[meteorite-list] Meteorite Strike Can Bring Windfall to Homeowners (New Orleans Meteorite)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:26 2004
Message-ID: <200310120424.VAA21600_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13698-2003Oct11.html

Meteorite Strike Can Bring Windfall to Homeowners
By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post
October 12, 2003

NEW ORLEANS -- So a meteorite crashes through your roof, pulverizes a
bedroom upstairs, obliterates a powder room downstairs and splinters into
pieces in the crawl space beneath your house.

Now what?

You are not necessarily having a bad day. Provided you are not flattened
like a pancake, you might even get rich. But you may want to start screening
your calls and doing some homework, because you have just become a bit
player in a multimillion-dollar enterprise -- the strange, impassioned,
big-budget commerce in interplanetary objects.

That is what Roy and Kay Fausset, owners of a New Orleans gift shop, have
been learning since they came home from work on Sept. 23, opened the front
door and were confronted by what insurers would regard as "an act of God."

Dust, debris, sheetrock and crown molding littered the foyer of their
tree-shaded house. Doors to the powder room and laundry room had been blown
open. Upstairs, an antique desk in their daughter's bedroom had been
destroyed, as had a wicker desk chair.

Incredulous, Roy Fausset wondered if a water pipe had burst -- but there was
no apparent water damage. Then, seeing basketball-sized holes in the roof
and floors, and tree branches strewn atop the house, he thought: Maybe an
airplane dropped something?

The police came, and quickly applied their talent at deduction. Looks like a
meteorite, they said.

Scrounging downstairs and beneath the house, the Faussets and police found
hunks of a grayish, friable rock, including a couple of pieces larger than a
hand. The rock might have resembled paving stone, except it was
exceptionally dense and heavy, and some pieces bore a thin, dark rind known
as a fusion crust, a souvenir of the meteorite's fiery, 40,000 mph arrival
in Earth's atmosphere.

"It came from outer space," Roy Fausset said wryly.

Within days, that was confirmed by Stephen A. Nelson, a geologist at Tulane
University in New Orleans, whose laboratory is barely a mile from the
Faussets' house. Still spry after 4.5 billion years, the meteorite had a
terminal velocity of about several hundred yards per second when it struck
the Faussets' roof, Nelson said.

To Nelson, 53, who had lectured on meteorites for 20 years, the discovery
was a geologist's dream. "As a volcanologist, which is my main thing, it'd
be nice to have a volcano come up in the backyard," he said. "But this is
nice, as well. This doesn't happen to everybody."

Nelson's tests, and subsequent testing by the Institute of Meteoritics at
the University of New Mexico, confirmed that the object was an H-type
chondrite -- the "H" is for high iron content -- a relatively common type of
stony meteorite from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Every year,
a few hundred such chondrites are believed to descend in fireballs and smack
into Earth, most of them falling unheeded into oceans, seas or unpopulated
areas, never to be found.

But the Faussets' meteorite has rare novelty value. As the only meteorite
known to have fallen in the Crescent City, the Faussets' cosmic rock is
destined to be classified as the New Orleans Meteorite by the Meteoritical
Society, an international professional organization whose nomenclature
committee is the ultimate authority on such questions. And the fact that it
fell in a major U.S. city -- what's more, through someone's roof and not far
from the New Orleans Superdome -- endowed it with a highly marketable,
one-in-a-million back story.

"They're extremely lucky," said Rhian Jones, curator of meteorites at the
Institute of Meteoritics, with a note of envy creeping into her voice. "It's
so rare and such an amazing thing to happen. They were lucky they weren't in
the house at the time, but they were lucky that it happened. It makes them
very special."

That fact was not lost on dealers who specialize in meteorites, whose
business has exploded in the past decade with the help of Internet trading
and the burgeoning new supply of cosmic debris extracted from the Sahara
Desert and Antarctica. As more chunks of interplanetary debris are hauled
out of the desert by nomads or scooped up by explorers near the South Pole,
the supply of meteorites has boomed, and so has the demand. Meteorites are
even traded on eBay.

"I think a lot of it has to do with the space program," said Matt Morgan, a
Colorado geologist who runs the Mile High Meteorites Web site
(www.mhmeteorites.com). Many of the customers, he said, are middle-aged men
who grew up with the Apollo program. "You never realized, at least when I
was a kid, that you could own a piece of rock from outer space."

Almost immediately after the Faussets and their meteorite were written up in
the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, the couple's phone started ringing. And
ringing.

"Dealers have been calling and saying, 'Oh, have we got a deal for you,' "
Kay Fausset said. "No one's given us a figure yet, but they say they have
interested buyers."

One of them was Mike Farmer, an Arizona dealer who one-upped his competition
by flying into New Orleans and paying a call on the Faussets. Farmer, who
dropped out of college seven years ago to deal full-time in meteorites, has
a personal collection he estimates to be worth $2 million and annual sales
he estimates at $500,000. He spends his time scouring the globe, especially
North Africa, for hunks of heaven-sent flotsam, selling what he does not
keep for himself to private collectors, universities, museums and "a lot of
space-type people."

Already, Farmer said, collectors wanting to know if he could sell them
pieces of the Faussets' meteorite have bombarded him with e-mails. "They're
driving me crazy," he said. "The drive is owning something from another
planet; you're owning something from out there; you don't know where it's
been."

Farmer guessed that the Faussets' meteorite could sell for $8 to $20 a gram.
Based on Roy Fausset's estimate that his cosmic chunks weigh about 30
pounds, that would put the market value of his windfall at between $108,862
and $272,156.

Other dealers mentioned that the Faussets' meteorite might be worth
considerably more, even millions of dollars, if it turned out to be a rare
rock from the moon or from Mars -- which it did not. "It's been
disorienting," Roy Fausset said.

Unwittingly, the couple has become a part of meteoritic lore, and
specifically the few well-known cases in which a meteorite has landed in the
vicinity of human beings: the 1992 meteorite that plunged through the trunk
of a teenager's parked Chevrolet Malibu near New York; the 1911 meteorite
that killed a dog in Alexandria, Egypt -- the only known mammalian fatality
blamed on a meteorite; and the meteorite that struck a house near Chicago
around midnight in March, waking up the people living there and ending up on
a table in the basement.

In the case of the Chicago meteorite, the owner of the house, Phillip Jones,
declined an initial offer of $35,000 for the meteorite, opting instead to
lend it for the time being to the city's Adler Planetarium. "It was an
unusual experience," said Jones, 53, a retired utility worker. "I hope it
never happens to me again."

The Faussets, for their part, became cautious as interest in their meteorite
surged. Not all the dealers seemed above-board. One telephoned to say that
he could pay the Faussets a handsome price, but only if they sold the
material to him quickly. The couple put the bulk of the space rock in a
safe, secret place, away from the house, sent a sample to an independent
expert for analysis and considered their next move. Meanwhile, people from
outside the neighborhood started arriving to scour the sidewalks and gutters
around their house for cosmic shards. Strangers offered to go underneath the
house and comb the crawl space. Hoping for admittance to the house, a few
even offered bribes to a contractor working there during the day.

The Faussets, meanwhile, are working hard to keep the event in perspective.
They are going ahead with a long-planned trip to Europe, and hoping their
insurance will cover the damage to their house, which they said might cost
$10,000 to repair. As for an eventual profit, they will wait and see. "I'm
not expecting a whole lot, but you never know," Roy Fausset said.

Staff researcher Karin Brulliard in Austin contributed to this report.
Received on Sun 12 Oct 2003 12:24:04 AM PDT