Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/19/indonesian-man-sells-meteorite-that-fell-through-his-roof-for-1-million.html
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Man I really, really wanna find a meteor out in the wild. I’d keep half and sell half. Unless it was huge, then keep less, sell more.
I do have a few bits from the Campo del Cielo in Argentina. But that isn’t the same as finding something yourself.
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In my country any objects falling from the space belong to the state and you can’t keep or sell them. A small finder’s fee is usually awarded but it’s going to be very small.
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We had a fairly big one over Sweden a week ago. It broke up in the atmosphere, but had hunters scrambling over the countryside looking for fragments.
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A much better conclusion than what happened to poor Jordi Verill.
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I hope he held back enough to forge a Pratchett sword for himself.
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Which country is that? And it seem rather unfair.
Thats cool. Did they have any luck?
Now in Kansas, were I am from, it has a lot of farm land, there are people who have massive, ATV pulled metal detectors and have found some large masses under feet of earth in fields. I would LOVE to do that, but the buy in cost for something like that is high. And most of the time, you find nothing. Or nothing of value.
RE: Jordi Verill
IIRC he broke his meteor, which he feared greatly reduced the value!! (It has been 15+ years since I’ve seen it, so memory fuzzy.)
In the United States, meteorites are the legal property of the person upon whose land they fall or are found. If it is found on Federal land then it counts as the property of the Federal government. So if you do find one in “the wild” your best bet is to either
- Try to buy the land in question before anyone else realizes it’s there, or
- Covertly transport it to your own property and then tell everyone you found it in the flower beds while you were gardening
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OK… good idea. Not that I am very likely to find one in the wild. IIRC the guys who look in fields usually work it out with the land owner to split it if they find something.
I also heard the silt in your gutters can contain micro-meterorites. Back when I had gutters I though I might try to find some… but me and ladders don’t like each other so I just cleaned out the leaves and left it.
All you have to do is go to Antarctica where they are literally just laying there on the ice and they are super easy to spot…black stone in an all white landscape. Also, anywhere in the Sahara desert.
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I’ve heard that too! But don’t live near either area!
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Yeah or say it fell through your roof.
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Yeah but then you have to bust a hole in your roof to sell the story.
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Literally everything on Earth is from space.
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A few months ago, one or more boulders fell from the sky in a remote region of Brazil. At first the residents were frightened by the rain of stones, but quickly learned the value of the rocks. Some people who found the meteorite fragments after a cosmic gold rush, sold them for a few dollars, but they ended up on sales websites with the price tag in the range of thousands of dollars.
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I thought this was going to turn into a story about how you destroyed your gutters searching for micro-meteorites.
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Once when I stepped out of my house I heard a huge crash from the gutter above me. Couldn’t see anything obvious but I checked later and found a normal rock in the gutter. A friend suggested it was kids with a catapult. It didn’t look like a meteorite.
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Reboing!
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They call those Kris in Indonesia…
