moon rocks

The Case of Colorado's Missing Moon Rocks

Last year, I wrote about the concerns that some of the moon rocks given away to various governments by the Nixon administration may have gone missing. A recent report from the Denver Post indicates the problem isn't just with other countries, it's right here at home. A set of moon rocks presented to Colorado's governor in 1974 which could be worth as much as $5 million on the black market appear to have disappeared.

Denver has one set of moon rocks on display on the third floor of the state Capitol. Those rocks were found around ten years ago in storage at the Colorado History Museum. A plaque with a golf-ball-sized sphere enclosing bits of the moon, was presented to Gov. John Vanderhoof by astronaut Jack Lousma on Jan. 9, 1974 but now it cannot be located. The Colorado History Museum doesn't have it nor does the Denver Museum of Nature & Science or the CU Heritage Center Space Exploration Gallery. A forensic-investigation student from the University of Phoenix believes they could be tucked away in the Colorado State Archives in boxes of Vanderhoof's personal effects. Richard Griffis has spent two months trying to find Colorado's Apollo 17 moon rocks. He is a student of Joseph Gutheinz, a retired NASA agent who in 1998 helped catch a man trying to sell Honduras' Apollo 17 moon rocks for $5 million. Gutheinz now teaches forensic investigation at the University of Phoenix and one of his assignments is for students to locate the lost moon rocks.

UPDATE: The rocks have been found. The rocks brought back by the Apollo 17 mission a are hanging in the home office of former Gov. John D. Vanderhoof. They will likely now find a home at a local museum or historical society.

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The Search For Missing Moon Rocks

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Have moon rocks gone missing? Recently the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam announced that a rock it thought was a moon rock turned out to be petrified wood raising questions of how moon rocks are accounted for. During the Apollo 11 and 17 flights to the moon rocks were collected by the astronauts. The AP reports that around 270 rocks were given to foreign countries by the Nixon administration and that the fate of some of those rocks may be unknown. The article quotes Joseph Gutheinz, a University of Arizona instructor who says that he believes that some of the gifted rocks have been lost or stolen and are now secreted in private collections. Moon rocks aren't of particular value in mineral terms but their rarity and the obvious difficulty in attaining them has made them precious. A website called CollectSpace.com is working on compiling a list of where the stones are.

The AP report seems to indicate that many stones given to embassies made it into national museums but others may have gone missing long ago. Of an estimated 134 rocks brought back in the Apollo 11 mission in 1969 only around a dozen can be immediately located.NASA turned over the samples to the State Department to distribute and there is, according to the State Department historian, no record of what became of the rocks. At the time when the rocks were distributed no one imagined that it would be the last trip to the moon for decades.

Most of the material gathered by the Apollo missions remains under NASA lock and key. They give away small samples to researchers and lend rocks out for exhibitions.The gift rocks which were given out were very small and encased in plastic globes. Collectors are often interested in moon rocks but should know that buying the moon rocks from the Apollo missions is illegal. Anyone trying to sell you moon rocks is either lying about the provenance or has obtained the rocks illegally.

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