[meteorite-list] Arkansas Democrat Article from today.

From: Michael Farmer <meteoritehunter_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Nov 21 10:33:06 2005
Message-ID: <003601c5eeb0$d89d7620$0200a8c0_at_S0031628003>

Here is the article, it is a pain to register on the site to view it, so
here is the whole thing with it's errors.
It says I got the New Orleans meteorite, which is not true. But otherwise,
not bad.
Mike Farmer
Space rock puts Arkansan on cloud 9
Man hopes 1,430-pound meteorite will land him seven-figure payout
BY MARK MINTON
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

KINGSTON - When Steve Arnold heard that grapefruitsized meteorites were
pelting a Chicago suburb two years ago, he rushed to the scene and stayed 44
days, meticulously plotting strike points and sweeping streets curb to curb
with a detector fashioned from a magnet and broomstick.
   He got some funny looks, but he left with 113 meteorites.
   In the deserts of Oman on a similar excursion, Arnold and wife, Qynne,
bounced over the sands in a Jeep looking for cosmic treasures. "We'd see a
black spot on the horizon, and it would either be camel poop or a
 meteorite," Arnold said. They scooped up 151 of the rocks.
   Of the 6.4 billion people who live on Earth, no more than two dozen are
full-time meteorite hunters. Arnold, 39, of Kingston, has been one since
1990, earning enough to finance his adventures and to sustain a rustic
lifestyle for his family.
   He has sold some nice rocks. But the big scores - such as six-figure
chunks of the moon or Mars - have always eluded him.
   Until last month.
   Arnold was dragging an 8-foot-wide custom metal detector over a Kansas
wheat field when a sustained screech blared through his headphones. Seven
feet down, there it was: the 1,400-pound mass of rock and metal that is the
largest meteorite of its kind discovered in the world.
   Arnold hauled it to the Ozarks last week in his 1973 Ford Ranger. The
meteorite, shaped like a jellybean and roughly the size of an engine block,
hunkered in the bed, a mottled chunk of the asteroid belt between Mars and
Jupiter.
   The discovery has already earned Arnold a degree of fame: appearances on
the Today show and Discovery Channel Canada as well as wide circulation on
the news wires. He also has new notoriety around Kingston, a Madison County
town whose downtown includes the tiny bank made famous by Bill Clinton's
Whitewater venture.
   "Congratulations, Mr. Rich and Famous," the banker Gary Bunch greeted
Arnold on the square Wednesday.
   Bunch said he had spotted a meteor himself the other evening. It streaked
across the sky while he was smoking a cigarette on his porch. Bunch, the
breed of smalltown banker who wears overalls and rides a Harley-Davidson,
has come to view such phenomena with new appreciation.
   "I got interested in it since the rich and famous got involved," he said.
   The meteorite business can have its rewards, but job security is not one.
A risky enterprise, it is peopled by a band of fiercely competitive
entrepreneurs willing to instantly fly someplace they have never been
before - with no more to go on than a news report or hot rumor.
   "I've lost thousands of dollars chasing nothing," said Matt Morgan, a
competitor based in Denver. "When you get there, it turns out to be a piece
of lava or something like that."
   But the lure of money falling from the sky is so tantalizing that meteor
hunters quickly converge when there is news of a fall. The 2003 Park Forest,
Ill., meteor shower was the rare event in which a major metropolitan area
was hit by hundreds of meteorites. About 100 professionals and hobbyists
followed.
   "It's about the only meteorite chase I've been on where there was a Red
Lobster in the middle of the search area," said Mike Farmer, a professional
from Tucson, Ariz. "Usually, you're in Africa, and you're getting rotten
goat meat."
   The same year, a gaggle convened in New Orleans, where a 40-pound
meteorite had crashed through a house near the Superdome. The rock smashed
an antique desk, penetrated the upstairs floor and slammed into the bathroom
below, narrowly missing the commode, according to Farmer, who eventually won
the competition to acquire the rock.


THE METEORITE MARKET

In 1998, Arnold beat him and others to the spot where a meteor crashed down
near a basketball court in Monahans, Texas, where seven boys were playing.
The police confiscated the rock, which had fallen in two chunks.
   Arnold, first on the scene, represented the boys as a broker. He "kind of
shamed the city into not taking this away," said Arthur Ehlmann, the Texas
Christian University emeritus geology professor who followed the dispute
from his perch as curator of the university's Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite
Gallery.
   In the end, Ehlmann said, the city kept the chunk that landed on a city
street. The boys got the other, and Arnold made a commission when he sold it
for them for about $20,000.
   Arnold also brokers exchanges for museums, including the one at Fort
Worth's Texas Christian, which is home to about 1,200 meteorites, including
a 100-pounder that Ehlmann keeps under his desk.
   Demand for meteorites is fed not only by scientists, but collectors
fascinated to own an extraterrestrial object that has rocketed through space
at 50,000 miles an hour.
   Dealers could not say how much the market is worth. In Denver, Morgan
said his own sales hit about $500,000 last year.
   Pallasites such as Arnold's 1,400-pounder are rare, accounting for only
about 1 percent of known meteorites, dealers say. Prized for the nickel-iron
and olivine crystals that form them, pallasites are often cut into slices,
polished to a shine and sold as art objects or in jewelry.
   Arnold's rock is "oriented," meaning that it didn't tumble as it entered
Earth's atmosphere, and thus has a rounded "nose cone."
   It is hard to say what the rock might be worth. Arnold is willing to
speculate about "seven figures," and fellow dealers, perhaps hoping for a
spillover effect from such a sale, are quick to agree.
   But the biggest sum that has been reported for a meteorite to date is
about a quarter of a million dollars, Arnold said, and rocks from the moon
or Mars have commanded the highest prices.

RUN, DON'T WALK, TO KANSAS

Slices of pallasite from the same Kansas meteorite fall have gone for about
$4 a gram, dealers said. Assuming enough demand to sell the whole
1,400-pound monolith slice by slice, that would make the meteorite worth
$2.5 million.
   It's an other-worldly figure. But Arnold is loathe to even discuss
slicing the stone. Because of its size and nose cone, he said its highest
value is as is.
   Arnold found his prize on a farm in Kiowa County, between Wichita and
Dodge City, a site well-known among meteorite hunters. The Brenham meteorite
that landed there, named for the township where it landed, exploded overhead
centuries ago, scattering more than 3 tons of fragments, according to the
American Museum of Natural History in New York. The museum owns some of the
Brenham specimens, as does the Field Museum in Chicago.
   But most hunters left the Brenham zone for tapped-out decades ago.
   In his research, however, Arnold discovered something - he won't say
what - that convinced him they were wrong.
   He told it to Phil Mani, a San Antonio geologist and oil and gas attorney
who collects meteorites. Mani was quickly persuaded. He agreed to bankroll a
hunt.
   "I suggested that he hurry run, not walk - to Kansas," Mani said. But
first the treasure hunters needed the permission of the landowners. They
also needed to somehow acquire legal rights for stones they might find.
   "So we did what's probably never been done in the history of the world
before," Arnold said. "We made a meteorite lease."
   The pair currently hold the meteor rights to 2,000 acres of Kansas
farmland. The leases give the landowner a percentage of any sales. Still,
some of the locals thought it was all a little strange, Mani acknowledged.
   "The notary was looking at us like, 'Hey, these boys from out of town are
giving away free money.'"


'KING OF THE PALLASITES'

With planting time fast approaching, Arnold set to work immediately in a
320-acre wheat field with his ATV-powered metal detector, which rides over
the ground on a plastic frame with wheels and is sensitive to about 15 feet.
   "I got a lot of hits," Arnold said. "On wagon wheels. Horse shoes.
Pliers. Linchpins. A whole lot of linchpins - a whole museum display. A
coyote trap.
   "I found a really neat ring for a bull's nose."
   He stopped about every 100 feet to dig in the clay soil and see what his
detector was registering.
   The rock was 7 feet deep, nose down.
   Arnold hoisted it with a backhoe and hauled it to a nearby grain-elevator
scale: 1,430 pounds, plus or minus 20.
   He has been in the aggressivemarketing phase ever since, hoping to build
interest and attract a buyer.
   On worldrecordmeteorite.com, the "official website of the world's largest
oriented pallasite," he describes it as "one of the most valuable meteorite
finds ever made in the United States" and of "historic and scientific
importance."
   "We're coining it 'the King of the Pallasites,'" Arnold said Wednesday.
The King of the Pallasites was bound for a friend's body shop in Tulsa on
Thursday, for an unusual radio cross-promotion marrying the astral and the
accidental.
   Then it was headed for an undisclosed location in Texas, to be overseen
by Mani, who said he has "several tens of thousands of dollars" invested in
the venture.
   Mani believes a museum will be the best destination in the end for the
meteorite.
   Meanwhile, Arnold has work to do on the farms in Kansas, where he has
bought a second house as a base for his prospecting.
   "Who knows?" Mani said. "Maybe we'll find something better. Something
bigger
Received on Mon 21 Nov 2005 10:32:43 AM PST