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Re: The Fight for Truth, Justice & the American Way, in Monahans

Hello Steve and all,

MeteorHntr@aol.com wrote:

> Canada got mad because the EVIL meteorite hunter H.H. Nininger was taking too
> many meteorites out of Canada and they wanted to keep that from happening.
> They may have come up with the "only the commercial meteorite dealer profits
> when they get meteorites" philosophy, even before NASA adopted it.
> 
> So to stop this awful injustice, they made it illegal to export meteorites.
> Since about 99.9% of all meteorite scientists and collectors are from outside
> Canada, they have in fact, cut off all the reasonable market and thus market
> value to those meteorites.

So what's wrong with a country wanting to keep it's historic natural
resources? Ever try to throw a stone into the Grand Canyon? If Canada
want's to keep it's meteorites (about 4/5 of which are represented in
public and private collections outside Canada) that's their business. A
lot of governments and museums have been burned by commercial meteorite
dealers, so the sense of injustice is understandable. No, I don't think
Nininger was an EVIL meteorite hunter, but Canada has decided it wants
to keep it's meteorites. Maybe it's scientific ego, maybe it's a sense
of culture and history. Whatever the reasons, they obviously prefer to
let material go unfound rather than open the country to U.S. style
commercialism.
> 
> Hey Bernd, or anyone else out there, since about 1978 how many meteorite FINDS
> (not Falls) have there been recovered from Canada?  And then find out how many
> turned up between 1931 (when Nininger got his first Springwater out of the
> field) and the mid '70's?   (I bet the numbers are around 1 and 30
> respectively)
> 
I came up with 3 meteorites since 1978, 1 of which was a fall; Between
1931 and 1978, 31, of which 9 were falls. Interesting that the ratio
comes out about the same at 3 to 1 for both periods, one of 48 years and
one of 19+. 


> Anyway, a couple of years ago I asked the curator of the Canadian National
> Collection that if I went up there and used some of my meteorite recovering
> skills that helped me find over 3 dozen here in the States, would the
> Collection be interested in buying the meteorite(s) at a reasonable wholesale
> price?  He said "Of course!"  Well, a couple of weeks later I recovered
> Canada's 50th meteorite (Hodgeville).  I spent a lot of money and a lot of
> time getting that rock, and I asked meteorite dealer Blaine Reed, what he felt
> was a reasonable wholesale price on the rock?
>
I would hope you had a written agreement with the government before
spending all that time and money. A verbal "Of course!" is nice and
should be binding, but government hierarchies don't work that way. What
was acceptable to him may not have been acceptable to the guy paying the
bill.

BTW, I can't find Hodgeville. Has it been classified and recognized yet?
 
Gene
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