A lunar rock hunter searching for the last missing stones of the states

In the last few weeks, two of the rocks that fell off the radar after the 1969 mission were in Louisiana and Utah, leaving only useless memories in New York and Delaware.

Lawyer and lunar rock chaser Joseph Gutheinz says he "blows his mind", that the rocks have not been neatly indexed and saved by some of the states that have received them, but he hopes that the last two will be located before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Mission next summer.

"It's a tangible piece of history," he said. "Neil Armstrong's first mission was to go down and pick up pebbles and dust in case they needed to do an emergency takeoff."

The administration of President Richard Nixon has introduced the tiny lunar samples to all 50 states and 135 countries, but few have been officially registered and most have disappeared, Gutheinz said.

Each state got a tiny sample covered with acrylic and mounted on a wooden plaque, with the state flag. Some have been placed in museums, while others have been exhibited in state capitals. But almost no state has recorded them in an archival document, and many have lost track of them, he said.

When Gutheinz began looking for them in 2002, he estimates that 40 states had lost track of the rocks.

"I think part of it was that, honestly, we thought the return to the moon would happen regularly," said Gutheinz. But there were only five other trips before the last moon landing, Apollo 17, in 1972.

On the rocks of Apollo 11 given to other countries, about 70% are not counted, he added.

The US government has also sent a second set of good-looking moonstones to states and other nations after the Apollo 17 mission, and many of them have also disappeared, he added.

NASA did not follow them after giving them to the Nixon administration for distribution, said chief historian Bill Barry, but the space agency would be happy to see them locate.

Gutheinz began his career as an investigator for NASA, where he found illicit sellers asking for millions of rocks on the black market. Authentic moonstones are considered national treasures and can not be sold legally in the United States, he said.

He told NASA that gifts to the states were missing, but he only started his hunt after leaving the agency.

Now a lawyer in the Houston area, he is also a college instructor and has asked for help from his students. The recording of their discoveries on the location of moon gems discovered in a database.

Most of the Apollo 11 rocks were found in unexpected places: with former governors of West Virginia and Colorado, in a military artefact storage building in Minnesota; and with a former crab boat captain of the TV show "Deadliest Catch" in Alaska.

In New York, state museum officials have no record of Apollo 11 rock in that state. In Delaware, the sample was stolen from its national museum on September 22, 1977. The police were contacted, but it was never found.

The territory of the US Virgin Islands, meanwhile, can confirm that he received a stone of goodwill, although the University of the Virgin Islands later received Apollo 11 stones for scientific research, said the conservative Chief Julio Encarnacion III.

In other states, although Gutheinz has recently hit the market. Baton Rouge's Advocate newspaper spotted Louisiana's Apollo 11 lunar rock in early August after a call from Gutheinz.

In Utah, the state history division had no record of the sample, but the Associated Press confirmed that it was stored at the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City.

The officials present will be able to exhibit it as part of the celebrations celebrating the anniversary of Apollo 11 next year, which Gutheinz hopes to see everywhere.

"The people of the world deserve this," he said. "They deserve to see something that our astronauts have accomplished and to be part of it."

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