When is a meteorite not yours?

Tuberale

Tuberale

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May 12, 2010
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Portland, Oregon
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A couple of years ago, a guy in Southern Oregon found a meteorite. Actually, it almost his him.
He was on BLM land.

An analysis of the stone showed that had a lot of rare-earth minerals in it, like gold, platinum, osmium. Then he learned what he has found. And also learned it didn't belong tp him. How could that be?

Beliieve it or not, not all things that seem to be meteorites are actually meteorites.

Some are pieces of satellites that fall to earth.

And believe it or not, they still belong to whoever made them.
 

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Which of the many meteorite reports are you referring to? Please link or cite a news article, please. When narratives get passed from person to person, it becomes a version of the “telephone game” very quickly.

Time for more coffee.
 

This incomplete story, or another very similar bounced around here a while ago. Kind of a disjointed thing about big buried meteorites on gov't land in Oregon. Oregon residents should just call all rocks, meteorites. "Yeah, I spread ten yards of crushed meteorites on my driveway. Looks great now."
 

Rock fell near Powers, Oregon. Almost hit a guy. No newspaper story that I know of. He was a neighbor of my (then) brother-in-law. Time-frame: about 1974-1976.
 

When it belong to Terry Soloman 8-)

chub
 

I was at the Virginia Museum of Natural History a couple of years ago trying to get an ID on a big back crystal {Rutile} when the phone rang. The lady that was doing the ID for me got excited and said she had to go right now to pick up a meteorite. I asked if she really thought it was a meteorite and she said that there was a pretty good chance because it had came through the roof of a house and was on the dining room table. I never went back to check it out, but I really should.
 

Where is it now? After 45 years, much of the information regarding this item is very likely to have been changed, embellished, or forgotten. Such is the human memory.

Time for more coffee.
 

Last edited:
I do remember the law changed,.....

Not January 1st last year, about 5 years ago.

Reads like this,..........

If you find a meteorite on city property,..... it belongs to the city.

If you find a meteorite on county property,..... it belongs to the county.

If you find a meteorite on state property,..... it belongs to the state.

If you find a meteorite on Federal property,..... it belongs to the feds.

If you find a meteorite on your property,..... it belongs to you.


The government really knows how to take the fun out of something.
 

Interesting, but what gov body makes laws that sweep with such a wide broom as to jurisdictions?

Can you link us up with something? thanks


SanMan said:
I do remember the law changed,.....

Not January 1st last year, about 5 years ago.

Reads like this,..........

If you find a meteorite on city property,..... it belongs to the city.

If you find a meteorite on county property,..... it belongs to the county.

If you find a meteorite on state property,..... it belongs to the state.

If you find a meteorite on Federal property,..... it belongs to the feds.

If you find a meteorite on your property,..... it belongs to you.


The government really knows how to take the fun out of something.
Click to expand...
 

meteorite only belongs to you if The Powers that Be Let you have it.

As said Earlier , Careful Who ya Tell

Especially if it's larger then a Marble
 

Last edited:
ConceptualizedNetherlandr said:
Interesting, but what gov body makes laws that sweep with such a wide broom as to jurisdictions?

Can you link us up with something? thanks
Click to expand...

I would have to dig for it, but I remember it clearly.

It came about when, and after, the popular "Meteorite Hunters" type shows.

The law was repeated to me by a friend that teaches gold finding in Arizona.


It's like this,.........

"Who so ever owns the property where a meteorite lands, owns the meteorite"


Example:

You're a farmer, so you have a good many acres of land.
A meteorite lands in your corn field,....... that meteorite becomes your property.

Two years later a meteorite lands across from you, on a neighboring farm,......
that meteorite now becomes property of that land owner.

But, if either of those meteorites landed on the highway that separates the two farms,......

If it's a county highway,..... it would belong to the county.

If it's a state highway,...... it would belong to the state.


The law kicked a big hole in searching for meteorites on BLM land.
 

ummmmm ? if i never actually found it..............................yet !
 

US law is not as @SanMan recollects. BLM last issued guidance (as an Instruction Memorandum, not as legislation) covering meteorite collection in 2012, which is published here:

https://www.blm.gov/policy/im-2012-182

Note that there are circumstances where you can collect on certain types of public land, subject to a maximum of 10 pounds per person per year. and some other restrictions. This is for casual personal collection only and the collected material may not be bartered or sold. It is also possible to obtain a permit (subject to a fee) from a local BLM office for commercial collection, where the 10 pound limit doesn't apply. Individual States and other jurisdiction are of course perfectly entitled to ignore the BLM Instruction Memorandum and impose additional restrictions. Some of them do, but most do not.

The original story on this thread has so many holes in it that I don't believe it to be in any way accurate, for reasons I will cover in a separate post.
 

Coming back to the original story, meteorite falls do not escape the attention of the collecting community or its societies. There has only been one reported fall in Oregon since 1952, which was at Fitzwater Pass in 1974. However, that’s a long way from Powers and the meteorite didnd’t nearly hit anyone. It was found by Paul Albertson in a grassy area with scattered trees along a mountaintop and he still owns about 46g of the 66g recovered, having sold portions of it or submitted them for analysis. It turned out to be a rare Iron IIIF type, not confirmed until 2006.

Meteorites do not contain “a lot of Rare-earth minerals like gold, platinum, osmium”. They often contain higher amounts of those metals thah you would typically find in Earth’s crust and that often gets incorrectly portrayed as meaning the absolute amounts are high. They aren’t. The highest level of gold ever found in a meteorite is less than 10mg/Kg (10 parts per million by weight) for example and it’s a similar story for other metals. Higher than Earth’s crust but still extremely low in absolute terms.

The Fitzwater Pass Iron IIIF for example contained Gold at 1.8mg/Kg, Gallium at 10 mg/Kg, Germanium at <10mg/Kg, Iridium at 2.5 mg/Kg, Platinum at 9.2mg/Kg and Rhenium at 0.2mg/Kg among others. These are very typical amounts and not of commercial value in the context of the size of meteorites that reach us. It would be a different story it we were able to mine some of the still-orbiting asteroids for which we have identified much richer amounts. The Asteroid Psyche 16 for example.

“Some are pieces of satellites that fall to earth. And believe it or not, they still belong to whoever made them” is largely true. Plus pieces of military hardware, jettisoned booster rockets for satellite launches and such. Those may well have compositions in the realms of “a lot of rare-earth minerals”, but we don’t class them as meteorites.
 

@Indian Steve’s story is rock solid. Since it was the only reported meteorite fall in Virginia since 1950, he must be describing the events of 18 January 2010. Following reports of a large fireball as far away as West Virginia, at 5:45pm a single stone hit the roof of the Willimasburg Family Practice in Lorton Va, penetrated the ceiling below and broke into three large pieces plus a number of smaller fragments. Much of it was found embedded in the concrete floor below the carpet. The practice’s doctors were present at the time the meteorite fell, and described hearing a sound akin to bookshelves crashing to the ground. The recovered pieces represented an approximately rectangular stone measuring 8x5x5cm and totalling 330g. Analysis by the Smithsonian confirmed it to be an L6 (low metal) Chondrite meteorite, which was formally given the approved name “Lorton”.
 

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