History of Meteorite

Thank you for your response to my e-mail. I will be sending you a sample via Fed Ex. The rock has been looked at by two other people and their superficial examination leads them to believe it is not a meteorite. However, I have included a short history of the rock and my experiences with it to help you understand why I think it came from space and why you need to run definitive tests to determine its exact origin. Thanks for you help and if I can do any thing please let me know.

Mike Moore

History of Meteorite

As a child there were two main aspects of my upbringing. First I was raised as a Christian and taught to say my prayers every night and to believe in God and His love and to believe that He answers our prayers. But my other love was always science and especially space travel. From my earliest days, I have loved science and everything about it and have always wanted to go to space. When confronted by the apparent contradictions between science and religion, I once asked my pastor about the biblical account of creation in the Bible and he told me never to worry because the Bible was a book to teach us how to live, while science was a method for learning how God had put together all the things we see around us. Now as much as I wanted to go to space, I decided early in my life that I would probably never have the chance. So my compromise was to spend my youth praying every night that God would "send me something from space."

When I left home for the military, I had long since forgot my childhood prayers. Many years went by and I eventually ended up working for my great Aunt on her ranch. Working for my Aunt was very trying because she liked to control every aspect of one’s life, but working out of doors with animals was enjoyable to me. On the ranch, every day was very similar. We made exactly the same rounds every day during the winter as we fed the cattle and checked their condition. When you spend several years of your life traveling over the same roads and the same ranch, one becomes very familiar with everything on the ranch.

Then one day we were repeating the same routine when both of us saw something that made us wonder what it could be. From maybe ½ mile away or more, it looked like a rock out in the middle of the dry, short, yellow grass that mostly covered the sandy flood plain. My first thought was that it had to be a meteorite and that God had finally answered my childhood prayers. So as we drove up to the rock, I was already prepared to approach it as if it was a meteorite. It had definitely not been there the day before or any other day. Here was a reddish rock out in the middle of all the dry yellow grass and it stood out like a sore thumb.

As I walked up to it, I carefully checked to see if there were any footprints to indicate if anyone had placed it there. There were none. As I examined the site, it was very sandy with about ½ the sand covered with short yellow grass. There was no signs of any disturbances around the rock except a small depression about a foot away that was maybe one or two inches deep. It looked to me as if the rock had fell from the sky, landed and bounced that one foot away. I retrieved the rock and have kept it inside every since that day. The place where it "landed" was about 30 feet from the ranch road we were on. No one else used that road. The landing sight would have been about ¾ of a mile from an oil well road and about 1 ½ miles from a public highway, both of which would represent the closest the public could get to the site.

When I first got the rock, I went to the library and tried to learn what I could about meteorites. The rock was obviously volcanic, was rounded in a manner that appeared to be caused by entry into the atmosphere, showed signs of being melted at certain places along the exterior and showed shiny spots under a microscope, which I had read indicated that silicon in the rock had been melted into small pockets of glass. I concluded the rock was probably from Mars, since that seemed to represent the nearest body large enough to have volcanoes and would be the planet most likely to be able to "get" the rock to Earth. At the time, I was mildly disappointed, since God had sent me a meteorite from such "near" space and I really had wanted something further away and older than a rock from Mars would be. I knew that the volcanic nature of the rock meant that it couldn’t be as old as the planet it came from or as old as most of the material floating around the solar system. Since that time, I have often joked, that now I am praying for a gold meteorite.

Since that original examination, I have basically never examined the rock again. It has sat in my closet, or sometimes in my living room and I have always told everyone that the rock is my most valued possession, since it represented to me the concept that God does answer prayers and that miracles do still happen. This has been my total involvement with that rock. Then recently came the announcement that primitive life had been found in meteorites from Mars. It was probably two weeks after that announcement, that I remembered that I had always thought my rock had come from Mars. That was when I finally decided to have the rock tested to see for sure "from whence it came."

Every bit of experience in my life tells me that the rock I found must have fallen from the sky. There are no volcanoes within hundreds of miles of the site where I found this rock. I have visited those volcanoes on many occasions and have looked at every piece of volcanic rock that I have found anywhere. I have never seen another rock which looks like mine. I have also never seen a meteorite that looks like mine, although I have not seen very many meteorites.