If You Find a Meteorite, Can You Really Claim It?

Astronomers, amateur and professionals alike, always dream of finding a meteorite. It's even more exciting if the meteorite is found just after it hits. Consider yourself very lucky if the meteorite falls somewhere near you and you get to retrieve it while it's fresh. But does finding and simply picking up a meteorite make it your own? Can you lay claim to it without anybody else contesting the legitimacy of your ownership?

The answer to both is yes... that is... if you, the one who found the meteorite, is also the owner of the land it slammed into. This means that if you found a meteorite on someone else's property, the landowner has the right to claim the object as his, never mind if it journeyed for millions of years in space before hitting dirt. While laws in different places may differ, it just shows that picking a meteorite up from the ground does not automatically make it yours.

Meteorites can fetch a lot of money, especially for specimens that cause a ruckus and are found right after impacting. These meteorites become popular and when broken in pieces, it can make a lot of money for the owner. Apart from museums and research institutions, collectors worldwide are willing to pay big for really good and popular specimens. Meteorites are like long lost treasures. But while the founder of lost treasures generally get a share of the bounty along with the owner of the land and the government, meteorites pose questions that require the services of good lawyers.

Just consider what happened at Williamsburg Square, in Lorton Virginia, USA in January 2009. A meteorite (top and left) crashed through the roof of a building and into a doctors' office. One doctor thought that a bookshelf had fallen on his partner after he heard a boom. But it turned out, a mango-sized meteorite was responsible for the explosion. It hit with such force that it embedded pieces of ceiling tiles into the floor, going through the carpet. The doctors were thankful the meteorite didn't hit any of them because it fell on a spot where they usually sit. The doctors placed the meteorite fragments in a box and sent them to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History where it was confirmed as a meteorite by scientist Cari Corrigan. She said it was likely traveling at 350kph when it hit.

You'd think that the Lorton meteorite has found it's final resting place in the Smithsonian? but no, the owner of the building it crashed into has laid claim to the space rock. The Smithsonian says it will hold on to the meteorite until ownership is resolved. It's up to history to say where the rock will end up.

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Tektites Rock! How to Find and Collect Tektites

You've probably heard of that asteroid tracked to it's explosive demise over the Sudan desert in 2008 (fragment shown at left). Only a few meters across, it didn't survive intact and shattered before it hit the ground, sending hundreds of debris strewn on the desert sand. Eventually, fragments of the doomed asteroid were recovered. It was easy because astronomers knew where it went and it also left fireball dust like in the following picture left behind by the Almahata Sitta fireball.

A lot of meteorite collectors would have scrambled to get a piece of Asteroid 2008 TC3 if they also knew where to look. But the fact is that meteorites are quite difficult to find. Usually, scientists look for them on ice fields, where they stand out starkly against the white ice. Others prefer vast stretches of sandy desert, where they also stand out like sore thumbs. But of course, not everyone has the means to travel to the North Pole or the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia just to hunt to meteorites.

The next best thing to collecting such souvenir rocks from space is to simply collect tektites (top pic from http://www.tektites.co.uk/). Tektites, of course, are rocks that are the result of asteroids that have impacted Earth in the past. thrown high above the atmosphere as molten globs that solidified, they form strange shapes upon reentry into the atmosphere since they are melted again. They drop to the ground, on what are called strewn fields, as odd rocks that do not match others on the ground.

Here is a table of major tektite strewn fields in the world:

Name	Location	Age (million years)
Australasian	Australia, Tasmania, Indonesia, Philippines, and most of Southeast Asia	0.75
Czechoslovakian	Czech Republic	14.8
North American	Texas, Georgia, Martha's Vineyard, Cuba	35
Ivory Coast	Ivory Coast of Africa	~ 1.0
Libyan	Libyan Desert	28.5
Irgiz	North of the Aral Sea	1.07
Aouelloul	Mauritania (West Africa)	3.5

If you live in a country or in a specific area that's part of a major strewn field, then you're lucky, because the chances of you finding tektites is high. In the Philippines, for instance, tektites are regularly collected and sold as amulets in Manila. People simply go and walk by the side of rivers and over fields to look for them. They are simply visually sorted out and picked up by hand from the other rocks on the ground. Most are small - an inch or two, but some can be as big as five inches in diameter or even more, although these big tektites are rare. Dr. Henry Otley Beyer (left), the renowned American anthropologist who lived with the Ifugaos, did most of the collecting of Philippinites. His collection now forms part of the National Museum displays, including those at the Planetarium at the Luneta park.

Of course, you have to know what tektites look like in order for you to find them. Most are dark and grooved, but others, like Libyan desert glass (left), are translucent and appear shattered. You can see samples of how tektites look here in this entry in Wikipedia. There you'll also see how some rocks like sandstone can have the shape, but not the texture and color of a tektite.

FACT: In the Philippines, tektites were once collected in Ortigas in Metro Manila. Today, there are the Tektite towers that stand along Exchange road to remind us of the richness of the area for tektites! You can check out one of the abstracts of the research papers where a find in the Ortigas site is mentioned, here at the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System. Just type the words "tektites" and "ortigas" together and you'll find it.



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