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Moon rocks embedded in acrylic and mounted on a wooden plate at the Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City, Utah. A former NASA investigator who has spent more than a decade following tracks of missing lunar rocks is getting closer to his goal of finding the 50 lunar samples donated to the United States after Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. (Rick Bowmer / AP)
A strange thing happened after Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 crew came back from the moon with lunar rocks: Many memories given to all US states have disappeared. 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 disappeared after the 1969 mission were located in Louisiana and Utah, leaving only New York and Delaware with unexplained rocks.
Lawyer and lunar rock chaser Joseph Gutheinz says it "blows his mind," that the rocks have not been carefully documented 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."
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, on September 22, 1977, the rock was stolen from its state museum. The police were contacted, but she was never found.
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 landing on the moon, Apollo 17, in 1972.
Authentic moonstones are considered national treasures and can not be sold legally in the United States, said Gutheinz.
A lawyer near Houston, Texas, he is also a college instructor and has asked for help from his students. They record their discoveries on moon gems discovered in a database.
"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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