COURTESY OF AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Arrival of the 34-ton iron mass at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
The biggest meteorite of all, of course, is the one that “got away.” In 1916, a captain in the Mauritanian army was taken by a native guide, secretly and at night, to the site of a colossal iron meteorite located in the dunes of the Adrar desert, in the far western reaches of the vast Sahara. The officer described the mass as measuring 100 meters (over 300 feet) by 40 meters (over 120 feet), with the third dimension hidden by the sand dunes. According to him, the mass “... jutted up in the midst of sand dunes that were covered by a desert plant, the sba, and it had the form of a compact, unfissured parallelopiped. The visible portion of the surface was vertical, dominating in the manner of a cliff, the wind-blown sand that was scooped away from the base of the mass so that the summit overhung; and that portion exposed to eolian [wind] erosion was polished like a mirror.”
The captain, at the request of his uneasy guide, returned from his hurried excursion without taking notes or making a map. But he did bring back a small 10-pound fragment of iron which he had found lying on top of the giant mass. This small fragment later proved to be a genuine meteorite, and is the only known specimen of the famous Adrar mass. It is preserved at present in the Museum of Natural History at Paris.
J. OTIS WHEELOCK PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Man and boy carrying off the famous “purloined” Willamette meteorite on a homemade dolly car with wheels of tree-trunk sections. Note hole piercing this 14-ton chunk of iron.
What has been called a conspiracy of silence among the natives of the Adrar area and the inhospitable nature of the region itself have successfully preserved the secret of the location of the enormous metallic mass described by the captain. The native guide died, apparently of poison, and although many inhabitants of the region are no doubt familiar with the whereabouts of the mass (whatever it is!), those questioned have consistently denied knowledge of its very existence. All recent attempts, not only by military but even by scientific expeditions, to relocate the gigantic metallic mass have failed. The whole Adrar case remains an intriguing puzzle to be unraveled, it is hoped, by future generations of meteorite hunters.
Another “lost” meteorite is one composed of stone and iron. The Port Orford, Oregon, stony-iron (as it is now named) was originally found in 1859 by a U.S. geologist who was engaged in a survey of what were then the Oregon and Washington Territories. According to him, the mass was quite irregular in shape and “4 or 5 feet [of it] projected from the surface of the mountain,” while it was “about the same number of feet in width and perhaps 3 or 4 feet in thickness.” He broke off a small fragment of it (far smaller than the one taken from Adrar) and packed this specimen away with his collection of rock and mineral samples. Years later, the geological collection was cataloged and analyzed in the East. At that time, the fragment collected in 1859 was found to be a piece of a stony-iron meteorite. After that, scientists and others made many attempts to rediscover the main mass of the large Port Orford meteorite, all of them unsuccessful. Today the sum total of material recovered from this stony-iron amounts to 25 grams in the U.S. National Museum, about 4 grams in the Natural History Museum of Vienna, and a few tiny specks in the Museum of the Geological Survey of India.
The Red River, Texas, iron is still another famous meteorite. It was originally discovered by Pawnee and Hietan Indians, and a group of them took a party of traders, in 1808, to the site. Two years later, two rival parties, each led by a man who had been a member of the 1808 trading expedition, began a search for the meteorite. The members of one of the two parties were from Nacogodoches, Texas. They reached the meteorite first but had left home so hurriedly on their eager hunt that they were not properly prepared to move so large a mass. They went away from the site to get horses and a wagon, after they had laboriously hidden the meteorite under a huge flat stone, to prevent the other party from finding it. The members of the other party, hailing from Natchitoches, Louisiana, set out better prepared. After a lengthy hunt, they finally found the hidden meteorite. Using tools they had the foresight to bring, they built a truck wagon and drove away with their prize. Eventually, the Red River meteorite, weighing 1,635 pounds, became a part of the collection at Yale University. But two other, smaller, masses of the same metal, known in the early days to the Pawnees and a few traders, remain still undiscovered in the Red River area.