old pictures and articles we saved and I came across
the front page of the July 21, 1969 edtion of The Flint Journal. The front page that day was all about the moon landing and pending return home of the astronauts. After reading the articles I saw a small article about a Russian sattelite that said it landed on the moon 500 miles from the Apollo
site. Here is the article,

Bristish Report
Luna 15 Landing
JODDRELL BANK, England
(AP) - Russia apparently
landed an unmanned Luna 15
space probe on the moon
today just as American
astronauts Neil A. Armstrong
and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr.
prepared to take off.
Joddrell Bank Observatory
reported.
The observatory reported Luna 15's
landing site was near The Sea Of
Crises, about 500 miles from
the Apollo site in The Sea Of
Tranquility.

I don't remember hearing anything about this before, what do you think?

Interesting, i found something.

At the time of Apollo 11, the Soviet Union tried sending an unmanned probe to the moon, Luna 15, to bring back moon rocks. Officially, the effort failed (the Dark Moon authors theorize that Luna 15 brought back the Apollo 11 moon rocks). The Soviet Union successfully returned from the lunar surface with Luna 16 in September 1970, with retrieved moon dust.

Officially the effort failed, or did it?

Pure propaganda?

Source.

Well check this out, I found the mission report and it says it actually crashed on the moon on that date. So it was for real.
link

nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...

I believe Luna 15 crashed, but Luna 16, 20 and 24 brought back soil samples (not rocks or core samples like Apollo). There were more attempts in between those, but those failed. Also Luna 17 and 21 were rovers. Here's a list of the Russian Luna program en.wikipedia.org... and a site with some photos from the various missions. www.mentallandscape.com...

[edit on 6-5-2007 by jra]