Moon rocks round out 1 billion years of Maryland’s geologic history

What are illegal to own, cost as much as a Super Bowl ad, and have spawned dragnets that have ensnared people including a “Deadliest Catch” captain and former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot?

If you answered “moon rocks,” you’d be right.

Elusive, rare and worth millions on the underground market, these tiny lunar souvenirs are on display at a museum along Belair Road in Overlea. They came to Maryland courtesy of President Richard Nixon, who ordered moon rock samples from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions be broken into pieces and mounted on plaques with flags to distribute to all 50 states and 135 countries.

Visitors can see them for free — along with fossils, shark teeth and the taxidermy heads of bison, bucks and bears — as part of the Maryland Museum of Natural Sciences’ newest exhibit. It’s called “The Making of Maryland: One Billion Years and Counting.”

The exhibit celebrates a law passed this year that designated the facility as the state’s first natural science museum. Maryland now has an official repository for all scientific finds, including meteors, dinosaur bones and, yes, moon rocks.

It means that the museum, long home to the Natural History Society of Maryland, can secure funding to expand its collections, as well as make official requests like the one to “borrow” the moon rocks from the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis.

“I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, it would be so great to have them because many of the other moon rocks throughout the country are on display at museums of natural science and natural history,” said museum director Bronwyn Mitchell-Strong. “And now that we have that designation, we should be showcasing these treasures.’”

With a street value of about $5 million per rock cluster, these space souvenirs have had a tendency to disappear.

In 2010, Joseph Gutheinz, a retired NASA inspector general who was teaching at the University of Phoenix online, deputized his students to take an inventory of lost moon rocks and get them back.

Gutheinz and his students discovered about half the states’ gifted moon rocks had, well, walked off, according to a story in The Atavist magazine as well as the podcast “This is Criminal.”

As part of their research, each student at the online university published an op-ed in their local newspaper about the moon rocks and where they were last seen, a sort of APB for lost space treasures.

The gambit worked: Retired government workers and museum personnel started thinking and asking around.

Arkansas’ moon rock was found with Bill Clinton’s post-gubernatorial personal belongings. Missouri’s was discovered in a box when Sen. Kit Bond was packing up his Washington office for retirement after stints as governor and senator. Colorado’s was hanging in a former governor’s home in Grand Junction. West Virginia’s ended up in the office of a dentist whose deceased brother was the former governor’s business partner. Alaska’s was in the custody of Coleman Anderson, skipper of the Western Viking crab boat featured on the first season of TV show “The Deadliest Catch.” Anderson’s father was the curator of the Alaskan museum that had displayed the rock. After an unsuccessful lawsuit, Anderson returned it.

As for the moon rocks in other countries, locating them also proved challenging. In the late 1990s, when Gutheinz was still at NASA, custody of Cyprus’ rock was uncertain due to a war. Honduras’ rock ended up in the hands of a former military colonel who sold it to a Florida man named Alan Rosen — who then attempted to sell it to undercover agents for $5 million.

Gutheinz and his team needed proof they had $5 million to satisfy an increasingly suspicious Rosen, but NASA was unwilling to part with the money. So Gutheinz called H. Ross Perot, knowing that his nickname was “the Patriot” and that he had previously helped with a 1979 hostage situation in Iran. Within a half hour, Perot called back, and loaned him the money. Rosen was arrested at a Miami bank.

NASA considers moon rocks government property as well as national treasures, so any sale is considered trafficking in illegal goods. But a market remains. Astronauts collected moon dust and rocks not part of the official plaque-giving. Con artists have long claimed random rocks are from the moon and attempted to sell them to collectors. A moon rock expert in Houston does the verification, but most don’t make it there before the grift is completed.

After a 2003 trial — United States v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque — Rosen lost custody of his rock, but he did not go to jail.

At the Baltimore County museum, the moon rocks are ensconced behind glass, and then inside another sphere embedded in a plaque. One looks like a dollop of caviar; the other like dust in a renovation project. The inscription reads: “This fragment is a portion of a rock from the Taurus Littrow of the Valley of the Moon. It was part of a larger rock composed of many particles of different shapes and sizes, a symbol of the unity of human endeavor and mankind’s hope for a future of peace and harmony.”

A designation ceremony for the museum, which recently underwent a $1.9 million renovation, is scheduled for Oct. 1, the day the law takes effect. The museum is open 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

When the exhibit opened last month, astronaut Ricky Arnold was on hand to commemorate the occasion. He flew on Space Shuttle mission STS-119 in March 2009, delivering solar arrays to the International Space Station. He launched again in 2018 on the Soyuz MS-08. He has walked in space, where he watched the earth pass under his feet. Magical is the only word, the Ocean City resident said.

Arnold thinks the moon rocks have found an appropriate landing.

“Space is still the one place where we have shown we can cooperate and do really amazing things,” Arnold said. “Hidden in those rocks is a reminder of our shared beginnings, and maybe our shared destiny.”