Washington, February 04: An out-of-this world rock has become the centre of a down-to-earth dispute over who its rightful owner should be.
The tennis ball-sized meteorite plummeted through the roof of a Virginia medical office just after dusk on January 18, the same time as people reported seeing a fireball in the sky.
It plunged through the ceiling of an examination room and landed near the spot where a doctor had been sitting a short while earlier.
“I’m the most likely person to be sitting in that place where it hit,” Dr Marc Gallini said. “It just wasn’t my time, I guess.”
He and fellow practitioner Dr Frank Ciampi say their first thought was to give the rare find to the Smithsonian Institution, which offered $5 000 for it. Within days, it was sent to the National Museum of Natural History for safekeeping.
The doctors are worried, though, that their long-time landlords plan to stake their own claim to the space rock. The collectors market for meteorites can be lucrative.
Gallini, who has run his family practice in Virginia, since 1978, said he notified his property owner, Erol Mutlu, of plans to hand the object over to the Smithsonian, which holds the world’s largest museum collection of meteorites. Gallini says he got Mutlu’s permission.
Later in the week, though, Mutlu sent the doctors an e-mail warning that his brother and fellow landlord Deniz Mutlu was going to the Smithsonian to retrieve the rock, Gallini said.
—Agencies