[meteorite-list] Lost Moon Rocks

From: kenoneill_at_kenoneill.com <kenoneill_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri Jul 23 06:14:52 2004
Message-ID: <000a01c4709e$224ad610$0f01a8c0_at_tda1156>

(resent, hope it gets through this time as its worth a read)

Hi all,

Thought I'd share this article from the national "Irish Independant"
newspaper. How embarrasing !!!! (see final paragraph).

Ken O'Neill
Ireland
IMCA #9465

Irish Independant

Lost: the hottest rocks on earth

Issue Date Wed, Jul 21 04



Pea-sized bits of the moon given out as goodwill gestures after the Apollo
11 landing, which took place 35 years ago this week, are vanishing - and one
man is determined to find them. Anjana Ahuja investigates a case of lunar
larceny
By weight, they are worth around four times as much as diamonds. In terms of
rarity, they could be matched only by something as spectacular as an
undiscovered Picasso. At a Sotheby's auction in 1993, three specks weighing
less than one hundredth of an ounce attracted a frenzy of bids that peaked
at $442,000 (?355,000).
More than a decade later, Moon rock is more valuable than ever, its
desirability enhanced by the fact that nobody, apart from a Russian robot,
returned after the Apollo missions to collect more. The first Moon landing
on July 20, 1969, and five subsequent missions garnered 382kg (840lb),
immediately designated the property of the United States. The vast bulk of
it remains to this day under lock and key in Nasa's vaults; not even the
astronauts who chaperoned it back to Earth were allowed to keep any.
Just a quarter of a kilogram was spared from storage and commandeered for
diplomatic purposes. This fragment was split into pea-sized grains, each
encased in a transparent ball the size of a marble. The granite-grey
'goodwill moon rocks', as they were termed, were given as gifts to 135
nations by President Nixon, including Ireland, and, after his impeachment,
by President Ford. Accompanying each ball was that country's flag, flown on
the historic mission, and a plaque bearing the stirring inscription: "This
flag of your nation was carried to the Moon and back by Apollo 11 and this
fragment of the Moon's surface was brought to Earth by the crew of that
first manned lunar landing."
Yesterday celebrated the anniversary of the Moon landing, but 35 years later
many of the goodwill rocks have gone missing. Several have been stolen
(Malta, Honduras), others looted (Afghanistan), and some were sold by the
dictatorships that thought they owned them (Romania). Over the past few
years, Joseph Gutheinz, an attorney in Texas and a retired special
investigator for Nasa, has led an extraordinary one-man mission to discover
their fate. In 1998 he pulled off a Nasa sting operation to smoke out the
Honduran goodwill rock, lifted from a museum and then smuggled into America
years later to be sold.
Today his Houston office is full of correspondence with museums and
governments around the world, in an effort to find out where all the rocks
have gone. He is currently preoccupied by the fate of the Swedish one. "I've
located about two dozen worldwide; the rest are unaccounted for," says
Gutheinz. "My hunch is that around half are lost, stolen or in a position
where they could easily be stolen. The Honduran one was on the market for $5
million. They are worth whatever a collector is prepared to pay for them."
Gutheinz's campaign against lunar larceny is fuelled by a mixture of
old-fashioned patriotism and admiration for the space programme. Gutheinz
says: "When you bring back fragments of another world they should be
treasured, respected and safeguarded. The people of that country should be
able to go and look at it and dream.
"So it makes me angry to think that they might be sitting in some deposed
dictator's home, or being sold to fund terrorism, or being put on the black
market."
He believes that the Romanian one was sold in 1998 as part of the Ceausescu
estate. Once given, though, the goodwill rocks became subject to the
ownership laws of the countries that had received them, potentially leaving
the way free for disreputable leaders to claim personal ownership and
selling rights.
Robert Pearlman, the editor of CollectSpace.com, a respected online space
memorabilia site, shares Gutheinz's worries. He, too, has been making
inquiries about the goodwill gifts and, since 2001, has managed to locate
only 20. He believes that the one given to Nicaragua was sold by the
dictatorship for $10 million.
"We are losing pieces of history," says Pearlman. "They may look like little
awards that belong on the mantelpiece, but they represent the first time man
went beyond his own planet. To lose them is to turn our backs on that
legacy."
The goodwill rocks are the property of the nations to which they were given,
while those in Nasa's vaults remain the property of Nasa and are classified
as "national treasure". That makes private ownership of Moon rock tantamount
to theft, a fact known to every laboratory that can carry out the chemical
analysis required for authentication.
When President Bush celebrated the anniversary by presenting a Moon rock to
the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury astronauts - and Walter Cronkite, the veteran
news anchor who covered the Moon landings on American TV - the recipients
still will not be allowed to take it home or sell it. They will have to
donate it to a museum of their choice.
The continued ferocity with which Nasa guards its lunar booty - one Nasa
student who stole some samples received an eight-year prison sentence
recently - has unintentionally allowed risk-loving fraudsters to flourish.
Gutheinz says: "When somebody forks out a fortune for a rock, they won't
take it to Nasa because they know it will be confiscated. So they stick it
in a bank vault and go to look at it occasionally. It's the perfect con,
because the seller knows the buyer's not going to get it tested."
This makes Moon rocks - or anything containing them - virtually untouchable
at public sales. However, it is legal to sell lunar meteorites, which means
that genuine bits of the Moon are in circulation.
The problem is, a buyer cannot distinguish between the two. As a result,
Moon rock and dust - most often fakes - continue to be bought in underhand
deals. The forces driving these transactions are the same as those that lead
to the theft of famous and, therefore, unsellable, artworks - money, ego and
the consuming desire to own something that hardly anyone else can.
It is also legal to sell space dust that has gathered on space artefacts
obtained legitimately. Pearlman tells the story of a Nasa photographer who
got moondust all over his fingers while opening a film canister that
Armstrong had dropped on the Moon. The photographer was quarantined along
with the astronauts, and later given a 2.5 centimetre strip of Scotch tape
used to remove the dust. A gallery bought it and is now selling
three-millimetre slivers for $949, and nine-millimetre swatches for $6,000.

Irish moon rock ends up in dump...

A valuable piece of lunar rock that once belonged to the Irish state is now
believed to be lost among household rubbish at a Dublin dump, writes Kim
Bielenberg. In the early '70s, the piece of rock from one of the Apollo
missions was presented to Ireland and was on display in the Meridian room at
Dunsink Observatory. But in 1977, the observatory was damaged in a fire.
According to Ian Elliot, a former Dunsink employee, the moon rock was lost
in the rubble that was later taken to the nearby corporation dump.
Another piece of moon rock, collected by Harrison Schmidt on the Apollo 17
mission in 1972, was presented to Ireland by President Nixon in 1973. It is
currently held by the Natural History Museum in Dublin and is being cleaned
for future display.
Twelve slices of moon rock that are on loan from NASA are stored by the
Geology Department at Trinity College Dublin.
The Trinity moon rocks will go on public display during an Autumn series of
illustrated lectures on the 'Origin and Early History of the Solar System'
by TCD lecturer Dr Ian Sanders. For more information contact TCD Department
of Geology, 6081074.
Received on Fri 23 Jul 2004 06:16:34 AM PDT