How much for a meteorite? On eBay, the sky's the limit

GARDEN GROVE, Calif. — Something lit up the Norwegian sky on June 7. A streaking fireball, caught on film, followed by an earth-shaking impact recorded at the Karasjok seismic lab at 2:13:25 a.m.

It became international news when University of Oslo astronomer Knut Jorgen Roed Odegaard told a local newspaper: "If the meteorite was as large as it seems to have been, we can compare it to the Hiroshima bomb."

Those words assured that Norway's meteor would light up more than the heavens. It lit up the faces of a rare new breed: meteorite hunters who scour the globe for space treasure worth as much as $25,000 a gram — and the collectors who fund such expeditions. Collectors like Dave Radosevich.

Radosevich, 42, of Garden Grove has amassed more than 300 meteorites — including pieces of the moon and Mars and a rock older than our solar system — making his one of the best private collections anywhere.

"Allende is older than any Earth rock," the Northrop Grumman project manager says, picking up a 1-pound meteorite found in Allende, Mexico. (Collectors refer to their meteorites by the place they were found.) "It's older than the sun. The planets. Older than any of the solar system. You're holding a piece of a star."

That would make it more than 4.5 billion years old, the estimated age of our solar system. Most meteorites hail from the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars. But Allende is believed to come from deeper space.

Each rock has a story. Radosevich pulls a Diablo Canyon from his display case. A small chunk of iron now. But 50,000 years ago, it was part of a meteor that slammed Arizona like 150 Hiroshima bombs, blasting a 700-foot crater nearly a mile across.

His Cape York, from Greenland, holds delicate iron crystals that form only after two planets collide.

Then he pulls out his Murchison, from Australia — another meteorite from outside our solar system. It was found to have 56 amino acids — 33 of which had not been seen before on Earth — when found in 1969.

Feeling lucky? Forget the lottery. Go buy yourself a magnet and tape it to the bottom of a cane. Or a tractor. Or a camel. And, by the way, welcome to the new Gold Rush.

Bob Verish of Sunland, Calif., became rich while cleaning his backyard of rats' nests and found two Mars meteorites in a pile of rocks he had collected 19 years earlier.

Businessman Steve Arnold became famous last year after paying Kansas farmers to comb the fields of a famous meteorite fall and unearthing a 1,400-pound meteorite filled with iron, nickel and green olivine crystals. You can buy it for $1 million.

Fifteen years ago — before eBay, before Google, before the rise of the Internet — few cared about meteorites. Few knew about them. You could buy just about anything for a buck a pound from all of three or four dealers worldwide.

"If I'd started back then, I'd be rich," Radosevich says. "Nobody was collecting. Even the rare ones, nobody cared."

The Internet changed everything. Suddenly a handful of entrepreneurial treasure hunters began studying the best places to search. They fanned out across the globe, paying camel drivers in the Sahara Desert and children in Mexico to search for heavy, fusion-crusted rocks near known meteorite falls.

Others began inspecting suburban rain gutters, four-wheeling through California dry lakebeds, and walking along New England rock walls with magnet-mounted canes — most meteorites have enough iron to attract a magnet.

The prices now? Try $1,000 a gram for moon rock. And $2,000 a gram for Mars rock — 100 times the price of gold. Some rare moon meteorites command $25,000 a gram.

Which is why new rocks arrive every day in the mailbox of UCLA research geochemist Alan Rubin, who inspects and authenticates meteorites for the public. Maybe one a year is a meteorite. The rest?

Says Rubin, "We call them 'meteorwrongs.' "