So, my latest foray into television documentary land premiered on May 10. For my co-host and expedition buddy, Steve Arnold, the Meteorite Men debut was the culmination of almost seventeen months of work. We have done a lot of other television—Discovery Channel, Wired Science for PBS, Cash & Treasures for The Travel Channel, Naked Earth for National Geographic, and so on—but this was a first for us, our very own big budget one-hour special, devoted almost entirely to our favorite topic: scouring the earth’s surface for fallen space rocks. And there was some hard science and gemology thrown in for good measure.

Filming "Meteorite Men" on location in Kansas

The ratings were good, and Science Channel has now aired the pilot about 15 times. Once or twice, I turned on the TV just to watch the opening credits. It is fun and slightly disorienting to see yourself live on the box. Well, I say I was only going to watch the opening credits, but don’t you know, I ended up sitting there and watching the whole thing over again anyway. I found it difficult to turn off my own show and go do something else.

That one-hour episode had always been intended as a pilot. Since it was was well received we hope more episodes will follow. In fact, I receive emails or phone calls from my friends, colleagues, and customers, pretty much daily, along the lines of: “Any news about the show?”

Looking for weird stuff in weird places. It's what we do. Camo is optional.

Quality adventure television is complicated, time consuming, and expensive to produce. Although I’ve been involved in similar projects in the past, I was amazed by the attention to detail and the level of perfectionism demonstrated by our production company, LMNO,  through the long months of development. I am a perfectionist, and I do appreciate that quality in others.

What will happen if Meteorite Men goes to series? Well, Steve and I will have to come up with a super-secret list of places where we can go and hopefully find meteorites. Actually, we have already compiled such a thing and believe me a lot of people want to know what is on that list.

The trick is to pick sites that are interesting in terms of geography, scenery, or history (or all three), where we also have a decent chance of finding space rocks. As Steve is fond of saying: “You can’t go to the meteorite hunting aisle of your favorite mega-mart” to get that kind of information. We have to figure it out on our own, using knowledge accumulated through years of research and adventuring.

Big country

In order to maximize our production budget and “put every dollar up on the screen,” as some TV and movie makers like to say, we may take Meteorite Men on the road, and film a series of episodes back-to-back. That would cut down on all kinds of expenses, including air fares, vehicle rentals, and travel days for the crew.

So, here comes the question: If such a thing were to happen, would the Logical Lizard’s esteemed readers enjoy an exclusive “on the road” account of the making of a TV adventure series? Speak up please!

Photographs by Geoffrey Notkin and Caroline Palmer © Aerolite Meteorites. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission.

In my professional life as a meteorite specialist I frequently interact with curious and friendly members of the public who believe they might have found a space rock. Authentic meteorites are about as rare a thing as you can acquire: less common than gold, diamonds, or even emeralds, so the chance of somebody stumbling across one by accident is very small indeed. But it does happen on occasion. One of the things my company does is assist people who have found, or think they have found, a meteorite.

In an average year we will receive between 800 and 1,000 such inquiries. About 0.8% of those will result in the identification of a real meteorite. In other words, somebody contacts us with a genuine find roughly every 15 months. In order to reduce the enormous amount of time we spend answering routine questions along the lines of: “Are meteorites radioactive” (no, they are not), and listening to interminable stories about how “A big meter burned down my great uncle’s barn in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and ought seven,” we cleverly devised a detailed and comprehensive online guide that tells people how to determine if they have found a rock from space.

The plan backfired.

The Aerolite Guide to Meteorite Identification became such a popular and widely visited resource that we now receive more inquiries than ever. Although I do believe in the basic goodness of humanity, it amazes me how otherwise courteous and intelligent people cannot, or will not, follow the simplest of instructions. On our ID page, in big red bold capital letters, it states: “WE DO NOT ACCEPT PHONE CALLS ABOUT METEORITE IDENTIFICATION” and “THE COMPANY TELEPHONE NUMBER IS FOR SALES INQUIRIES ONLY. WE CANNOT IDENTIFY YOUR SUSPECTED METEORITE OVER THE TELEPHONE.” I go on to state, gently, that we are very busy with expeditions, research, writing, photography, television work, and so on, and would people please just email us a photo of their strange rock first. And yet, with great frequency, individuals who have clearly read that page call me anyway. Occasionally, if I am having a very bad day, I might ask if the caller has, in fact, studied the meteorite identification guide on my website. When they answer yes, I might go on to say: “And did you read the part about not calling us to ask questions about identification?” That is usually met with a stunned silence.

A genuine iron meteorite that really did fall from the sky. Photograph by Suzanne Morrison © Aerolite Meteorites

I appreciate that in the modern age of instant gratification there is an urgent need, among some, to know immediately if they have unearthed a million-dollar space rock (on the ID page it says, by the way: “Despite what you may have heard on television, or read on the internet, your meteorite is not worth a million dollars, sorry”). I will now own up and say that we are polite, nearly all of the time, and do our best to help, educate, and inform. We were all beginners once.

Yesterday, I received an email inquiry from a lady who told me that her husband had witnessed the June 23 Tucson fireball. He had seen it from so very close, she claimed, that he had felt the heat of the fireball on his skin. It sounds exciting but it is nonsense. As recently discussed in my review of the NBC miniseries Meteor, the flames from a fireball or shooting star go out miles up in the atmosphere. So, it would literally be impossible for someone to feel that heat, unless they happened to be . . . say . . . falling out of an aircraft or an experimental balloon, seven miles up in the sky, at just the precise moment that a fireball flashed by. I tried to explain this in a patient and friendly manner to the lady. When she told me that her husband had actually seen the meteorite fall to earth as well (highly unlikely), I invited her to email us a photo, which she kindly did. I inspected the picture, as did my staff geologist, who exclaimed: “What the hell is that?”

Not a meteorite!

We think it might possibly be a partially melted tile from the bottom of an old furnace or smelter, or maybe a slab of iron oxide such as hematite. The truth is, sometimes we just cannot tell what kind of rock it is from a photo—but we can tell what it is not. There is absolutely no way, in this universe, or any alternate universes we know of, that it is a meteorite.

I dutifully wrote back to the lady, told her it was not the real thing, and thanked her for her time. Shortly thereafter, I received a terse reply:

“My husband saw it land O.k! So don’t tell me it’s not a meteorite! I’ll just find another buyer!
Or take it to a museum or the center at ASU!”

So many exclamation points!

And doesn’t this just beautifully illustrate a failing within the human psyche? We are all quick to ask those who are in-the-know for free advice: friends, doctors, lawyers, plumbers and, in this particular case a meteorite specialist. But if the answer we receive is not what we want to hear, then we think: “Liar!” or “Idiot!” or “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Today it is back to business as normal in the office. A few more (and very polite, I might add) identification inquiries came in this morning. We did recently receive an example of the real thing and will be sharing that story with you at a later date. In the meantime, it is probably only about another 13 months until the next genuine space rock arrives in our mailbox.

It may sound like the tag line for a not very engaging fantasy film, but read on. Some years ago I journeyed from New York to Ohio, by road, with my great friend Allan Lang, a noted paleontologist, meteorite collector and founder of the Langheinrich Fossil Preserve. Our destination was a private, working quarry in Sylvania, Ohio.

The Sylvania fossil quarry

During the Middle Devonian age (that’s about 390 million years ago to you Creationists) the area around present-day Toledo was underwater. The remains of untold billions of tiny sea creatures today form a silica-rich shale that preserves, in incredible detail, the fossilized hard parts of long-vanished aquatic creatures. The Sylvania quarries are famous for their trilobite fossils, in particular the spectacular jointed marine arthropod Phacops rana. Something about the silica preserves the trilobites’ exoskeletons in exquisite microscopic detail—a rich and shiny brown/black pasted against the dusty gray shale matrix. Trilobites did not have soft lenses for eyes, as we do. Their eyes were made of calcite, and they are the only creatures in the history of life as we know it, to have gazed upon their own world through crystalline lenses.

The fossilized remains of a 400 million year-old Phacops rana trilobite

Dr. Richard Fortey, author of Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution explains:

“Look into a crystal of Iceland spar and you can see the secret of the trilobite’s vision. For trilobites used clear calcite crystals to make lenses in their eyes; in this they were unique . . . trilobites alone have used the transparency of calcite as a means of transmitting light. The trilobite eye is in continuity with the rest of its shelly armour. It sites on top of the cheek of the animal, an en suite eyeglass, tough as clamshell.”

Quarrying is big business in Sylvania, but fossils are not officially part of the local commerce. Unfortunately for people like me, the quarries are primarily interested in producing thousands of tons of aggregates for road building. Giant cranes and tractors munch up the layers of rock, along with all those beautifully preserved trilobites. For various reasons including safety, insurance, and the demands of heavy duty industrial production, the quarries are off-limits to fossil enthusiasts. You can’t really blame the owners. If a star-struck fossil fanatic falls from the top of a hundred-foot knife-sharp shale ridge, it kinda puts a damper on the work flow.

Heavy equipment at the Ohio quarry

Despite numerous obstacles, and after some years of sustained effort, Allan managed to get a special dispensation that allowed a small band of us hardcore fossil nuts access to the undisturbed quarry face. What a spectacular treat it was! Only a handful of people have ever been able to walk up to that wall of fossil-rich rock and dig through it for mementos of an ancient sea.

The author (above right) with celebrated paleontologist Allan Lang. I thought our color coded hardhats were quite chic.

During our first two days in the field it rained continuously. On the third the sun came out and—with rays reflecting endlessly from the light colored rock at the bottom of an open pit—it became unbearably hot. I was doing pick axe duty, smashing up big blocks of shale looking for trilobites, or “bugs” as the pros call them. I got a little grumpy. I hit one oversize block a little too hard, at a weird angle, and it shattered. To my horror, the broken faces exposed a superb and brilliantly preserved trilobite, its head dismembered by my axe. Part of it was on this block of stone, part of it on that one, and . . . so on.

Paleontologist and master prep artist Leon Theissen examines the remnants of my big trilobite immediately after I atomized it with the pick axe

Leon Theissen, one of the world top fossil preparators (a specialist who cleans fossils, removes extraneous rock, and sometimes carries out repairs) happened to be on the team. “Don’t worry Geoff,” he said with a confident and reassuring smile. “I can probably put it back together for you.”

"Frankenstein's triolbite" after some TLC from Leon and Zarko

To my considerable amazement, he did. Leon, Allan, and Zarko Ljuboja—another highly talented prep artist—had combined forces, repaired this marvelous fossil, and presented it to my on my birthday. I call it “Frankenstein’s trilobite” and it is indeed a prized possession. A reminder both that even the most horribly damaged things can sometimes be fixed, and that it’s okay to take it easy with the pick axe. Even when grumpy.

All photographs by Geoffrey Notkin © Geoffrey Notkin. All rights reserved. No reproduction without written permission.