MISSION MOON
Friendswood attorney hunts down missing moon rocks
Our special anniversary coverage of the July 20, 1969, moon landing continues today with an inside look at a Friendswood man’s hunt for missing moon rocks.
Somewhere — hidden in plain sight, lost in archives or possibly sitting in the offices of former autocrats’ children — are 178 rocks taken from the moon. From a nondescript law office in Friendswood, one man is trying to find them all.
“I felt it was ‘Mission Unaccomplished,’” attorney Joe Gutheinz said of his quest to locate the missing lunar mementos.
Gutheinz is a man of many stories, and perhaps his favorite to tell is the one that started it all: While a senior special agent at the NASA Office of Inspector General in 1998, he successfully led a sting operation to recover a moon rock given to the government of Honduras after the Apollo 17 mission.
Dubbing the effort “Operation Lunar Eclipse,” Gutheinz ran an ad saying “Moon rocks wanted” and posed as a salesman willing to negotiate a $5 million sale for the rock, which the Honduran government said had been stolen. Someone stepped forward with it.
The rock was returned to the government of Honduras, and every moon rock recovered since has been returned back to NASA or the state or country that had received it.
‘Perfect con’
Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford had gifted dozens of the artifacts — which were brought back from the Apollo 11 and 17 missions — to states, nations and territories as a measure of goodwill. The years that followed weren’t kind to most of them, however, and they scattered to places unknown.
But the difficulty in nabbing the Honduras artifact taught Gutheinz that more moon rocks were missing than anyone realized — and that no one had tracked them down after they left federal custody.
There were believed to be 135 rocks given to nations and 50 given to the states from each mission, Gutheinz said.
In the worst cases, as happened with the Honduras rock, they migrated into the wrong hands. The rocks are thought to be valued in the millions of dollars, meaning people are hungry to sell them to space collectors, Gutheinz said.
“It’s the perfect con, because they go to you and they say, ‘Here’s a moon rock that Neil Armstrong gave me,’” Gutheinz said. “‘But you can’t tell anyone about it because it’s not legal for a private citizen to have possession of a moon rock.’”
Other instances aren’t as sinister in nature. One former governor of Colorado had an Apollo 17 rock on his wall at home for decades before it was found. One of Ireland’s rocks is lost because it got thrown away in 1977 after an observatory caught fire.
Robert Pearlman, an expert on space artifacts, said the rocks’ values come from historical and cultural significance as well as a desire for something almost unattainable.
“The moon rocks represent more than just a geological sample of material — they represent what many consider the crowning achievement of humanity to date,” Pearlman said. “In a lot of ways, it’s the rarest material on earth.”
Tireless searching
Given their social value, it’s amazing just how small the rocks actually measure, Gutheinz said. They’re the size of a small pebble, contained in a lucite ball, and attached to an inscribed plaque with replicas of the nation, state or territory’s flag.
Gutheinz began teaching an investigations course through the University of Phoenix in 2002, and he got his students in on the game. They found a total of 78 moon rocks, Gutheinz said.
Sandra Shelton, who is now 60, found one of West Virginia’s rocks while taking the class in 2010. She put an ad in the newspaper and got a bite after four weeks of tireless searching. She found that the governor at the time gave the plaque to a friend, who had since died. The friend’s brother recognized the rock in the ad and called Shelton.
Shelton spent several hours a day investigating leads, she said. She screamed when she got the call that her rock had been found, in part because she knew she would get an A in Gutheinz’s class.
“Doing something like that, you have to be very persistent,” said Shelton, who lives in Eagan, Minn. “I would go to sleep at night and wake up thinking of this moon rock.”
Narrowing the search
“It’s the perfect con, because they go to you and they say, ‘Here’s a moon rock that Neil Armstrong gave me. But you can’t tell anyone about it because it’s not legal for a private citizen to have possession of a moon rock.’ ”
— Joe Gutheinz, former special agent at the NASA Office of Inspector General
Pearlman has also created a tracker of sorts on his website, www.collectspace.com. Internet sleuths have crowdsourced and located many on their own.
“Because they’re no longer U.S. federal property, there was no one who was responsible for tracking these as a group,” Pearlman said. “This was the very first effort to try to look for all of them.”
Pearlman said he and Gutheinz hope to find all of the states’ rocks by the 50th anniversary of the Apollo landing on July 20. There are believed to be seven left to locate.
An estimated 178 of the nation’s rocks are still missing, Pearlman said.
For Gutheinz, the mission has been long and exhaustive, but the rewards are plenty. If the moon rocks are all put back on public display, they could inspire future generations of astronauts, he said.
“The moon rocks belong to the people,” he said.
“NASA put our people in jeopardy to get those moon rocks back so that they can be studied, so they can be preserved, so they can be looked at for and by the people. Not by an individual, not by a dictator, not by a communist, not by a fascist, not by a capitalist.”