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After dawn, Barnett searched the area and within minutes found a meteorite
200 yards from his house on his father's adjacent farm. The meteorite, which
measured seven inches in diameter, was sticking out of the ground only a
couple of inches because of the impact.
It was only 20 feet from his father's house.
Eager to show off his prize, Barnett, who was 32 at the time, took the
meteorite to his White Way service station in Murray.
"Everybody handled it. It was the best advertising I ever had." he recalled.
"There was people coming in that never knew I even had a service station."
After three or four months of taking the meteorite back and forth from his
home to his service station, Barnett started to worry that it had emitting
radiation.
"I got scared of it," he said. "I'd pick it up and it would be warm. The
next time I would pick it up, it would be cold."
The atomic bomb had been invented only five years earlier and little was
known about the effects of radiation.
So, Barnett decided to take his meteorite to the Bank of Murray where he
stored it in a safety deposit box. A few months later several professors
from Vanderbilt University showed up at Barnett's house wanting to buy his
meteorite.
"I got $100 for it. I needed the money worse than I needed it," Barnett
said. "But we had a (verbal) agreement that I could buy it back whenever I
wanted to. I wanted to about a year and a half later. I offered $200 to get
it back but they wouldn't let me. They wanted to study it."
Barnett remembers getting a phone call two years later from a friend in
Murray who told him that a Nashville television station was doing a report
on
his discovery.
"I really burned some rubber to get there. The first time I ever saw a TV, I
was on it. They showed a picture of me holding the meteorite."
Barnett said at the time he found the meteorite, a lot of his neighbors
thought a larger one splashed into a nearby lake. "They didn't know a 7 1/2
pound meteorite could sound like a dozen jets crashing."
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