[meteorite-list] The Trials and Tribulations in Dealing with Lando wners

From: Steve Schoner <schoner_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:53:39 GMT
Message-ID: <20110221.105339.9199.0_at_webmail06.dca.untd.com>

How about prices for meteorites on Ebay? Surely the landowners can see this and the dollar signs begin rolling in their minds.

When I started searching back in the late 1960's it was a "handshake agreement." And meteorites went for mere dollars per/pound. No one, except the scientific community, and a few meteorite "nuts" like me, really cared about them.

I remember the days when I bought pounds of Allende, freshly recovered for less than $10 per/lb. And that day in Jan of 1970 when I obtained a 6 oz fresh piece of Murchison, that fell the previous year direct from Australia by one that saw it fall for a mere $50. I was offered by the same person two other stones. One at .75 lbs, for $75, and another at 1.2 lbs for $120.

Boy I wish I had gotten all of those, too! I still have my 6 oz one in a safe deposit box. At today's prices figure out the price of that one?

Why have the prices of meteorites increased from mere dollars per/lb to dollar's per/gram now---

Marketing.

My friend Bob Haag was the first to really make the market. I would never have believed it then. I remember the day when he came to my house in a beat up pickup back in 1980. He had a shoebox of nice meteorites offering to sell them to me. I picked out a few, and asked how much. When he did the total and showed me the bill I was floored. Dollars per gram. I had bought meteorites for mere $10 to $20 per/lb. And I had over the years bought small cut and polished pieces from Nininger and Huss for mere cents per gram. Harvey Nininger often quoted the price for me over the phone to a landowner when I made a find. And that was enough said to seal the deal then.

I have never been an efficient dealer in meteorites. I just don't have the "marketing skills." But Bob Haag did. And he made the mark.

Every successful dealer of meteorites came after him.

But current marketing between the many dealers have made the mark greater, and now the dollars signs are flying high in the minds of landowners. Legal issues are the norm.

When I was collecting starting back in the early '60's, very very few were even interested in meteorites. They were of purely scientific value. But that is not to say that monetary value was never an issue. There are many cases in history where fresh meteorite falls have created monetary values. And there were several dealers back in the late 1800's and early 1900's that had a substantial market for meteorites. And some of the prices that they sold them for, corrected for current values, would be comparable to today's prices.

I think that the Great Depression might have depressed the interest in marketing meteorites. And that is when Harvey Nininger made his mark, and pretty much set the price all the way into the 1970's.

Another point that Jeff brought up is very aspect of current marketing...

The loss to science.

It is getting ever more difficult for scientists to obtain meteorites because of commercial demand.

The point he made with regards to SNC's God help science if people start eating martian meteorites. Stupid though such a notion sounds, there are cases where people actually ate Egyptian mummy dust to prolong their lives. And such dust was being sold in the 1800's. The result of that was a crackdown by the scientific community on the practice.

Many of the antiquity laws came out of it.

And now with prices sky high for any meteorite, Nations are making laws about meteorites and exporting them, or prohibiting export of a so called "national treasure."

Australia, Argentina and Oman have such laws now. I am sure Nations will follow.

It is always demand and monetary value that makes this trend.

These trends are virtually impossible to reverse once in place

Steve Schoner
http://www.petroslides.com

BTW: Because of the Egyptian antiquity laws, and antiquity laws of many Nations today... Have you had a dose Egyptian mummy dust?

Message: 24
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2011 07:41:36 -0500
From: Jeff Grossman <jgrossman at usgs.gov>
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] The Trials and Tribulations in Dealing
        with Landowners
To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
Message-ID: <4D625D80.6000206 at usgs.gov>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Why don't we discuss the real issue with this thread? Is nobody else offended by the idea of destroying meteorites for commercial gain?

I do realize that the scientific value of Brenham pallasites is extremely low. Many hundreds of kg are held by museums, so chances are that the destruction by dealers of a few hundred kg more to extract the olivine will not result in irreversible harm to science.

But what if some cult placed a high value on ritually consuming Martian/lunar meteorites or angrites, or CAIs, and the price for powdered meteorites skyrocketed? Would it be ethical to destroy these meteorites for profit? And, are such practices harmful, in the long-run, to both science and the avocation of meteorite collecting?

A large part of the tension between the scientific and collector communities, including the creation of much-reviled export and ownership laws in some countries, arises from the perception that national scientific treasures are being lost. This sort of practice by dealers could make the situation so much worse.

Jeff


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Received on Mon 21 Feb 2011 12:53:39 PM PST