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UTL MILK CITY – A strange thing happened after Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew came back from the moon with lunar rocks: most memories given to all US states have faded away. Now, after years of research, a former NASA investigator is getting closer to his goal of locating all 50's.
In recent weeks, two of the rocks that had disappeared after the 1969 mission were located in Louisiana and Utah, leaving only non-existent memories in New York and Delaware.
Lawyer and lunar rock chaser Joseph Gutheinz says it "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 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 reach the rocks and the dust in case they needed an emergency take-off."
The administration of President Richard Nixon has introduced the tiny lunar samples in the 50 states and 135 countries, but few have been officially registered and most have disappeared, said Gutheinz.
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 entered the archives of rocks collected by Armstrong and fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Gutheinz said many of them had lost track of them.
When Gutheinz began looking for them in 2002, he estimates that 40 states have lost track of the rocks.
"I think part of that was, we honestly believed that going back to the moon was going to be a regular event," Gutheinz said.
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 countries after the Apollo 17 mission, and many of them are also missing, 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 legally sold 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.
A lawyer in the Houston area, he is also a college instructor and asked for help from his students. They record their discoveries on 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 warehouse of military artefacts in Minnesota and with a former crab captain of the TV channel '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 not confirm that it received a stone of goodwill, although the University of the Virgin Islands later received Apollo 11 rocks for scientific research, said the Chief Curator Julio Encarnacion III.
In other states, although Gutheinz has recently hit the market. Baton Rouge's Advocate newspaper spotted the Apollo 11 Lunar Rock of Louisiana in early August after a call from Gutheinz.
In Utah, the history of the state 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 participate in it."
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