Stolen and missing Moon rocks

• 1. Introduction

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  Stolen and missing Moon rocks are a surprisingly widespread problem, one that has unfolded quietly across decades and dozens of countries. Of the 270 rocks given to the nations of the world by the Nixon Administration following the Apollo missions, approximately 180 are unaccounted for today. Some were stolen by opportunists. Some vanished in fires or during political upheaval. Some were simply misplaced, sitting forgotten in a desk drawer or a locked cabinet in a governor's office. And a few were taken by people who genuinely did not understand they were holding public property rather than a personal gift.

  The rocks that are known to exist have been locked away in storage for decades in many cases, a fact that frustrates researchers and hobbyists who track them because of their rarity. Getting more is, to put it plainly, not an option anyone can count on. What drove a NASA inspector general agent to run a federal sting operation? What led a billionaire presidential candidate to put up five million dollars to recover a pebble-sized piece of the Moon? And how did a 13-year-old in Canada end up as the custodian of a national treasure? Those questions lead into one of the stranger stories in the history of space exploration.

• 2. Operation Lunar Eclipse

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  In 1998, a federal undercover operation unlike any before it was assembled specifically to catch people selling counterfeit Moon rocks. Operation Lunar Eclipse began with two agents: Senior Special Agent Joseph Gutheinz of NASA's Office of Inspector General, who posed as a buyer named Tony Coriasso, and Inspector Bob Cregger of the United States Postal Inspection Service, who posed as John Marta. The operation later expanded to include Special Agent Dwight Weikel and Special Agent Dave Atwood of the United States Customs Service.

  The operation's central target was a Florida businessman named Alan H. Rosen, who was attempting to sell a 1.142 gram Moon rock that had been presented to Honduras by President Nixon. Rosen was asking five million dollars. To complete the sting, agents needed to actually produce that sum. They turned to H. Ross Perot, the billionaire who had recently run for president, and Perot agreed to put up the money.

  After two months of negotiations, the rock was seized from a Bank of America vault. What followed was a five-year civil suit with one of the more memorable names in American legal history: United States of America v. One Lucite Ball containing Lunar Material (one Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque. The government prevailed on the 24th of March 2003. The rock was refurbished at Johnson Space Center and formally presented back to Honduras in a ceremony at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. on the 22nd of September 2003, with NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe handing it to Honduran Ambassador Mario M. Canahuati. On the 28th of February 2004, O'Keefe flew to Honduras to present the rock in person to President Ricardo Maduro. The Honduras Goodwill Moon Rock now sits on display at the Centro Interactivo Chiminike, an education center in Tegucigalpa that sees hundreds of young student visitors every day.

• 3. The Moon Rock Project

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  After leaving NASA for a teaching position at the University of Phoenix in Arizona, Gutheinz turned his investigative experience into a classroom exercise. Starting in 2002, he challenged his criminal justice graduate students to track down the goodwill Moon rocks that Nixon had given to states and nations in 1969. He eventually extended the project to cover all the missing Apollo 11 rocks as well. Hundreds of students participated from 2002 onward.

  The results were remarkable. A student named Toni Dowdell located the Oregon Apollo 11 Moon Rock hidden in the ceremonial governor's office, starting her search with a phone call to a state Capitol operator because there was no document trail to follow. Sandra Shelton traced the West Virginia Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock, valued at five million dollars, after a front-page story she wrote in the Gazette-Mail of Charleston prompted a retired dentist named Robert Conner to come forward. Conner explained that the rock had passed to him through his deceased brother, who had been a business partner of former West Virginia governor Arch A. Moore, Jr. For her role, Shelton was awarded a certificate by Governor Joe Manchin.

  Another student, Cleo Luff, uncovered what happened to Ireland's Apollo 11 rock: it had been accidentally discarded in October 1977 at the Dunsink Landfill following a fire that destroyed the Meridian room library at the Dublin Dunsink Observatory. In Arkansas, an archivist named Michael Hodge found the state's Goodwill Moon Rock on the 21st of September 2011 while processing the gubernatorial papers of Bill Clinton at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. The rock had been presented to Arkansas in 1976 at a Boy Scout event in Little Rock by astronaut Richard H. Truly.

  Operation Lunar Eclipse and the Moon Rock Project were together the subject of the 2012 book The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks by Joe Kloc.

• 4. Diplomats, Dictators, and Heirs

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  Several of the most tangled stories involve the rocks that traveled through the hands of political figures, and the confusion over whether those rocks were personal gifts or national property. Misael Pastrana Borrero, who served as President of Colombia from 1970 to 1974, received both lunar sample displays directly from Neil Armstrong and kept them on his desk at the Casa de Nariño. Believing they were personal diplomatic gifts, Pastrana took the rocks home after leaving office and used them as living room decoration in his private residence in Bogotá.

  The situation came to light in 1980, when journalist Daniel Samper Pizano investigated and contacted the United States Embassy in Bogotá, which confirmed the rocks belonged to the Colombian people. Samper published an article accusing Pastrana of theft. Pastrana's son, Juan Carlos, then returned the displays to the Bogotá Planetarium on his father's behalf. The rocks sat in secured storage there until 2003, when they went on public display for the first time.

  Spain's Moon rocks followed a similarly convoluted path. The Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock given to Francisco Franco's administration ended up in the possession of the family of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, who had been assassinated by the Basque separatist organization ETA while in office. In 2007, Carrero Blanco's son donated the rock to the Naval Museum, where it remains on display alongside a Spanish flag that traveled aboard the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. The Apollo 11 rock meant for Spain is another matter. Franco's grandson told a journalist from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in a story published on the 20th of July 2009 that the rock had simply gone missing during a move, and that students assigned to the Moon Rock Project were looking for leads in Switzerland.

  Cyprus added a different kind of complication. Both its Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 rocks were believed destroyed during the Turkish invasion of 1974. But in 2003, space memorabilia expert Robert Pearlman learned that the Cyprus Goodwill Moon Rock had never actually been presented to Cyprus at all. It had been retained by the son of an American diplomat. The American government had been informed in 2003 and took no action. Gutheinz eventually filed a request for a Congressional inquiry and pushed to have the facts published in the press to motivate the diplomat's son to return the rock. After five months of negotiation, the rock was recovered. The diplomat's son's name has never been disclosed.

• 5. Rocks Hiding in Plain Sight

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  Hawaii's case illustrated just how casually some of the rocks had been forgotten. In 2009, an estimated ten million dollars in Moon rocks from Apollo 11 and the Apollo 17 Goodwill mission could not be located anywhere in the state. Curators and officials at every museum and university in Hawaii were contacted, along with the office of then Governor Linda Lingle, the state capitol, and state archives. None of them knew where the rocks were. Both were eventually found in a locked cabinet in the governor's office during what officials described as a routine inventory of gifts given to the governor's office over the years.

  Missouri produced a similarly farcical search. In 2010, employees of both the Missouri State Museum and the Missouri State Department of Natural Resources claimed the Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock was in storage. News photographs of the rock were later identified as Apollo 11 images. Then-Senator Kit Bond, who had been governor when the rock was gifted to Missouri, said he had no memory of receiving it. The State Museum and State Archives reversed their earlier statements and declared the rock presumed missing. Bond's staff eventually found it among his personal possessions and returned it to the state.

  Colorado's resolution was more direct. A graduate student's investigation led directly to former governor John Vanderhoof, then 88 years old, who acknowledged he had the Goodwill Moon Rock in his personal possession and agreed to give it back. On the 25th of August 2010, the rock was unveiled at the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum by curator Dr. Bruce Geller.

  North Carolina's rock had spent years in a desk drawer at the state Commerce Department before a colleague of Professor Christopher Brown found it in 2003. Brown, the Director of the N.C. Space Grant and a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, used it in presentations on space science to students for years before transferring it to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for permanent display.

• 6. The Theft of NASA's Own Rocks

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  In June 2002, two NASA interns named Thad Roberts and Tiffany Fowler stole 101 grams of Moon rocks from the Johnson Space Center. Roberts was an ambitious student pursuing degrees in physics, geology, and anthropology who aspired to become an astronaut. He and his co-conspirators used knowledge of the security systems around the samples, gained during their internship, to remove a 272-kilogram safe from building 31 North.

  Roberts advertised the rocks on a Belgian mineralogy club website. The post was forwarded to the FBI, which enlisted Belgian amateur rock collector Axel Emmermann to help set up a sting. On the 20th of July 2002, two FBI agents posing as buyers met with Roberts, his accomplice Gordon McWhorter, and Fowler. All three were arrested and the samples were recovered. Roberts also faced charges of stealing dinosaur bones and other fossils from the University of Utah. The theft was the subject of Ben Mezrich's 2011 book Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History.

  The theft also included a meteorite catalogued as ALH 84001, a sample that researchers believed might hold evidence relevant to the question of life on Mars. Earlier and less dramatic incidents included a 1986 theft from the Louisiana Science and Nature Center, where six fragments used in educational programs disappeared when a small safe was ripped out of a wall, a case that remains unsolved. In Virginia Beach on the 10th of January 2006, an education specialist named Rudo Kashiri reported that Moon rocks locked in a safe bolted to a NASA van had been stolen from her driveway. Those rocks have not been recovered.

• 7. Counterfeits and Confusion

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  A writer named Tom Tiede predicted the counterfeit Moon rock market in a November 1969 article in the Fort Scott Tribune, before the gifted rocks had even begun going missing. He described a Miami housewife approached by a door-to-door salesman selling lunar rocks, a California woman advertising Moon dust for sale at $1.98 an ounce, and the Harlem Better Business Bureau warning consumers against purchasing fake Moon substances.

  By 1995, the fake rock trade had become serious enough to reach a Manhattan auction house. Two brothers, Ronald and Brian Trochelmann, had negotiated an agreement with Phillips Son & Neale to auction a rock they claimed had been brought from the Moon by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean and given to John Glenn, and then to their father. FBI agents confiscated the rock in December 1995 before the auction took place. A story in the New York Times on the 2nd of December 1995 by Lawrence Van Gelder first broke the news. NASA initially suggested the rock might be real, since an Apollo 12 sample of approximately the same weight had been stolen from a shipment of registered mail in 1970 while en route to a researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles. The brothers later pled guilty to wire fraud. Their scheme was among the inspirations for Operation Lunar Eclipse.

  The most striking case of mistaken identity involved Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. In August 2009, a spokesman for the museum acknowledged that a rock it had displayed as a prized lunar sample was actually a piece of petrified wood. The museum had acquired it after the death of former Dutch prime minister Willem Drees in 1988. Drees had received it as a private gift on the 9th of October 1969 from then-US ambassador J. William Middendorf, during a visit by the three Apollo 11 astronauts as part of their "Giant Leap" goodwill tour. Geologist Frank Beunk described the actual object as "a nondescript, pretty-much-worthless stone." The genuine Dutch Apollo 11 Moon rock was accounted for at a different museum in the Netherlands all along.