Monahans News
Monahans, Texas
Thursday, June 25, 1998
Meteor auction set for Internet
Bidding starts at $20,000 when the Meteorite 7's Monahans 98-I is offered for auction on the world wide web on July 9.
That report came from Steve Arnold, the Tulsa, Okla., meteorite broker who represents the children who first
retrieved the space rock when it crashed into a vacant lot in Monahans on March 22.
On Tuesday, June 23, in an internet auction billed as Baby Monahans, less than two grams of microgravel from M98-I sold for nearly $600. Offered in two lots (a 1.1 gram pebble and six bits of space rock weighing less than a tenth of a gram each), the large pebble sold for $380; the six bits of
meteorite for $215.
Michael Casper, a meteorite dealer from Ithaca, N.Y., paid the $380 for the 1.1 gram sample. It is Casper, whose bid of $20,000 will start the July 9 web auction for a 1,156 gram piece of the meteorite from the Asteroid Belt that landed in the West Texas Desert.
The web address is meteoritebroker.com
City OKs meteorite display
Monahans City Council Tuesday, June 23, unanimously adopted a plan to bring meteorites that fell 60 years apart into one City Hall exhibit.
Both landed in Ward County. Monahans 38, so christened because it fell in the sandhills and was recovered in 1938, and Monahans 98-II, one of two that impacted in Monahans on March 22, would be the focus of the projected exhibit.
M98-II was recovered in a city street on March 23 from the place it impacted about 800 feet from where M98-I was first retrieved by seven children. M98-I was returned by the Council to the families of the children who are offering it for sale through a meteorite broker.
Bringing a piece of the 1938 meteorite back to Monahans involves giving part of M98-II to the University of Arizona and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in return for a comparable piece of M38. A replica of M98-II would be made before it is divided. The projected exhibit also would include the cratered part of the asphalt into which M98-II fell.
