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NOT GOLD EXACTLY, BUT THE PAY & HUNT FEVER IS COMPARABLELA Times 10-27-07COLUMN ONE Chicken Little was right Jeff Cooper / For The Times SUCCESS: Steve Arnold finds another meteorite in a field near Haviland. He has found 33 space rocks in Kansas, making farmers who share the profits happy. And Steve Arnold is there to pick up the pieces of sky, in Kansas or Chile or Oman. Don't laugh: His meteorites are worth a bundle. By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 27, 2007 HAVILAND, KAN. -- Steve Arnold is driving the yellow Hummer in circles around a Kiowa County wheat field, towing an 18-foot-wide metal detector. For an hour, nothing but silence. Finally, the detector whines and Arnold slams the brakes. "That is so good," he says. Hunting click to enlarge There's a romantic notion of being able to have something from between Mars and Jupiter. — Darryl Pitt, Curator of a meteorite collectionArnold jumps out, pinpoints the location with a smaller detector and starts digging. The world-renowned meteorite hunter is hoping for a big score. He has had three false hits today, unearthing a bit of barbed wire, a fragment of a plow, a squashed Dr Pepper can. "What's the definition of insanity?" Arnold asks. "Doing the same thing over and over again." All over the world. He has dodged police in Oman, had his truck break down in a desert in Chile, and bicycled the streets of suburban Chicago holding a broomstick with a magnet tied to its end -- searching for space rock. But it was here in Kansas that he found the meteorite that would make him famous. In 2005, Arnold began to systematically search the meteorite-rich prairies of western Kansas. Within two weeks, he unearthed the world's biggest intact pallasite. Weighing 1,400 pounds, the pallasite -- the rarest, most sought-after type of meteorite, composed of iron streaked with dazzling crystals -- is believed to be worth between $600,000 and $1 million. It will be featured in the first all-meteorite auction, scheduled for this Sunday in New York. The world of space rocks attracts all sorts. Professionals like Arnold comb the tundra of Siberia and Norway and the deserts of South America. Nomads in the Sahara search for rocks to sell to avid collectors looking for the perfect piece of intergalactic debris. Some collectors are drawn to meteorites for purely aesthetic reasons -- the rocks can be startlingly colorful -- but many are also captivated by the scientific novelty of the pieces. "It's from outer space," said Darryl Pitt, who curates a major meteorite collection. Ten pieces from that collection will also be auctioned Sunday. "There's a romantic notion of being able to have something from between Mars and Jupiter." Unlike many meteorite mavens, Arnold is not in it for the science. "I'm a treasure hunter, not a scientist," he says repeatedly. Arnold, 41, grew up in a small town in eastern Kansas, and knew nothing about meteorites. What he did know was that he wanted to be his own boss. His parents operated their own businesses: his father, an accounting office; his stepmother, a bookstore. Arnold went to Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla. -- not for religious reasons but because he liked its business program. He met and married his wife, Qynne, at the school, and after graduation pressure-cleaned houses in Tulsa to make ends meet while trying to figure out what to do with his life. One day in 1992, he wandered into a Barnes & Noble and spotted a book on treasure hunting. In a chapter on finding buried caches of coins on old homesteads, the book advised checking historical records to locate areas where epidemics or drought wiped out the population. Arnold went to the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka and began to thumb through newspapers. In the yellowing pages, he found stories about farmers digging up meteorites. "I realized, 'Oh my God, these are treasure maps,' " Arnold said. He began driving to rural communities in Kansas and offering to buy meteorites from farmers. Then he sold them to retailers or collectors. As the years passed, he spent less time acting as a middleman and more time hunting the rocks himself. Meteorites are extraterrestrial debris from asteroids and comets that collide with the Earth. As the rocks fall through the atmosphere, the heat and pressure can mold them into odd shapes. Some land with a huge impact, creating enormous holes such as the Barringer crater in northern Arizona, which is nearly a mile wide and more than 500 feet deep. Treasure hunters like Arnold are generally on the prowl for meteorites that break up as they fall through the atmosphere and scatter across what is called a "strewn field." These are simplest to find in dry, flat places where the dark rocks are preserved and easy to spot, like the Great Plains or the basins of the American Southwest. In 1995 Arnold went to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, considered the driest place on the planet. He drove a rented truck for hours into the desert and got stuck in a sand drift. It took four hours for Arnold and his companions to free the truck by excavating limestone slabs to create a ramp. "Nothing ever gets him down," said Geoff Notkin, a science journalist and meteorite aficionado who accompanied Arnold on the Chile trip. "In 11 years of digging holes and getting lost and getting soaked, I've hardly ever seen him annoyed." Arnold took two other trips to Chile and also continued to hunt and trade domestically. He made enough money to buy a 19th century log cabin in northwest Arkansas, where he and Qynne home-school their two daughters. The family has joined him on a few of his excursions, including one to Chicago in 2003, when pieces of a meteorite showered the nearby suburbs. Arnold bought a bicycle at Kmart and cruised the streets, harvesting fragments of space rock from the gutters. He later sold the rocks for about $25,000. In 2005, Arnold and his wife traveled to Oman, a newly popular meteorite hunting ground. They scooped up 151 meteorites lying in plain sight in the desert. But when they got back to their hotel they were warned that police had been asking questions about meteorite hunters. The Arnolds drove back into the desert and hid the rocks. The next day they retrieved them and shipped them home and then left the country. Arnold still has no idea why police were looking for meteorite hunters -- he thinks they may have been looking for another group, but he'd prefer not to know. For years, though, Arnold's list of hunting grounds was topped by a less exotic place -- western Kansas. Ten percent of the meteorites found in the U.S. have come from that region, which was showered with debris when a huge meteor broke up in the atmosphere untold thousands of years ago. Homesteaders were the first to recognize the unusual richness of the land. Eliza Kimberly in the 1880s was convinced the heavy rocks shattering her family's plows were meteorites, and insisted on collecting them. She was proved right when she sold them to universities to pay off her mortgage. The homestead was promptly dubbed "the meteorite farm." Other farmers continued to occasionally dig up meteorites in the stretch of Kiowa County near the meteorite farm, between the towns of Haviland and Greensburg. Prospectors swept through the area and discovered a half-ton pallasite that Greensburg displayed next to its other municipal treasure, the world's largest hand-dug well. The town lined the highway with signs advertising its display. Arnold browsed the journals of meteorite hunters who had explored that stretch, and determined that the land wasn't as thoroughly searched as others believed. He didn't know how to comb such a vast area for buried meteorites until 2005, when he bumped into an Argentine hunter at a meteorite show in Denver. The South American told him about an extra-wide detector he used to search for buried rocks. Arnold drove through Greensburg on his way home from the show and decided to try his luck. He got permission from one farmer to search his land, in return for a share of any rocks found. Then he custom-ordered the giant detector from a German company and had it shipped to Kansas. The detector is a rectangular coil of wires sheathed in PVC piping; it shrieks when its regular pulse of energy is disrupted by an iron object. Arnold built a wooden platform, and attached wheels that he bought at Lowe's. He mounted the detector and began manually dragging the contraption through the field. Within three hours, he found a 280-pound meteorite. Two weeks later, he dug up the big pallasite. Word of Arnold's discovery resounded throughout the meteorite world. A team from the Houston Museum of Natural Science came to accompany him on digs. A crew from the Travel Channel followed him on others. He upgraded to using a tractor to tow his metal detector rig, then an ATV, and now his Hummer. He became a local celebrity. A few weeks after the big find, Arnold and his partner in the Kansas hunt, a San Antonio lawyer and meteorite fanatic named Phil Mani, invited farmers to a barbecue in Haviland and signed agreements with most of them to prospect their land. Haviland inaugurated an annual Meteorite Festival, holding a parade and displaying the big pallasite. "Steve brought the meteorites back into focus," said Steve Hewitt, city manager of Greensburg. "It had become -- well, everyone around here has found a meteorite or two. Steve just had the gung-ho to go out and look for more." Arnold has found 33 meteorites in Kansas, making farmers who share in the sales proceeds very happy. Milton and Wynona Ross' son found a meteorite in the 1980s and sold it for a decent sum, but Arnold's finds are bringing in more money than they expected. "They've been our best crop," joked Milton, 84. In May, a tornado flattened Greensburg and killed nine. It tore the roof off a small house Arnold had bought to use as his base of operations. Half of the town's population of 1,600 still has not returned, and most of those who have are living in government-issued trailers. Arnold and other meteorite enthusiasts helped raise $12,000 for Greensburg in a raffle of space rocks and memorabilia at a meteorite show last month in Denver. The town is hoping to build a museum about extreme weather and meteorites. To many Kansans, the two are intertwined. "People are intimately connected with the sky out there," said Max McCoy, an instructor at Emporia State University who is writing a book on Kansas, Arnold and meteorites. "The landscape is so big, the idea of death coming from the sky, whether it's fireballs or tornadoes, is understandable." The afternoon sky is Kansas-huge as Arnold begins to dig his fourth hole of the day. A freight train rolls by on the horizon. An oil pump nods up and down as the sun drifts below the line of the prairie. He is hopeful that after the previous false hits, an actual meteorite has set off the detector. He hasn't found any trash -- cloth, papers or any other sign that people buried garbage in the area. After about 10 minutes he excavates a 2-foot-deep hole and stops. "You know what?" Arnold says jokingly. "It's time for a breakfast break." He dashes back to his Hummer and grabs the Hostess fruit pie he bought that morning and washes it down with Coke from a 64-ounce plastic cup. Then he resumes digging. Moments later, his normally cheery face falls. "Rust," he mutters as he uncovers an orange-tinged chunk of dirt. Then his shovel hits metal. It appears to be another plow fragment. "OK," he says, "next." For every meteorite he discovers, he says, he finds 30 to 40 "meteorwrongs," as hunters call the false hits. Arnold fights the monotony by gnawing on Twizzlers and listening to REO Speedwagon or Rush Limbaugh on the Hummer's radio as he circles the fields. About 6 p.m., the metal detector screeches yet again. "That's pretty good -- considering I've said that four times [already] today," Arnold says as he halts the Hummer. He begins digging again. "You notice Steven Spielberg cut this boring stuff out of 'Indiana Jones,' " he says. The sun dips lower. He stops. His shovel has hit something. "We might have one," he says. Arnold switches to a plastic trowel. "Nothing like putting a big gash in the side of a meteorite to drop the value from $20,000 to $15,000," he says. Then he lies on his belly and scrapes away the last bit of dirt from the top of a meteorite. "Ah,  ," he says. "We've got ourselves a real one here." (Days later, he weighs the meteorite; it's 72 pounds and its estimated value is $30,000.)
But right now, as the meteorite lies mostly buried, size unknown, Arnold throws back his head and hollers in triumph. He says: "How much fun is this?" nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com |
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COINS IN AN OLD PENNSYLVANIA FARM HOUSEI COULDN'T find the story on the net version of the LA Rimes today, so I did a search for coins in an old house, and got this:Treasure trove of rare coins found in dilapidated home[PA][Est. worth 100K] The Tribune Democrat ^ | 26 Oct 2007 | RANDY GRIFFITH Jeff Bidelman already was dragging a huge bag of old coins when he noticed a hole in the wall of a dilapidated Windber home. “The woman said when she was a kid, there were always rumors that that’s where they threw money,” Bidelman said at his business, Rare Collectibles, in The Galleria in Richland Township. Within minutes, Bidelman and the former residents’ daughter discovered that the rumors were true. Bidelman found himself literally wading in old, valuable coins. “They think they are going to get (at least) $100,000,” Bidelman said. “I think they will probably get $200,000.” The home had been unoccupied for almost 20 years, and the former family members who were living there have died, Bidelman explained. Their children asked Bidelman to look through the home for items of value. “I was upstairs digging around,” Bidelman said. “I found a whole pile of coins.” Scooping them into a plastic bag, he had to drag the heavy load and was starting downstairs when he noticed a hole in the wall. “You don’t just have a hole in the wall,” he said. He asked the late owners’ daughter to explain the hole, and she recalled the family rumors from her youth. Bidelman quickly found the first-floor wall below the hole and began tapping near the floor. It sounded solid. “When I got to about teeth level, I heard, ‘chink, chink,’” he said. Bidelman opened the wall and the coins rushed out, “ballooning” under pressure. Coins that have been sorted so far date from 1826 through 1964 and include large cents and seated Liberty dimes. The coins have been removed from the old house and placed in secure locations. So far, Bidelman has sorted and cataloged coins with a face value of about $8,500. Value to collectors will be much more, Bidelman said, adding he is already putting some items on the popular Internet auction site eBay. There were several “large cent” coins, which were minted from 1793 to 1857. The face value is one cent, but Bidelman expects to get at least $20 each. The family asked Bidelman not to identify them or the location of the home, especially after reading recent news reports of a woman who allegedly tried to burglarize a Windber home while the family was attending a funeral. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOPICS: Miscellaneous; US: Pennsylvania KEYWORDS: coins; house; treasure -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Navigation: use the links below to view more comments. first 1-50, 51-52 next last -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Bidelman, owner of Rare Collectibles in The Galleria in Richland Township, holds one of the coins recovered from a long-vacant residence in Windber. 1 posted on 10/27/2007 3:25:19 PM PDT by BGHater [ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: BGHater Good thing they kept the house! 2 posted on 10/27/2007 3:29:40 PM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (Pray for, and support our troops(heroes) !! And vote out the RINO's!!) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: BGHater Lavere Redfield they weren’t, but not bad! 3 posted on 10/27/2007 3:31:50 PM PDT by Freedom4US [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: BGHater Nice find. I found three rifles and a WW2 era 1911 just over the eaves in our attic soon after we moved in. My guess is that the previous owner stashed them up there and forgot about them. Oh, well finder’s keepers. 4 posted on 10/27/2007 3:36:17 PM PDT by P8riot (I carry a gun because I can't carry a cop.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: P8riot I moved out of a house once and left Grandpa’s old Harrington and Richardson on the top shelf of the closet. It was a top break .38 short (I think) and the new occupants called me to come retrieve the pistol. I was pretty damn embarrassed. 9 posted on 10/27/2007 4:12:39 PM PDT by 2nd Bn, 11th Mar (The "P" in Democrat stands for patriotism.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: 2nd Bn, 11th Mar Yeah, but at least you got it back. I tried contacting the previous owner since the pistol was probably a family heirloom too, but he had just passed away, and his wife told me to keep the guns, she didn’t want the “nasty things”. Her loss. my gain. 11 posted on 10/27/2007 4:16:53 PM PDT by P8riot (I carry a gun because I can't carry a cop.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To U.S.S. Central America story linked below : http://archive.observernews.com/stories/ar...y/salvage.shtml 15 posted on 10/27/2007 4:36:04 PM PDT by Gum Shoe [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: poindexter They get a basis step-up if the owner is deceased. The real puzzle will be whose property the coins were. 16 posted on 10/27/2007 4:38:04 PM PDT by proxy_user [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Into the Vortex Its good to see something about Windber, I was born there many years ago. Moved away when I was about a third grader. 17 posted on 10/27/2007 4:40:49 PM PDT by depenzz (If we don't put an effort into creating what we want, we must then tolerate what we get) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 6 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: OrangeDaisy $8,500 face value. Mostly silver coins probably, would have a melt value around 10 times their face value in today dollars. But collectors will pay quite a bit more for certain dates and mintmarks. 18 posted on 10/27/2007 4:48:07 PM PDT by Freedom4US [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: stephenjohnbanker I once knew a guy in southern Michigan that worked in a very well paying factory. He never spent much of anything and even plowed up his entire city lawn and planted a garden every year. Every quarter the shop management would have to get on him for never cashing his checks because their books wouldn’t balance. He just horded them. When he died back in the late 70’s his family that wound up with his old house found over 100K in bills in his walls! 19 posted on 10/27/2007 4:50:01 PM PDT by Beagle8U (FreeRepublic -- One stop shopping ....... Its the Conservative Super WalMart for news .) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Beagle8U “When he died back in the late 70’s his family that wound up with his old house found over 100K in bills in his walls!” I used to lurk on a metal detector site and one guy told of a story where a fellow detectorist gave up metal hunting and would go to the outskirts of towns and find the old houses that had been abandoned and would find odds and ends left behind. One Saturday morning he showed up at the local cafe and his friend was sitting in the lot with his car. He motioned to the guy to come over, opened up the trunk, showed him two suitcases stuffed with old bills and drove off into the sunset never to be seen again. A fun story to whet the appetite - and perhaps its even true! 30 posted on 10/27/2007 5:43:50 PM PDT by geopyg (Don't wish for peace, pray for Victory.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: geopyg This was a true story and the guy stuffed his walls with cash. He was quite a nut with no real plan for anything other than hording cash for some unknown reason. He was divorced and never spent a dime of his money. He had no will or any dreams that ever shared with anyone. 31 posted on 10/27/2007 5:59:54 PM PDT by Beagle8U (FreeRepublic -- One stop shopping ....... Its the Conservative Super WalMart for news .) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 30 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Beagle8U “When he died back in the late 70’s his family that wound up with his old house found over 100K in bills in his walls!” Nice  in the late 70’s!
34 posted on 10/27/2007 6:33:49 PM PDT by stephenjohnbanker (Pray for, and support our troops(heroes) !! And vote out the RINO's!!) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Freedom4US; OrangeDaisy; BGHater “Mostly silver coins probably, would have a melt value around 10 times their face value in today dollars.” ....I noticed the coins were dated up to 1965....those dimes, quarters,halfs and dollars were 90% silver...in 1966 the govt. started debasing the coinage using silver clad copper....last week the exchange rate varied between 12 and 13 times face value....the coins could well go higher if sold later....gold is way up now and has been known to “pull” silver. 37 posted on 10/27/2007 7:42:02 PM PDT by STONEWALLS [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: STONEWALLS I see one major bullion buyer online paying $10.76 per dollar of face value right now. That’s the “melt” price apart from any collector value some coins may have. For those that don’t know, $1000 face value pre-65 dimes, quarters and halves equal 725 ounces of silver when new. Dealers typically allow for 715 ounces on account of wear on heavily circulated coins. Notice that four quarters or two halves don’t equal the content of a dollar - 770 ounces per $1000, a result of a kind of mint seignorage. All of this is academic now, leading little kids to wonder why a dime is smaller than a nickle or a penny. Many adults don’t know either, presumably. 38 posted on 10/27/2007 8:04:16 PM PDT by Freedom4US [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 37 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Freedom4US I don’t know the IRS rules, but the coins are legal tender. Technically they could, for example, buy a dime’s worth of candy with the dime. Seems like the basis ought to be the face value. As they sell them for profit, they’ll have to pay taxes on what they make over and above face value. 40 posted on 10/27/2007 10:07:27 PM PDT by OrangeDaisy [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: Tribune7 I never thought of using a wall as a piggy bank before 41 posted on 10/27/2007 11:36:59 PM PDT by Mo1 ( http://www.gohunter08.com) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 39 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: OrangeDaisy I’m almost certain the IRS position is that the fair market value is the tax basis. A nice find for the heirs. Proof that “you can’t take it with you”, ( I’m just trying to keep it while I’m here, though). I used to collect coins when I was a kid, rummaging through old pennies in change. My grandmother gave me a very worn silver dollar, that she had saved from the depression years. She explained, along with that dollar, what everyone went through in those years. That woman knew how to stretch money. The stories she and others have should make almost anyone shameful of how good we have it today. But the “hole in the wall” folks would have done better if they had provided their heirs with say, Intel stock. The IRS would have been happier too. 42 posted on 10/28/2007 3:33:44 AM PDT by Freedom4US [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 40 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: P8riot his wife told me to keep the guns, she didn’t want the “nasty things” Well, then.......fair enough, honor satisfied. You aren't required to enlighten her about the hundreds of dollars each piece is worth. My elderly uncle has had a Luger he brought home from the Big Show (he was in the Big Red One, his was an authentic war trophy, not a postwar pickup), that one day will go to the kids. I've given my cousins an idea what those guns were going for in fair-to-good condition in a fair-sized gun store in my home town, and that was 10 years ago now. I was surprised to see Luger made an American edition in the 30's.....receiver stamp featured the superchicken from the Great Seal picked out in white, damn nice looking. Wonder if a Wehrmacht officer carried it during the War? Real surprise to see it alongside all the other special-issue models, in this or that caliber, of the basic Luger. 45 posted on 10/28/2007 4:27:46 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: lentulusgracchus Kinda like this one? It's a 1941 Mauser. All numbers match. Picked up by the father of a friend of mine in Dec 1944 just outside of Bastogne. He (my friend) passed away a while ago, and din't have anyone to pass it along to so he willed it to me. 46 posted on 10/28/2007 5:06:15 AM PDT by P8riot (I carry a gun because I can't carry a cop.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 45 | View Replies ] 47 posted on 10/28/2007 5:19:07 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 42 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To: lentulusgracchus Those coins are beautiful, it must be said. They are a reflection of the times and circumstances. Ancient Greek coins are another example. But at best (usually) they only remain static at some level with respect to purchasing power. That means a hell of a lot, finding an old checkbook inside the walls wouldn’t be quite the same thing. Worthless, in fact. To: P8riot That is a beautiful piece. Hang on to it. I once lusted after an Erma I saw at a gun show (that's the baby Luger, downsized but otherwise a good copy), think it was in .380, most of them were in .22LR. I just admired the action and thought it would be nice to own a pistol with that famous grasshopper action. I didn't bring funds with me (to keep myself out of trouble), and I've had slight pangs of regret ever since. Oh, well. 49 posted on 10/28/2007 6:31:25 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 46 | View Replies ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |