Show Hunting treasure from outer space Nicholas Riccardi Los Angeles Times Steve Arnold is driving th the yellow Hummer in circles around a Kiowa County wheat field towing an wide foot metal detector For an hour nothing but silence Finally the detector whines and Arnold slams the brakes That is so good he lie says Arnold jumps out pinpoints the location with witha a smaller detector and starts digging The renowned meteorite hunter is hoping for a big score He has had three false hits today unearthing a bit of barbed wire a fragment of a plow a squashed Dr Pepper can the definition of insanity Arnold asks Doing the same thing over and over again All over the world He has dodged police in Oman had his truck break breakdown breakdown breakdown down in a desert in Chile and bicycled the streets of suburban Chicago holding a broomstick with a magnet tied to its end searching for space rock But it was here in Kansas that he found the meteorite that would make him famous In 2005 Arnold y began to search the rich meteorite-rich prairies of western Kansas Within two weeks he lie unearthed the worlds world's biggest intact Weighing 1400 pounds the the most sought-after sought type of meteorite composed of iron streaked with dazzling crystals is believed to be worth between and 1 SI million It will willbe willbe willbe be featured in the first meteorite all-meteorite auction scheduled for Sunday in New York The world of space rocks attracts all sorts Professionals like Arnold comb the tundra of Siberia and Norway and the deserts of South America Nomads in the Sahara search for rocks to sell to collectors looking for the perfect piece of intergalactic debris Some collectors are drawn to meteorites es for purely aesthetic reasons the rocks can be startlingly colorful but many are also captivated by the scientific novelty of the pieces Its from outer space said Darryl Pitt who curates a major meteorite collection Ten pieces from that collection also will be auctioned Sunday Theres Theresa a romantic notion of being able to have something from between Mars and Jupiter Arnold 41 grew up in ina a small town in Eastern Kansas and knew nothing about meteorites What he did know was that he wanted to be his own boss His parents operated their own businesses his father an accounting office his stepmother a bookstore Arnold went to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa not for religious reasons but because he liked its business program He Hemet Hemet Hemet met and married his wife at the school and after graduation pressured- pressured cleaned houses in Tulsa to make ends meet One day in 1992 he wandered into a Barnes Noble and spotted a book on treasure hunting In a chapter on finding buried caches of coins on oni i 1 S old homesteads the book advised checking historical records to locate areas where epidemics or drought wiped out the population Arnold went to the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka and began to thumb through newspapers In Inthe Inthe Inthe the yellowing pages he found stories about farmers digging up meteorites I realized oh God my these are treasure maps Arnold said He began driving to rural communities in Kansas and offering ofTering to buy meteorites from farmers Then he lee sold them to retailers or collectors As the years passed he spent less time acting as a middleman and more time hunting the rocks himself Meteorites are extraterrestrial debris from asteroids and comets that collide with the earth As the rocks fall through the atmosphere the heat and pressure can mold them into odd shapes Some land with a huge impact creating enormous holes such as the Barringer crater in northern Arizona which is nearly a mile wide and more than feet deep Treasure hunters like Arnold are generally on the prowl for meteorites that break up as they fall through the atmosphere and scatter across what is called a strewn field These are simplest to find in dry flat places where the dark rocks are preserved and easy to spot like the Great Plains or the basins of the American Southwest For years Arnolds Arnold's list of hunting grounds was topped by a less exotic place western Kansas Ten percent of the meteorites found in the United States have come from that region which was showered with debris when a huge meteor broke up in the atmosphere untold thousands of years ago Homesteaders were the first to recognize the unusual richness of the land Eliza Kimberly in inthe inthe in inthe the was convinced the heavy rocks shattering her family's plows were meteorites and insisted on collecting them She was proved right when she sold them to universities to pay off ofT her mortgage The homestead was promptly dubbed the meteorite farm Other farmers continued to dig up meteorites occasionally in the stretch of Kiowa County near the meteorite farm between Haviland and Greensburg Prospectors swept through the area and discovered a ton half-ton that Greensburg displayed next to its other municipal treasure the worlds world's largest hand-dug hand well The town lined the highway with signs Arnold browsed the journals of meteorite hunters who had explored that stretch and determined that the land wasn't as thoroughly searched as others believed He didn't know how to comb such a vast area for buried meteorites until 2005 when he bumped into an hunter at a meteorite show in Denver The South American told him about an wide extra-wide detector he lie used to search for buried r rocks Arnold drove through ugh Greensburg on his way home from the show and decided to try his luck He got permission from one farmer to search his land in return for a share of any rocks found Then he ordered custom-ordered the giant detector from a German company and had it shipped to Kansas The detector is isa isa isa a rectangular coil of wires sheathed in pvc piping it shrieks when its regular pulse of energy is disrupted by an iron object Arnold built a wooden platform and attached wheels that he bought at Lowes He mounted the detector and began manually dragging the contraption through the field Within three hours he found a pound meteorite Two weeks later he dug up the big Word Vord of Arnolds Arnold's discovery resounded throughout the meteorite world A team from the Houston Museum of Natural Science came to accompany him on digs A crew from the Travel Channel followed him himon himon himon on others He upgraded to using a tractor to tow his metal detector rig then an and now his Hummer |