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Mining for Meteorites - Part 9 of 12

KRAJICK KEVIN (1999) Mining for Meteorites
(Smithsonian, March 1999, pp. 90 -100):

The first few finds went for about $2a gram, but sellers quickly sensed
blood and jacked the price up to $15 - a wholesale record. One farmer
made Allen Shaw, a dealer from Kansas City, stand at his pickup-truck
window in a convenience-store parking lot to bid on two chunks while he
haggled with Haag on a cell phone. Shaw prevailed by shoving
hundred-dollar bills under the man's nose. Inside Love's Gas Station,
Mike Farmer handed $5,500 to two young men while a woman looked on
angrily, apparently believing she was witnessing a drug deal. Haag came
to Nelda Wallace's porch, but she considered his manner discourteous and
aggressive, and shut the door in his face.
At least he was offering to buy her meteorite. The next day Wallace
looked out her window and saw eight young men bumping around her field
on all-terrain vehicles, their eyes fixed on the ground. She knew what
they were looking for, and she hadn't even had a chance yet to look
herself. Wallace owns a BB gun, a .22 and a 30/30, and she went out and
told these people to leave and never come back. One farmer down the road
finally called the sheriff because the hunters he chased just kept
returning, like crows.
Skip Wilson got permission to hunt a neighbor's field, but in the
graying dawn he started making out competing figures - 10 ... 20 ... 30
crawling, walking slowly, turning in circles. Like Night of the Living
Dead, pointed out Cottingham. People on horseback trampled crops.
Out-of-town cars patrolled roads with drivers peering through
binoculars. Many who sold rocks went vague when asked where they found
them, or gave false locations, far from the 6-by-1.5-mile elliptical
strewn field Wilson had plotted. "You wouldn't believe the greed," he
said. "You can bet some local kids stuck someone else's meteorites in
their pockets and ran off to get rich."
Wilson eventually found two pieces himself, including one of the
biggest, at 11.25 pounds. He was able to keep it since the landowner had
given him permission to take what he found. At last count, 44 chunks
totaling about 150 pounds had been recovered, and people were still
looking.
In the rush, one group of searchers was conspicuously missing:
scientists. This, even though Portales is close to three universities
with major meteorite collections, and other related institutions. It was
typical: most were too busy teaching, writing grant proposals or
examining meteorite slices under a microscope to actually go out and
find one themselves. "Nine out of ten meteoriticists wouldn't recognize
a meteorite on the ground," says David Kring, a senior researcher at the
University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. He admits it's
embarrassing, but explains, "There are a lot of people who can find a
meteorite, but very few with the training to study them. It's more
efficient to let other people look."

It is bedtime here after a beautiful, sunny day at the swimming pool,
a three-hour-walk with my grandson, an onion soup, a pizza and an
ice-cream at our Italian's - oh, I forgot the cool beers :-)

Good Night,

Bernd

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