LOS ANGELES, Calif. – Quick, what can cost a thousand and more dollars a gram, isn’t stored at Fort Knox and won’t get you into trouble with the law?
Hint: Sometimes the farther it falls, the higher its price.
Answer: Meteorites.
Ever since 1996, when NASA scientists claimed that a potato-sized bit of Mars that had dropped on Antarctica possibly contained traces of life, the market for meteorites has exploded.
Nor has this state of affairs been hurt by a slew of recent Hollywood movies about the exciting things that would happen to the Earth if an extremely large space rock happened to cross its path.
"Interest is growing because people are now more aware of the asteroid threat – Armageddon and Deep Impact, these movies have stirred up a lot of interest," said Joel Schiff, editor and publisher of the New Zealand-based magazine Meteorite!. "Meteorites are just small Armageddons, little impacts."
Meteorites now sell for anywhere from $1 to $1,000 a gram, prices that can best by far those fetched by any precious metal or illegal drug.
Dealers hawk the rocks through auctions, on the internet, in stores and at conventions – like several held each February in Tucson, Arizona – that draw thousands of people.
High prices in turn have driven meteorite hunters into the field, to traipse across the globe in search of the rare rocks.
"Scores of individuals and groups have gone out scouring the Earth for new meteorites," said Darryl Pitt, curator of the Macovich Collection of meteorites in New York.
To capitalize on the public’s interest in meteorites, Pitt is auctioning off more than 40 lots of the space invaders on Sunday through Butterfields in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Marilyn Lindstrom, meteorite curator at NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s Antarctic Meteorite Program, said the public’s renewed fascination has kept her phone ringing for years.
"We get calls every week, ‘I have this funny rock and it may be a meteorite,’’’ Lindstrom said. Most, she added, turn out to be "meteor-wrongs" – nothing more than simple Earth rocks.
The Butterfields auction only deals with the real McCoy, including a tiny 0.6-gram martian specimen – part of the Shergotty meteorite that fell on India in 1865 – that has a pre-auction estimate of $1,800 to $2,500.
Other space chunks include a hefty 35-pound (16-kilogram) iron meteorite found in the Kalahari Desert that contains a naturally formed hole in the shape of a heart. It is expected to fetch between $32,500 and $40,000.
"It’s the only extraterrestrial Valentine," Pitt said.
The high prices have kept some meteorites out of the hands of scientists.
While scientists can lay claim to the 20,000 or so meteorite pieces found in the Antarctic over the last two decades, those scrounged from the deserts of North Africa – including, recently, the 14th martian meteorite ever found – and other places typically get sold on the open market.
"There are groups of people who roam around the Sahara Desert, finding chunks of Mars and the moon that have made them quite rich," Schiff, of Meteorite! magazine, said.
Lindstrom said she has colleagues who have paid $1,000 for a gram of otherwise unattainable meteorite. Others, she said, will agree to classify and authenticate a meteorite for dealers in exchange for a tiny portion of the rock.
Pitt said he sells some meteorites to collectors for their sheer beauty. He calls those "aesthetic iron meteorites" for their sculptural qualities.
"We said, ‘Wait a minute, this is stunning. This is a [Swiss sculptor Alberto] Giacometti. This is a [Italian sculptor Umberto] Boccioni. These shouldn’t be sold like the others," Pitt said. "And the art world took notice."
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