Dollars from Heaven?

Residents of Port Orford, Ore. made a great to-do last week about a mislaid meteorite. Somewhere in the wilderness to the southeast lay a huge clod of stone and metal. Exactly where it was, only one person thought he knew. In 1859 Dr. John Evans, a U. S. Government geologist, stumbled on a meteoritic body, almost entirely buried, whose mass he estimated at 22,000 Ib. A 25-gram sample was sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The meteorite was classified as a pallasite--a mixture of olivine (green magnesium iron silicate) and metallic iron. Unfortunately, before Dr. Evans had precisely charted the meteorite's position, he died.

Big meteorites are worth money as scientific exhibits. Harvey Harlow Nininger of Denver, indefatigable meteorite-chaser-and-broker, usually pays a rate of $1 per pound for these fragments, sometimes more for unusually fine specimens (TIME, July 5, 1937). Dr. Nininger was vacationing in New England last week, apparently biding his time until the lost pallasite was actually found. But anybody could figure that at his base rate the meteorite would bring $22,000.

The man who had Port Orford all stirred up last week was a 70-year-old Oregon miner named Robert Harrison. Miner Harrison asserts that he found the meteorite as a boy of 14, when he was staking out a nickel claim in the mountains with his father. Oldster Harrison also declares that he came upon the meteorite again in 1900, that he still remembers exactly where it is. Slowed up two years ago by an injury. Miner Harrison was feeling spry enough last week to figure on going after the lost meteorite.

The Smithsonian Institution was sufficiently roused by all this to point out that it had applied for and received a formal searching permit from the U. S. Forest Service, so that even if the body were found by someone else it would still belong to the Smithsonian. Free-lance searchers disagreed with this view. The Portland Oregonian quoted one "eminent," unnamed Oregon jurist as follows: "Anyone finding a mineral deposit (and a meteorite is a mineral) may file a claim and get possession by going through certain legal procedure at the courthouse of the county wherein it is found."

In Oregon's Deschutes County last week, forest patrolmen, investigating a puff of smoke in the woods, found a hot meteorite imbedded in a tree. They described it as ''the size of a ten-quart water pail." Latest reports: no sale.

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