Former NASA Special Investigator and college professor Joseph Gutheinz is on a mission. He set out years ago to recover the missing “Goodwill Moon Rocks” that were given to all 50 states and more than 100 countries by the Nixon administration about four decades ago as part of a good-will gesture to share America’s great aerospace achievements with the world.

West Virginia's Goodwill Moon Rock (WV Division of Culture and History)

Each state received two plaques – one commemorating the Apollo 11 moon landing, and another for the final Apollo 17 moon mission. Some estimates put these lunar samples’ value at $5 million dollars each so it is hard to believe that they were largely forgotten about, until NASA discovered some of them on the black market.

Gutheinz recalls how it all started when he was still working at NASA, “In 1998, I went undercover in a sting operation known as Operation Lunar Eclipse. The purpose of the undercover operation was to acquire people that were selling bogus moon rocks, to seek them out, and arrest them. What happened in 1998 is someone came to us with a real moon rock, and it was the Honduras Goodwill Moon Rock. After two months of negotiations we finally acquired that moon rock in a vault in Miami.”

Joe tells me that 215 of the 270 total rocks given out are missing, and today challenges each of his students to track down a missing moon rock. Sandy Shelton is one of those students, and her mission was a success. After posting an article in a West Virginia newspaper, Sandy was contacted by retired dentist Robert Conner, who had been keeping the state Goodwill rock in a box in his garage and recently a desk drawer for years. He came across it when going through the personal effects of his late brother. Conner recalls, “It wasn’t something I went out of my way to acquire. It wasn’t something I would take out and look at – it was something that was in a box that I would bump into from time to time, and I’d say, ‘I should do something about that’, and put it back in the box and go onto other things.”

Robert Conner shows where he kept the moon rock

While Conner doesn’t know exactly how his brother came into the rock, he told Prof.Gutheinz that his brother was a business partner of former Gov. Arch Moore, who apparently took the moon rock at the conclusion of his term of office. Today, the West Virginia Goodwill moon rock sits in the state museum in Charleston.

Joe Gutheinz poses with a NASA cap and prop rock

Gutheinz is not resting on his laurels. An enthusiastic man, Joe is determined to do his part in securing the legacy of our nation’s space program, even if it’s by returning a tiny rock to its rightful owners, “NASA is embedded in my heart. I’ve met many of the astronauts, including some of the astronauts that have walked on the moon. This is something special; we only had 12 people in the history of this planet ever walk on the moon. These people brought back 842 pounds of moon rock and dusts from that far off body in the sky. Now, most of those moon rocks that they brought back and we gave away are missing. I think that deprives the children of this planet of something special.”

If you think you have a Goodwill Moon Rock, or have information on the whereabouts of one, please leave a comment below, or contact the website: www.collectspace.com (who is working with Prof. Gutheinz on the recovery)