U.S. President Richard Nixon gave moon rocks collected by Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions to 135 countries as a token of American goodwill. While some hold pride of place in museums and scientific institutions, many others are unaccounted for — they have either gone missing, were stolen or even destroyed over the decades.
A list was compiled from research done by Joseph Gutheinz Jr, a retired NASA special agent known as the “Moon Rock Hunter,” his students, and collectSPACE, a website which specialises in space history.
Both the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 moon rocks presented to perpetually war-wracked Afghanistan have vanished.
One of the moon rocks destined for Cyprus was never delivered.
Honduras’s Apollo 17 moon rock was recovered by Gutheinz and Bob Cregger, a U.S. Postal Service agent, in a 1998 undercover sting operation baptized “Operation Lunar Eclipse.”
It had been sold to a Florida businessman, Alan Rosen, for $50,000 by a Honduran Army Colonel. Rosen tried to sell the rock to Gutheinz for $5 million. It was seized and eventually returned to Honduras.
Ireland’s moon rock was on display in Dublin’s Dunsink Observatory, which was destroyed in a 1977 fire. Debris from the observatory — including the moon rock — ended up in landfill.
The rocks given to then Libyan leader Colonel Moamer Kadhafi have vanished.
