Stolen and missing Moon rocks

• 1. Operation Lunar Eclipse Sting

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  In 1998, a federal undercover operation known as Operation Lunar Eclipse began to identify and arrest individuals selling counterfeit Moon rocks. Senior Special Agent Joseph Gutheinz of NASA's Office of Inspector General posed as Tony Coriasso. He worked alongside Inspector Bob Cregger of the United States Postal Inspection Service, who used the alias John Marta. The sting later expanded to include agents from the United States Customs Service, specifically Special Agent Dwight Weikel and Special Agent Dave Atwood. The operation successfully recovered an Apollo era Moon rock that had been given to Honduras by President Nixon. This specific rock had fallen into private hands and was offered to the Agents for five million dollars. To recover this Moon rock, the agents needed to secure the requested five million dollars. Billionaire and one-time Presidential Candidate H. Ross Perot agreed to provide the necessary funds. The rock was seized from a Bank of America vault after two months of negotiations with Florida businessman Alan H. Rosen. A subsequent civil suit resulted in the forfeiture of the rock to the Federal Government on the 24th of March 2003. In September 2003, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe presented the refurbished Moon rock to Honduran Ambassador Mario M. Canahuati at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

• 2. The University Moon Rock Project

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  After leaving NASA for a teaching position at the University of Phoenix in Arizona, Gutheinz challenged his criminal justice graduate students to locate goodwill Moon rocks. He subsequently extended this project to cover missing Apollo 11 Moon rocks President Nixon gave to states and nations in 1969. Hundreds of graduate students have participated in this project from 2002 to the present day. Beginning in 2002, his graduate students began reporting that both the Cyprus Apollo 11 Moon rock and the Cyprus Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock were missing. The Cyprus Apollo 11 rock is actually a collection of lunar dust in a Lucite ball. The Cyprus Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock is a pebble-size Moon rock. Operation Lunar Eclipse and the Moon Rock Project became the subject of the 2012 book The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks by Joe Kloc. Students like Cleo Luff obtained information about the Ireland Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock being discarded in a landfill known as the Dunsink Landfill in October 1977 following a fire. Another student, Toni Dowdell, successfully tracked down the Oregon Apollo 11 Moon Rock hidden in the ceremonial Governor's Office of Oregon.

• 3. Global Missing Gift Inventory

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  Of the 270 Apollo 11 Moon rocks and Apollo 17 Moon rocks given to nations worldwide by the Nixon Administration, approximately 180 remain unaccounted for. Many accounted rocks are locked away in storage for decades. In Brazil, the Apollo 11 display is missing. Canada lost its Apollo 11 display during a tour in 1978. While the Cyprus Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock was recovered, the Apollo 11 rock remains missing. Honduras lost its Apollo 11 display, though its Apollo 17 display was stolen and later recovered. Ireland accidentally discarded its Apollo 11 rock in the Dunsink Landfill in October 1977 after a fire consumed the Meridian room library at the Dublin Dunsink Observatory. The Apollo 17 Goodwill Rock remains with the National Museum of Ireland. Malta's Goodwill Moon Rock was stolen from the Museum of Natural History in Mdina on the 18th of May 2004. Nicaragua's Apollo 11 display was stolen and later recovered, but its Apollo 17 display is missing. Romania believed it only received one Moon rock until evidence surfaced that the Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock may have been auctioned off by the estate of executed former leader Nicolae Ceaușescu. Spain's Apollo 11 Moon Rock is unaccounted for, while its Apollo 17 Goodwill Moon Rock was returned to the people of Spain in 2007.

• 4. Recovered State And National Samples

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  Elizabeth Riker was assigned the task of locating the Alaska Apollo 11 Moon Rock by her professor. On the 18th of August 2010, she wrote about her investigation in the Capital City Weekly newspaper of Juneau, Alaska. Coleman Anderson, a crab-fishing captain who appeared on the TV show Deadliest Catch, claimed to have found the rocks in the garbage from a massive fire at the Alaska Transportation Museum in 1973. He filed a lawsuit against the State of Alaska asking the Court to deem the rocks his sole property. The missing Moon rocks were returned by Anderson as of the 7th of December 2012. In Arkansas, Michael Hodge, an archivist with the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, discovered the Goodwill Moon Rock on the 21st of September 2011, while processing gubernatorial papers of Bill Clinton. Former governor John Vanderhoof, then age 88, acknowledged he had the Colorado Goodwill Moon Rock in his personal possession and agreed to return it. The rock was unveiled at the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum by Dr. Bruce Geller on the 25th of August 2010. Louisiana's Apollo 17 Moon Rock was returned to the state in late 2020, hand delivered to the Louisiana State Museum by an anonymous Florida man.

• 5. Counterfeit Rock Schemes

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  On the 23rd of April 2012, Gutheinz met with Rafael Navarro, a 67-year-old former toy manufacturer, at a restaurant in Buffalo, Texas. Navarro claimed to have an Apollo 11 Moon rock given to him by a maid who worked for a Venezuelan diplomat. He offered shavings from the rock for three hundred thousand dollars on eBay. Gutheinz examined the sample through a microscope and became skeptical of Navarro's claim. Two brothers, Ronald and Brian Trochelmann, were previously charged in 1998 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan for a scheme to sell a phony moon rock for millions of dollars. They pled guilty to wire fraud for perpetrating that scheme. The brothers claimed their father invented a space-food packaging process used during the Apollo missions. They alleged the rock had been brought from the moon by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean and given to John Glenn. Before an auction could take place in December 1995, FBI agents confiscated the rock. In August 2009, a spokesman for the Dutch National Museum acknowledged that one of its prized possessions was just a piece of petrified wood. The museum acquired the rock after the death of former prime minister Willem Drees in 1988.

• 6. NASA Internal Theft Incidents

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  In June 2002, 101 grams of Moon rocks were stolen from the Johnson Space Center by interns Thad Roberts and Tiffany Fowler. The pair used knowledge gained during their internship to remove a safe in building 31 North containing the samples. Fellow interns Shae Saur and Gordon McWhorter were also arrested for their roles in the theft. The theft included a meteorite known as ALH 84001 which may have revealed information about life on Mars. Roberts advertised the rocks on a Belgian mineralogy club website before being caught. On the 20th of July 2002, two FBI agents met with Roberts, McWhorter, and Fowler, arresting all three and recovering the samples. In 1976, vandals damaged a 40-gram Apollo 17 Moon rock at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. About two cubic millimeters of basalt were chipped away during an incident involving a hard blow with a sharp object. Police looked for moon rocks taken from a NASA van that was stolen in Memphis, Tennessee, on the 8th of August 1986. A set of six fragments of Moon rocks used in educational programs were stolen from the Louisiana Science and Nature Center by ripping a small safe out of a wall in 1986.