Early Jan 2006 Alarm Newsgroup Messages Missing ??

As long as the messages are still on the NNTP server, you can just "download all" and they'll show up again. If for some reason the server was down or they were purged, you're SOL.

Each newsgroup service provider has it's own NNTP servers. They all archive messages for different length of time. It's possible that the op's NSP has an archiving issue, but the messages would avaiable elsewhere. Try a different provider such as Google and see if they are there. Another possible reason is that the posts where cancelled, although some NSP's disallow cancels or show the messages anyway.