Man hopes 1,430-pound meteorite will land him seven-figure payout

Bunch said he had spotted a meteor himself the other evening. It streaked across the sky while he was smoking a cigarette on his porch. Bunch, the breed of smalltown banker who wears overalls and rides a Harley-Davidson, has come to view such phenomena with new appreciation.

Kingston - When Steve Arnold heard that grapefruitsized meteorites were pelting a Chicago suburb two years ago, he rushed to the scene and stayed 44 days, meticulously plotting strike points and sweeping streets curb to curb with a detector fashioned from a magnet and broomstick.

He got some funny looks, but he left with 113 meteorites.

In the deserts of Oman on a similar excursion, Arnold and wife, Qynne, bounced over the sands in a Jeep looking for cosmic treasures. "We'd see a black spot on the horizon, and it would either be camel poop or a meteorite," Arnold said. They scooped up 151 of the rocks. Of the 6.4 billion people who live on Earth, no more than two dozen are full-time meteorite hunters. Arnold, 39, of Kingston, has been one since 1990, earning enough to finance his adventures and to sustain a rustic lifestyle for his family.

He has sold some nice rocks. But the big scores - such as six-figure chunks of the moon or Mars - have always eluded him. Until last month. Arnold was dragging an 8-foot-wide custom metal detector over a Kansas wheat field when a sustained screech blared through his headphones. Seven feet down, there it was: the 1,400-pound mass of rock and metal that is the largest meteorite of its kind discovered in the world. Arnold hauled it to the Ozarks last week in his 1973 Ford Ranger. The meteorite, shaped like a jellybean and roughly the size of an engine block, hunkered in the bed, a mottled chunk of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The discovery has already earned Arnold a degree of fame: appearances on the Today show and Discovery Channel Canada as well as wide circulation on the news wires. He also has new notoriety around Kingston, a Madison County town whose downtown includes the tiny bank made famous by Bill Clinton's Whitewater venture. "Congratulations, Mr. Rich and Famous," the banker Gary Bunch greeted Arnold on the square Wednesday.

Bunch said he had spotted a meteor himself the other evening. It streaked across the sky while he was smoking a cigarette on his porch. Bunch, the breed of smalltown banker who wears overalls and rides a Harley-Davidson, has come to view such phenomena with new appreciation.

"I got interested in it since the rich and famous got involved," he said.

The meteorite business can have its rewards, but job security is not one. A risky enterprise, it is peopled by a band of fiercely competitive entrepreneurs willing to instantly fly someplace they have never been before - with no more to go on than a news report or hot rumor. "I've lost thousands of dollars chasing nothing," said Matt Morgan, a competitor based in Denver. "When you get there, it turns out to be a piece of lava or something like that."

But the lure of money falling from the sky is so tantalizing that meteor hunters quickly converge when there is news of a fall. The 2003 Park Forest, Ill., meteor shower was the rare event in which a major metropolitan area was hit by hundreds of meteorites. About 100 professionals and hobbyists followed.

"It's about the only meteorite chase I've been on where there was a Red Lobster in the middle of the search area," said Mike Farmer, a professional from Tucson, Arizona. "Usually, you're in Africa, and you're getting rotten goat meat."

The same year, a gaggle convened in New Orleans, where a 40-pound meteorite had crashed through a house near the Superdome. The rock smashed an antique desk, penetrated the upstairs floor and slammed into the bathroom below, narrowly missing the commode, according to Farmer, who eventually won the competition to acquire the rock.

The Meteorite Market

In 1998, Arnold beat him and others to the spot where a meteor crashed down near a basketball court in Monahans, Texas, where seven boys were playing. The police confiscated the rock, which had fallen in two chunks.

Arnold, first on the scene, represented the boys as a broker. He "kind of shamed the city into not taking this away," said Arthur Ehlmann, the Texas Christian University emeritus geology professor who followed the dispute from his perch as curator of the university's Oscar E. Monnig Meteorite Gallery.

In the end, Ehlmann said, the city kept the chunk that landed on a city street. The boys got the other, and Arnold made a commission when he sold it for them for about $20,000. Arnold also brokers exchanges for museums, including the one at Fort Worth's Texas Christian, which is home to about 1,200 meteorites, including a 100-pounder that Ehlmann keeps under his desk.

Demand for meteorites is fed not only by scientists, but collectors fascinated to own an extraterrestrial object that has rocketed through space at 50,000 miles an hour. Dealers could not say how much the market is worth. In Denver, Morgan said his own sales hit about $500,000 last year.

Pallasites such as Arnold's 1,400-pounder are rare, accounting for only about 1 percent of known meteorites, dealers say. Prized for the nickel-iron and olivine crystals that form them, pallasites are often cut into slices, polished to a shine and sold as art objects or in jewelry. Arnold's rock is "oriented," meaning that it didn't tumble as it entered Earth's atmosphere, and thus has a rounded "nose cone." It is hard to say what the rock might be worth. Arnold is willing to speculate about "seven figures," and fellow dealers, perhaps hoping for a spillover effect from such a sale, are quick to agree.

But the biggest sum that has been reported for a meteorite to date is about a quarter of a million dollars, Arnold said, and rocks from the moon or Mars have commanded the highest prices.

Run, Don't Walk, To Kamsas

Slices of pallasite from the same Kansas meteorite fall have gone for about $4 a gram, dealers said. Assuming enough demand to sell the whole 1,400-pound monolith slice by slice, that would make the meteorite worth $2.5 million. It's an other-worldly figure. But Arnold is loathe to even discuss slicing the stone. Because of its size and nose cone, he said its highest value is as is.

Arnold found his prize on a farm in Kiowa County, between Wichita and Dodge City, a site well-known among meteorite hunters. The Brenham meteorite that landed there, named for the township where it landed, exploded overhead centuries ago, scattering more than 3 tons of fragments, according to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The museum owns some of the Brenham specimens, as does the Field Museum in Chicago.

But most hunters left the Brenham zone for tapped-out decades ago. In his research, however, Arnold discovered something - he won't say what - that convinced him they were wrong.

He told it to Phil Mani, a San Antonio geologist and oil and gas attorney who collects meteorites. Mani was quickly persuaded. He agreed to bankroll a hunt.

"I suggested that he hurry run, not walk - to Kansas," Mani said. But first the treasure hunters needed the permission of the landowners. They also needed to somehow acquire legal rights for stones they might find.

"So we did what's probably never been done in the history of the world before," Arnold said. "We made a meteorite lease." The pair currently hold the meteor rights to 2,000 acres of Kansas farmland. The leases give the landowner a percentage of any sales. Still, some of the locals thought it was all a little strange, Mani acknowledged. "The notary was looking at us like, 'Hey, these boys from out of town are giving away free money.'"

'King Of The Pallasites'

With planting time fast approaching, Arnold set to work immediately in a 320-acre wheat field with his ATV-powered metal detector, which rides over the ground on a plastic frame with wheels and is sensitive to about 15 feet.

"I got a lot of hits," Arnold said. "On wagon wheels. Horse shoes. Pliers. Linchpins. A whole lot of linchpins - a whole museum display. A coyote trap. "I found a really neat ring for a bull's nose." He stopped about every 100 feet to dig in the clay soil and see what his detector was registering.

The rock was 7 feet deep, nose down. Arnold hoisted it with a backhoe and hauled it to a nearby grain-elevator scale: 1,430 pounds, plus or minus 20. He has been in the aggressivemarketing phase ever since, hoping to build interest and attract a buyer.

On worldrecordmeteorite .com, the "official website of the world's largest oriented pallasite," he describes it as "one of the most valuable meteorite finds ever made in the United States" and of "historic and scientific importance."

"We're coining it 'the King of the Pallasites,'" Arnold said Wednesday. The King of the Pallasites was bound for a friend's body shop in Tulsa on Thursday, for an unusual radio cross-promotion marrying the astral and the accidental.

Then it was headed for an undisclosed location in Texas, to be overseen by Mani, who said he has "several tens of thousands of dollars" invested in the venture.

Mani believes a museum will be the best destination in the end for the meteorite. Meanwhile, Arnold has work to do on the farms in Kansas, where he has bought a second house as a base for his prospecting.

"Who knows?" Mani said. "Maybe we'll find something better. Something bigger."