More than 40 years ago now, in 1977, someone entered the Delaware State Museum in Dover during normal visiting hours, broke into a showcase containing moon dust from the Apollo 11 artifacts mission priceless.

"It was reported to the police at the time, and it has not been seen since," said Jim Yurasek, spokesman for the Delaware Historical and Cultural Affairs Division. "Unfortunately, we did not hear anything."

Approaching the 50th Anniversary of the Appollo 11 Space Mission, the lawyer and lunar rock chaser, Joseph Gutheinz, is looking for the missing moon dust from Delaware.

The strange thing is that it was not the only flight. 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 or been stolen, Gutheinz said.

Now, after years of research, the former NASA investigator is getting closer to his goal of locating all 50's.

"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."

Nixon had personally offered the moon dust to Delaware in 1969. This and a small Delaware state flag carried on the moon on Appollo 11 were covered with plastic, attached to a plaque and on display at the Delaware State Museum .

Moon dust was stolen on September 22, 1977. An employee of the museum discovered the theft and police found two of the four nails used to secure the plastic cover to the plate on the floor, according to media reports.

Although the crime took place four decades ago, Gutheinz is determined to solve it. And there may be hope.

In recent weeks, two lunar rocks that had disappeared after the 1969 mission were located in Louisiana and Utah, leaving only unexplained memories in New York and Delaware.

When Gutheinz began looking for them in 2002, he estimates that 40 states have 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. Of the Apollo 11 rocks handed over to other countries, about 70% are not counted, he added. .

The US government also sent a second set of good-looking moonstones to states and other countries after the Apollo 17 mission, and although many of them are also absent, Delaware has not confirmed it. Thursday.

"We have a rock on an Apollo mission," he said. "We do not introduce it anymore."

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.

Now a lawyer in the Houston area, 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.

Most of the Apollo 11 rocks were found in unexpected places: with former governors of West Virginia and Colorado, in a warehouse of military artifacts in Minnesota and with a former crab captain from the TV channel "Deadliest Catch" in Alaska.

In New York, state museum officials have no record of Apollo 11 rock in that state. 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, however, 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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This story contains information originally reported by the author of the Associated Press, Lindsay Whitehurst. Contact Jessica Bies at (302) 324-2881 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jessicajbies.

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