A lunar mystery
How thieves stole Apollo moon rocks in Memphis
Apollo astronauts who set foot on the moon brought 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil back to Earth.
From big chunks to mere dust, the samples retrieved nearly a half century ago during the six manned landings are kept secure at NASA’S Johnson Space Center in Texas and the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.
Scientists have extensively studied moon rocks from the Apollo program while the Nixon administration and NASA gifted other shards to countries across the globe or loaned them out for educational use. And some went missing. Lou Marshall does not know where the moon rocks stolen from his red NASA van ended up. Nearly 33 years later, the retired science educator still worries the tiny lunar samples encased in a clear, hard disc were tossed
Coming Sunday
Take a look at how The Commercial Appeal covered the moon landing in 1969, and read how America moved from the space race with Russia to the moon landing and return to Earth, in the words of those who worked on the program.
and are still buried in a Memphis landfill.
Marshall, hired by Oklahoma State University to work on a Nasa-funded aerospace education project, used the moon rocks and the other space-related items stowed in the 1982 Ford for his job. He traveled to several states presenting to teachers and students about NASA’S space exploration and the wonders of the universe.
But on the night of Aug. 5, 1986, the van vanished.
The case of the stolen moon rocks in Memphis
Marshall walked out of his Memphis home in a gated condo complex and could not find the van in the parking lot. He called police after checking that his friends were not pulling a practical joke on him.
Soon after, the van was found “totally and completely burned” in a Memphis field, per a report from the city’s police department. The decades-old report mentions a 35mm projector and a Sony video recorder among the stolen items, but not the moon rocks. But news reports do. “Moonknappers: Lunar rocks are stolen” reads the headline on the United Press International story printed in the Aug. 9, 1986 edition of The Arizona Republic.
“We’re not getting any breaks right now,” Lt. Carlton Parker, who worked in the police department’s auto theft bureau at the time, told the wire service.
They recovered the burned-out NASA van, but the lunar samples kept inside the vehicle’s safe were nowhere to be found.
Marshall, who is now 82 and still lives in Memphis, used the moon rocks and the other space gear he hauled around to stoke the curiosity of students and teachers. The items spurred questions and deeper thinking about what lies beyond Earth’s atmosphere, he said.
In particular, the backup spacesuit of Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa was a real crowd-pleaser. Marshall occasionally let kids try it on and he also passed around the roughly 8-inch in diameter disc of moon rocks during his presentations. It gave people a chance to hold something from out of this world in their own hands.
It incensed Marshall that someone would steal them.
He was a few years into a nearly 20-year career spent teaching about the country’s space program when the thief temporarily sidelined his work, but his anger was not just for himself.
“I was ashamed for my community,” Marshall said.
Astronauts landed on the moon and brought back lunar samples
In August 1986, NASA was nearing the close of its third decade and coming off what would become one of the greatest tragedies in its history.
Seven months earlier, the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded just after take-off, killing the seven-person crew as people around the world watched on television. An investigation was ordered and the space shuttle program was put on hiatus.
The lunar samples stolen in Memphis that year were scooped up from the surface of the moon during a far more celebratory moment in NASA’S history. They made their journey to Earth on an Apollo spaceflight although Marshall is not sure which one.
The ambitious Apollo program, which ran from 1963 to 1972 and claimed three lives, was designed to fly astronauts safely to the moon and back. NASA accomplished that feat six times.
Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the first of those stellar achievements. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the moon.
The pioneering moonwalkers brought about 46 pounds of lunar samples back to Earth with them.
“It’s one thing to pick them up and look at them on the surface, but what was really desired was to get them back to Earth so you could take them into a lab,” said Rod Pyle, who has written several books on the space program, including his new release “First on the Moon: The Apollo 11 50th Anniversary Experience.”
Scientists knew little about the moon at the time and the rocks held the promise of unlocking some of the natural satellite’s secrets, Pyle said. The lunar samples excited the scientific community, but the general public did not quite understand all the fuss, he said.
By and large, the sharp-edged, mostly gray and tan moon rocks are unremarkable looking.
“It’s where they come from that makes them special,” said Pyle.
Where they came from and what it took to bring them to Earth adds gravity to their theft.
Why steal moon rocks?
To Marshall’s knowledge, law enforcement never recovered the moon rocks stolen from the NASA van nor solved the crime.
Memphis police records give no indication that an arrest was made, but Lt. Karen Rudolph said the department considers the case closed. Officers who investigated the theft appear to have left the force more than 20 years ago, she said.
NASA did not have anyone who could talk about the crime, a spokesman said. And the FBI required that a Freedom of Information Act request be filed. The request submitted last month is still pending.
Questions about the theft continue to go unanswered: Was it an orchestrated moon rock heist? Or a crime of opportunity?
Perhaps the stolen and torched NASA van assigned to Marshall was just the latest in a string of vehicle thefts in his neighborhood. That was one of the likely theories Marshall recalls law enforcement bandying about as they worked the case more than 30 years ago. Several other stolen vehicles were found burned in the nearby countryside, he said.
But why target the NASA van and walk off with the moon rocks? Maybe it was the novelness of it all. In 1986, NASA spokesman Terry White speculated as much in the United Press International report.
“I don’t know what value it would be except just to gloat over it personally,” White said.
Memphis not only moon rock theft
The moon rocks pilfered in Memphis are not the only ones to disappear.
One of the most sensational cases took place in 2002 when three NASA interns stole a safe full of lunar samples collected on Apollo missions from the Johnson Space Center, according to the FBI.
The interns tried to sell the moon samples online for thousands of dollars a gram, but a Belgian rock collector suspicious of the sale tipped off the FBI. They were caught in a sting operation. Despite the headlines, moon rock thefts are rare. “The number of samples that are unaccounted for is minuscule,” Noah Michelsohn, a NASA spokesman, said in an email.
But a 2018 Office of Inspector General audit dinged NASA for not doing a great job of keeping track of its historic property: “Poor record keeping contributed to the Agency losing possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles.”
But the vast majority, about 84 percent, of Apollo samples are still in “pristine condition,” while roughly 16 percent are considered “used,” Michelsohn said.
Of the used samples, about 4 percent were put toward destructive analysis, approximately 6 percent were used in partially or non-destructive analysis and about 5 percent were used in displays in which samples are usually kept pristine, he said.
The Nixon Administration gave some of the moon rocks away and it is not clear where they all ended up, said Joseph R. Gutheinz Jr., a Texas lawyer and criminal justice professor trying to track the missing ones down with the help of college students.
All 50 states, U.S. territories and 135 countries received moon rocks from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions, Gutheinz said. Today, 156 of the small lunar shards fastened to wooden plaques are lost, he said.
Gutheinz started hunting moon rocks as an agent with the NASA Office of Inspector General.
In the late 1990s, the now former agent helped recover Honduras’ Apollo 17 moon rock in a sting operation. Gutheinz said he took out an ad in USA TODAY posing as a moon rock buyer in hopes of ensnaring con artists selling bogus moon rocks.
But a seller with a real moon rock reached out asking $5 million for just more than 1 gram in a lucite ball attached to a plaque. Although there are some exceptions, it is illegal to sell moon rocks, Gutheinz said.
In the U.S., states have lost track of their moon rocks. One was stolen and in some of the other instances governors took them home or regifted them, Gutheinz said.
“You’re looking at a piece of American history ending up in a garage box rather than a museum,” said Gutheinz, whose students have helped track down dozens of them.
“The fundamental problem is that they were never entered into any type of records system. So a governor, or president or dictator or thug would receive these moon rock gifts for their country and they wouldn’t enter it into their state archival records system and so nobody knew if they had it or not.”
The Apollo 11 moon rocks given to Delaware, New York and the Virgin Islands are still missing, Gutheinz said. And New Jersey, South Carolina, Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan and Puerto Rico do not know where their Apollo 17 rocks are located, he said.
In Tennessee, the state’s Apollo 11 moon rock is on display at the newly built Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. The Apollo 17 rock is at the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis.
“There’s a cost, a human cost to space exploration, and the only thing physically from that are those rocks and dust that we bring back,” Gutheinz said.
The case of the stolen moon rocks in New Orleans
The intrigue surrounding the Memphis case increased the following week when another set of moon rocks used for educational purposes were lifted in a city 400 miles to the south.
A small safe holding six, tiny pieces of the moon was ripped out of a wall at the Louisiana Science and Nature Center in New Orleans, The Associated Press reported on Aug. 17, 1986. The thief escaped unnoticed with the moon rocks, which were encased in a roughly 8-inch in diameter plastic disc.
Robert A. Thomas still thinks about that day although he is foggy on the details. At the time of the theft, he was the executive director of the center now known as the Audubon Louisiana Nature Center.
“I remember how distraught we were and thinking that we would get them back at any moment and it never happened,” said Thomas, who is now a professor at Loyola University New Orleans.
As far he knows, law enforcement never solved the case nor recovered the moon rocks just like in the Memphis case.
No one at NASA was available to talk about the New Orleans theft and a Freedom of Information Act request filed last month with the FBI is still pending.
Local police investigated, but the New Orleans Police Department does not keep theft records that old. The city’s library did find a newspaper account of the crime in the Aug. 17, 1986 edition of The Times-picayune.
The moon rocks, which were used for educational purposes, were stolen out of a safe that usually held small amounts of cash for the science center’s gift shop, the article states. The thief made off with $25 as well.
NASA required lunar samples to be kept in a safe, Thomas told The Times-picayune in 1986, but he did not think it was widely known where the center locked up the rocks. Actually, another set of moon rocks was on site at the time, but left untouched, the article states.
News reports on the New Orleans case mention the earlier Memphis theft, but there is no indication the two crimes were linked.
But coincidence or not, the retired Memphis educator and the former head of the New Orleans center both reacted emotionally to the thefts.
“It was because for Christ’s sake these were moon rocks,” Thomas said nearly 33 years later. “This is not something that you can replace.”
Both Marshall and Thomas hold out hope. Maybe for all this time the pieces of the moon taken in 1986 some 400 miles apart are stashed in safe places.
Perhaps they are sitting forgotten on basement shelves just waiting for someone to come across them, recognize their significance and return them to the stewards of country’s space program.
Reach Holly Meyer at hmeyer@ tennessean.com or 615-259-8241 and on Twitter @Hollyameyer.