On July 20, 2002, about 33  years after Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon,  astronaut hopeful Thad Roberts took his first steps into an Italian  restaurant in Orlando, Florida.

And while that sounds less impressive, this NASA intern was about to  make history in his own way … by completing the biggest heist  that the space agency had ever seen. By the way, you like the  vibe in here?

It’s very good. He already had the goods. All he  needed to do was complete the sale.

Inside that restaurant, Roberts and  two accomplices met the relatives of a Belgian mineral collector  who had agreed to pay $100,000 for roughly 100 grams of  moon rocks Roberts had stolen from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The group talked, agreed to  terms, then headed to the hotel where the thieves had stored the loot. But as soon as they entered the parking  lot, FBI agents swarmed around them.

Roberts and his crew weren’t  sure yet what had gone wrong, but they were in a lot of trouble. This story is about more than the  infamous Roberts heist, though. Over the years, hundreds of moon rocks  from the Apollo missions have vanished.

Some of them due to negligence, others due to political assassinations, others just plain theft. And around the same time that Roberts  was scheming to steal lunar samples from the Johnson Space Center, another man there was devoting his life to getting them back. NASA Special agent Joseph Gutheinz  was investigating the sale of fake moon rocks when he discovered a  thriving black market for the real thing.

His career tracking down those  rocks would uncover stolen and misplaced pieces of the moon around the world. This is the story of an unlikely  group of villains and heroes who, for their own reasons, became  obsessed with a few grey pebbles. And as it turns out, those  pebbles have a lot to teach us not just about the moon, but ourselves. [♪ INTRO] Luna.

Selene. Aunt Debbie. Whatever you call it, the  moon has been our planet’s constant companion for about  four and a half billion years.

And throughout history, we’ve pondered  what it was and how it came to be. But it wasn’t until 1610 … when Galileo  Galilei used one of the first telescopes that we could start to answer those questions. Galileo’s sketches revealed a barren, dry, and airless world covered  in mountains and craters.

There were no oceans or living inhabitants … at least none that left a mark on the surface. But while telescopes helped  reveal what the Moon was not, they didn’t help much with  figuring out what it was. “We had a very poor understanding  of what the moon was made of. Had almost no information about it.” That’s Professor Sara Russell, the  leader of the planetary materials group at the Natural History Museum in London. “One of the great mysteries  was how the moon got there, and there were lots of theories.

There was a theory that it could  have separated away from the Earth just by spontaneously, by them spinning around. It could have been a captured  asteroid, but no one really knew.” To decide between those theories, and  answer other questions about the Moon, scientists needed to learn about its composition. But there was only so much they could glean from more than 360,000 kilometers away.

The Apollo missions changed all of that. I mean, yes, one of the reasons 12 NASA  astronauts bounced around on the Moon was to stick it to the Soviet Union. But from 1969 to 1972, Apollo  astronauts also completed a suite of scientific objectives … including collecting  rock samples from the lunar surface.

And when they came back to  Earth, so did those samples. Roughly 2200 of them, weighing  382 kilograms in total. “That's like a room full of  rocks. It's a lot of material.

As well as the kind of big rocks that  were brought back, there's also a lot of what's called regolith, which is the fine  grain material on the surface of the moon. There's some rock cores as well. It's a proper geology collection  that samples the whole diversity of the places  where the astronauts visited.

It turns out that the Moon’s  geology, at least the bits that the Apollo astronauts visited,  is a lot less complex than Earth’s. “There's what's called the Highland rock. And when you look up to the moon on a clear night, that's the white stuff that  covers most of the moon. And that's made of a rock called Anorthosite.

And we think this is the oldest rock on the moon.” “And then the dark splodges  that you can see on the moon, that's a different kind of rock called basalt, and these formed later when  there were big impacts into the surface of the moon that triggered re  melting and resurfacing of those areas.” “But then a lot of the lunar rocks  have had quite a complicated history from being affected by  being impacted all the time. So a lot of the rocks are mixtures of different sort of rocks that have been jumbled together.” Samples of the Moon might not make for  the most attractive rock collection, but they are critical for scientific research. Remote data from telescopes and orbiting  probes gives us the general idea, but each rock sample offers an  opportunity to study the lunar surface on a fine scale, and paint a much more  precise picture of the Moon’s composition, geologic processes, and history.

As a result, NASA treats all of its  moon rocks with the utmost reverence. Around three quarters of all  the Apollo samples are stored at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Most of the rest are kept at a  facility in White Sands, New Mexico.

But at the JSC, the rocks are  kept in what’s known as the Lunar Sample Laboratory  Facility, inside Building 31N. This essentially windowless room was  built to withstand most major weapons. And because it’s in Houston, it’s  also watertight and hurricane proof!

Inside the Laboratory, the rocks are  surrounded by inert nitrogen gas, and are kept inside sealed glove cabinets, so that they can be handled without the  Earth’s atmosphere contaminating them. Anything or anyone that wants to enter  has to be thoroughly cleaned, first. And all of this is kept behind a strict  security system that requires two people to open the door, similar to the  safeguards behind nuclear missile launches.

As such, the Lunar Sample  Laboratory at JSC is considered as secure as any federal  reserve bank, or Fort Knox. So if you’re a scientist who wants to get your hands on a moon rock, it’s a whole process. “One of the glorious things about the Johnson  Space Center curation facility is that they do allow and invite  researchers all around the world to to apply for their materials,  to use for their research, you have to write a little proposal to  say what you're going to do and how much you need and what the effect will be, and  what the outcomes of your project will be. But then they consider your  request and and as a result, there are pieces of Apollo rocks  that are in labs across the world” Of course, NASA isn’t about to hand out  samples to anybody who asks for them.

Now if you’re a scientist lucky  enough to get a lunar rock to work on, you have to take as much care as NASA itself, including locking it up in  your own vault for safekeeping. And after you’ve finished with your  experiments, NASA wants their samples back. “You absolutely do not get to  keep it at the end of your study, you wrap it up very carefully and you  send it back to the curation center. Yeah, there's no, there's no souvenirs.” But despite all of the security and  protocols, the allure of owning a moon rock … or making money by selling them  … is occasionally, apparently, just too much for some to resist.

Thad Roberts was a model student  right up until he wasn’t. Born into a Mormon family in Utah,  he was disowned by his parents and the church as a young man. He married his high school sweetheart Kaydee, and was determined to make a life for himself.

At 23, he enrolled at the University of Utah to study geology, physics, and geophysics. And while he was there, he ran the  university’s astronomical society and volunteered at Utah’s  Museum of Natural History. He raised thousands of dollars  in a charity bike ride, and had his private pilot’s  licence and SCUBA qualifications.

With such an impressive resume,  it was little wonder that in 2000, he was accepted into NASA’s prestigious  co-operative education program This initiative gave interns three  so-called ‘tours’ at Johnson Space Center between continuing their studies, and  gave them exposure to some of the work that NASA scientists do, as well as  opportunities for future employment. Many applicants, including  Roberts, aspired to be astronauts, and saw the program as a way  to get a foot in the door. But that made it highly competitive.

The acceptance rate at that  time was only around 6%. By all accounts, Roberts thrived  during his co-op experience. During his first two tours at JSC,  he flexed his geological muscles, learning how to prepare meteorites  and terrestrial rocks for later study.

And this work took place in Building 31N … home to the Lunar Sample  Laboratory, and scientists like Professor Everett Gibson, who had been studying moon rocks and meteorites for the last 30 years. The two men didn’t work together directly,  but they did have a few encounters. Roberts even introduced Gibson to  his wife when she visited the campus.

At that meeting, Gibson gifted  Kaydee a small piece of meteorite. But Roberts came away with  something more valuable: An idea. Gibson stored the lunar samples he  worked on not in the high-security Lunar Sample Laboratory, but in a  5-drawer safe inside his office.

That meant the professor’s moon rocks had been out of the inert nitrogen atmosphere of the lab. They were nowhere near as  valuable as they once were. There are some projects that you just  can't do except on a pristine sample.

So one example might be looking  at noble gas abundances. So it could be that any sample that's experienced the Earth's atmosphere will be  contaminated for those sorts of analyses. But Roberts wondered if  these contaminated moon rocks might still be valuable to  somebody outside of NASA.

Gibson’s safe was locked,  and his office was locked, but compared to getting past the  Lunar Sample Laboratory security, it was a walk in the park. Plus, when the professor had opened his  safe to retrieve Kaydee’s meteorite, Roberts saw him reference a card stuck to the safe and assumed it must have been the code. That would be one obstacle already taken care of!

If Roberts could somehow get his  hands on those scientifically “worthless” samples, he  could cash in on rocks that he thought wouldn’t even really be missed. It was, he convinced himself,  a victimless crime.   Now maybe all of this sounds  a little out of character for a model student and aspiring astronaut. But Roberts’s resume didn’t  paint the whole picture.

In fact, this wasn’t the  first theft he had attempted. While he was volunteering for  Utah’s Natural History Museum, several impressive fossils  found their way to his house. He claimed that they had been given to him, but the truth was, he had simply helped himself.

Back in Building 31N, Roberts  began conceiving a plan to steal the moon rocks from Gibson’s safe. He knew he wouldn’t be able  to get them on his own. So in 2002, he put together a  team of like-minded troublemakers.

His first recruit was Gordon McWhorter, a student he met at the University  of Utah’s astronomical club. Like Roberts, McWhorter was  estranged from his family. He’d already had a run-in with  the law, and by his own admission, was a pretty heavy user of recreational drugs.

As a result, he knew his way around  some of the shadier parts of society, including the early 2000s internet. Which I don’t remember as very shady. Mostly it was like All Your Base Are  Belong to Us and X-File’s fan forums.

After becoming friends, Roberts  floated the idea of perhaps, maybe, selling some moon rocks. Eventually, McWhorter agreed  and helped him look for a buyer. Because it’s not like you could  post an ad on Facebook Marketplace.

Facebook didn’t exist in 2002. We were still a year out from Myspace  at that point! So, on March 9th, McWhorter posted on a few message  boards based outside the US, advertising “Priceless Moon Rocks Now Available”.

He followed this up with emails to  various European mineral collectors under the alias Orb Robinson. Which I love. Turns out this is based on his  favourite musician, Roy Orbison, who, it turns out, is also  somebody who studied geology.

I didn’t know that the Big O studied  geology in college, but there you have it. Eventually, McWhorter got a  Belgian collector to bite, and then handed the email address over to Roberts. His part in the heist was basically complete.

Next on Roberts’s team was Tiffany Fowler, a 22-year-old co-op at Johnson Space Center. She had just graduated with a degree in  biology at Texas Lutheran University, and was working in JSC’s tissue culture lab. Although Roberts was married, he  fell hard for Fowler when they met.

A passionate affair began, and less  than a month before he planned to steal the moon rocks, he brought  his new love in on this scheme. Rounding out the roster was 19-year-old Shae Saur, an engineering intern and straight A student with two years of college credits at Lamar University. We don’t actually know much about how  or why she ended up getting involved.

But both Fowler and Saur would ultimately  join Roberts as his boots on the ground, with the promise of a cut of any sale he made. By July, the crew was set to  do the unthinkable: rob NASA. But Roberts had good reason to believe he could make a fortune selling a bunch of grey stones.

There was something of a precedent, which lawyer and one-time special agent  Joseph Gutheinz knew all too well. But before I tell you more about that, a quick ad. When we were working on this script, one thing that became very  obvious to us was that the thing that most protected moon rocks was  people caring about moon rocks.

When people started caring less, that's when they started to  be in danger of being lost. I was actually recently in the  Natural History Museum in London, and the moon rock that the US  gave to the UK is in like the highest honor gallery there,  the Treasures Gallery. They care about that moon rock  and that is what protects it.

The story we're telling  here today is about someone putting their foot down and saying,  “This matters. We have to care.” And I think that is 100% the right take, both for science reasons and  for human history reasons, which is why I worked together  with my friend and designer, Matthew Gaydos to make this. It is a Moon Rock Protection Squad shirt  because protection starts with caring, and I have a feeling a lot of people  watching this right now do care.

If you care about keeping these  rocks safe and well documented. You are part of the Moon Rock Protection Squad whether you get a shirt or not, but  if you want one, I think they're cool! The way we're doing this is  it's a preorder because we have no idea how many we're going to sell.

So that preorder starts today  and then two weeks from now, we'll take it down and then print  the exact amount that get ordered, and then it will never be available again. You can get it at complexly.store/MRPS, which we have decided is pronounced “merps.” And of course if you get it, that  will also help to support SciShow. Thanks.

Now back to the story. Gutheinz started out in the military. Born the son of marines, he served in the army as an aviator and intelligence officer.

After he left, he became a special agent  for the Federal Aviation Administration, and then the Department of Transportation. Eventually, he caught the attention of NASA. “They liked what I was doing. They brought me into the agency,  made me a senior special agent, and that's where I really started to have fun.

Any law enforcement agent or any pilot  is naturally gravitated towards NASA. It's like the ultimate, right? If you're a law enforcement agent, there's no other place you want to be  a law enforcement officer than NASA.

In 1990, Gutheinz was recruited into NASA’s Office of the Inspector General, or OIG. It’s on the same level as the  FBI and the secret service, and is dedicated to rooting  out crime, fraud, and waste. And while he was enrolled in law school at night, he found himself stationed  at Johnson Space Center.

For most of the time I was  at Johnson Space Center, I worked in a… high security facility. It had like two foot brick walls all around it. It was partially buried under the ground.

There were safe doors that you  would have to go through to get from one place to the next or cipher  locks that would open up doors. I was running a 25-man and  woman task force investigation that resulted in the largest count  indictment and conviction in NASA history.” Throughout his 10 year career  as a NASA special agent, Gutheinz worked on a variety of cases. Many of which demonstrated that …  despite its bunker-like buildings, cipher locks, and two-party vault doors … NASA security really wasn’t  all it was cracked up to be.

He investigated problems and fraud  concerning the space shuttles. He investigated the Mir Space Station project, through which some Russians were billing  NASA for their million dollar homes. And he investigated individuals who made it much farther into NASA’s  facilities than they should have: “In June 1998, I had just  arrested Jerry Allen Whittridge, some called the great astronaut impersonator.

He got into mission control  during the space mission, got the schematics to the shuttle propulsion  system, VIP tours to Navy bases, etc. but he claimed to be a  Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Top Gun Trophy winner, astronaut, S1,  there's no such thing, and CIA assassin. And based on that resume,  he got into mission control. And so I arrested the guy.” While doing this work, Gutheinz  became aware of a minor, but pernicious crime that was  becoming more and more common: the selling of bogus moon rocks.

This con actually started  straight after Apollo 11, with door-to-door salesmen  offering so-called lunar rocks to people who weren’t aware of the  security and legality around them. Most of these marks were just everyday  folks caught up in the excitement of the Apollo program, so they  wouldn’t know the difference. And if they ever had doubts, getting  actual confirmation would mean revealing that you now had something  you legally weren’t allowed to have.

So these people often ended up paying a lot of money for a plain old  Earth rock and a clever lie. Seeing the average Joe getting conned,  while also undermining the work NASA was doing, really got under Gutheinz’s skin. So in 1998 … while waiting for that  astronaut impersonator to show up in court … he decided to do something about it.

And I decided, well, you know what? I'm not going to wait for these con  artists to come to our attention. I'm going to go after the con  artists with a sting operation.

For Operation Lunar Eclipse, as it became known, Gutheinz basically set up a fake  company called John’s Estate Sales. He assumed the alias Tony Coriasso, and pretended to be working for a wealthy client. On behalf of this fake company, Gutheinz  put a quarter-page ad in USA Today.

It featured a picture of an astronaut  jumping on the Moon, and a headline ‘Moon Rocks Wanted’, and a phone  number for potential sellers to call. “About 10, 12 days later, we get  a call on my dedicated helloline. And I go over, listen to the recording,  a guy by the name of Alan Rosen says, I got a moon rock. Great.

I'm expecting it to be a con artist. Call the guy back. Hello, this is Tony Correaso.

I'm with John's Estate Sales. So you have a moon rock. He said, absolutely, but don't believe  any of the other people trying to sell you a moon rock because they're bogus.

I got the real thing” Gutheinz, of course, was  used to this kind of claim. Every conman wants to convince you that  theirs is the only offer worth considering. But when he saw a picture of  the rock Rosen was offering, he realized he might actually  be dealing with the real thing.

Because it looked an awful  lot like a Goodwill Rock. See, not every rock that the Apollo  astronauts brought back wound up in NASA storage, or in scientists’ labs. In fact, hundreds of tiny Moon rocks were intentionally distributed all over the world. “The Nixon administration decided  to give 135 nations of the world, the members of the United  Nations, friends and foes alike, a moon rock from the Apollo 11 mission, and a moon rock from the  Apollo 17 moon rock mission.” They did the same for the 50 US states.

So in total, 370 Goodwill rocks were  given out between 1969 and 1973. Each consisted of a few pieces of dust, or a pea-sized piece of moon rock, encased  in a ball of a resin called leucite. The ball was then mounted on a wooden plaque with the recipient’s country or state flag.

These Goodwill rocks were gifted to  the people of those nations and states, and were intended to be displayed  as a symbol of human achievement. But now, one was being offered  to John’s Estate Sales. The name of the recipient country is blocked out, and the center of the flag is blocked out.

I'm going like, oh, that's real clever. I got the rest of the flag,  I just am missing the center. And the reason why that was clever  is that there are six countries in Central and South America  with exactly the same flag.

And lo and behold, the center is the only  thing that's different on any of them. And so now I knew that it  was one of six countries that this moon rock could be from,  and we started looking into it. And country after country,  I ran into the same problem.

The country, the recipient  nations didn't know, one, that they even got the moon  rocks, or two, where they were. He might not have known exactly which  Goodwill rock he was dealing with, but Gutheinz was pretty sure he’d  just found a real missing moon rock … in an operation meant to catch fakes. Rosen was asking for $5 million in exchange, apparently based on black market rates.

And he wouldn’t even show the goods  until he’d seen proof of the cash. And I thought, no problem. Called up NASA.

We're not going  to put up $5 million for that. Called the Department of Justice. No way. …NASA OIG calls up CIA.

Can't get the $5 million bucks. So Gutheinz turned to an unlikely source, someone he knew had helped people out in the past: billionaire businessman and one-time  presidential candidate Ross Perot. He's like one of the richest  guys in the United States.

I got through to his secretary. So, yeah, we need to see if  he'll loan some money to us. We're trying to get back a national treasure.

And she says, sure, I'll let him know. And just moments later, Gutheinz got a call. Ring, ring.

Pick up the phone. Hello. Hello, Joe.

This is Ross  Perot. How can I help you? I said, well, Mr.

Perot, we need $5 million to get back a moon rock. No  problem. And that was it.

Perot might have been able to cough up  $5 million like it was spare change. And of course, it would never  actually leave his bank account if NASA’s sting was successful. But that’s an incredibly high  asking price for one gram of rock.

Which begs the question: What’s a  moon rock actually worth, anyway? Many people would argue that their  greatest value lies in what they represent. I remember I was just a small child, and  I used to get excited about everything, but with the Apollo missions,  even the adults were excited.

And I remember being astounded that adults  could get so excited about something. At places like the Smithsonian National  Air and Space Museum and Space Center Houston, visitors can physically  touch a piece of the Moon. And for many people, that can  be a transformative experience.

I went to an astronaut, a famous  astronaut, and I said, hey, look, do you think $5 million is  reasonable for 1.142 grams of rock? He said, you know, Joe, I have no clue. But he said, I'll tell you this story.

He said, when I was a kid, I  always wanted to be a pilot. And he said that he went to a museum, and I started coming up to  this display with a moon rock. And somewhere between the point  that I started to the point that I got to the moon rock, I no  longer just wanted to be a pilot.

I wanted to be an astronaut. Apollo lunar samples are essentially  the rarest rocks on Earth. We don’t have the technology or  budget to easily replace them.

But in a way, they’ll always be irreplaceable. They’re relics of a singular time in world  history, representing a temporary peace in an otherwise tense and expensive  arms race between the US and the USSR. I can look up in the night sky and I  can see where the sample came from, and yet can hold it in my hand…holding  something that somebody selected over 50 years ago, chose and  then made this treacherous journey to the moon and back to  bring it for me to look at in my lab.

That's a real privilege to be able to do that. History is important, but lunar rocks do,  of course, have a value beyond symbolism. It’s been more than 50 years  since Apollo 17 returned with one last set of moon rocks.

And in that time, NASA has received  thousands of research requests from hundreds of scientists  in more than 15 countries. The agency has distributed around 50,000  samples for use in scientific fields ranging from astronomy to  biology, chemistry, engineering, materials science, medicine, and geology. Studying these samples has solved  many scientific mysteries about the Moon itself, as well as the Earth,  and the rest of the solar system.

If we have a physical lunar sample,  we do all sorts of microscopy on it. So that includes optical microscopy,  using light, but also using electrons electron microscopy, which means  that we can get down to really tiny, tiny samples and look at it  on a very, very small scale, which gives us a much better  idea of how the minerals formed. And then we could also do chemical analyzes, which enable us to compare it to  the earth and to other bodies, The Moon doesn’t have plate tectonics,  or any kind of air or water to erode the surface, so pristine Apollo  rocks are all at least 3 billion years old.

They retain a record of early solar system  events that you can’t find anywhere else. They’ve even helped researchers understand a whole other kind of rock in their collections. Basically, until we went up and  collected pristine bits of the Moon, we didn’t know that pieces  of it had already crashed into the Earth in the form of meteorites!

But probably most significantly,  the Apollo samples helped us solve the mystery of how the Moon  got there in the first place.   They were incredibly dry compared to Earth rocks, so they had lost water and lots of  other volatile elements as well. But apart from that … in lots  of kind of chemical signatures, they were identical to the earth,  and that means that somehow their genesis was linked to that of  the Earth, but they had lost something. These observations not only discounted  the ideas of the Moon being captured by Earth’s gravity, or forming alongside it, but they lent support to another,  controversial hypothesis from the 1940s.

The hypothesis was that not  long after the Earth formed, it was hit by another, Mars-sized planet. The impact vaporised and  liquified the colliding planet, plus a lot of the Earth’s outer layers. Everything mixed together and eventually,  the Moon formed from the debris.

So that's why they’ve got similar compositions. But then, as the spray that comes out,  a lot of it evaporates into space, so that affects its composition. Ultimately, the Apollo moon  rocks helped to establish the entire field of modern planetary science.

And their contribution is just as  significant today as it was 50 years ago. Once they're back on Earth,  they're back on Earth forever, and so we can use them. But also our descendants in  200 years time can use them to answer questions that we haven't  thought of, using techniques that don't exist at the moment.

And so it's the gift that keeps on giving. NASA has even left some Apollo  samples completely untouched for the last half-century, specifically waiting  for new questions and technologies.   Through both the science that’s already been done, and the science to be done in the future, the Apollo lunar samples have proved  their worth time and time again. Just ask Sara Russell … The Apollo rocks are absolutely,  completely irreplaceable.

And these samples are absolutely priceless. But that does not stop some people  from trying to put a price on them. Alan Rosen was not the first, and  Thad Roberts wouldn’t be the last.

Anyone can buy a chunk of the Moon,  and it’s perfectly legal so long as it didn’t get here with any human help. Lunar meteorites will set you back about  one or two hundred dollars per gram. But all of the Apollo samples  officially belong to the United States, or in the case of the Goodwill rocks,  to the nations they were given to.

It is illegal for any individual  to own any Apollo moon rock. But it is legal to sell space dust  that has gathered on space artifacts. That’s wild.

In 1993, the auction house Sotheby’s  sold three specks of lunar dust from the USSR’s Luna 16 sample return mission. Approximately 0.2 grams of material set the anonymous private collector back $442,500.   Now, if that’s outside your budget,  you might be interested in paying just under a grand for a 3 millimeter  strip of tape with lunar dust on it, originally owned by a NASA photographer  who got some dust on his fingers when he opened a film canister that  Neil Armstrong dropped on the Moon. Meanwhile, in 2018, a case of theft,  fraud and mistaken identity meant that an Apollo 11 collecting bag ended up in the hands of a lawyer from Illinois  named Nancy Lee Carlson.

NASA tried to take it back,  but Carlson won the case. She ended up selling the bag for $1.8 million, and a pinch of lunar dust from  inside it for half a million. But if you’re heading to the black market  to get your hands on the illegal stuff, the price is probably going to be even higher.

Records of such underhanded dealings are scarce, but a Nicaraguan Goodwill  rock is rumored to have sold, along with some other artifacts, for $10 million. And space historian Robert  Pearlman has estimated that a Goodwill Rock on its own could fetch  one to two million at a public auction. But Alan Rosen … the guy offering  a Central American Goodwill rock to John’s Estate Sales … had  gotten his for an absolute bargain.

In 1995, a colonel sold it to him for  $15,000 plus a refrigerated truck. Whichever way you look at them …  their symbolism, scientific worth, or raw collectors’ appeal … moon rocks  carry a far higher value than their grey, crusty exteriors would suggest. So Thad Roberts had plenty  of reasons to get his hands on Gibson’s samples back in 2002.

Unlike Alan Rosen, who had  a Goodwill rock three years before he saw Gutheinz’s newspaper ad, Roberts wanted a buyer lined  up before he so much as breathed on a stolen moon rock. That buyer turned out to be Axel Emmermann, a member of the Antwerp  Mineralogical Club in Belgium. He’d told Roberts that he was interested, but wanted proof of authenticity and to  know how much Roberts was asking for.

In May, Roberts promised this proof and  offered a price as low as $300 per gram. However, he asked Emmerman to commit to buying at least one kilogram of the samples. In other words, at least $300,000.

But when Emmerman didn’t immediately respond, Roberts got nervous and started  bombarding him with emails, assuring him of his intentions  and pressuring him to commit. Eventually, the Belgian said he  was willing to spend $100,000, but couldn’t come to the US. Instead, Roberts would have to meet  with his American sister-in-law Lynn, who was also a mineral collector, and would be able to authenticate  the rocks on Emmerman’s behalf.

After a lengthy exchange of  emails between Roberts and Lynn, the pair agreed to meet on July 20th, in Orlando. The evening of Saturday,  July 13th, Roberts, Fowler, and Saur were ready for their historic heist. The three NASA interns drove to  JSC in a Jeep Cherokee that Roberts had borrowed from a friend, under the pretense that he was moving to a new  apartment, and needed the extra space.

This was all going down during  Roberts’ third tour at NASA, and he no longer worked in Building 31N. So the first hurdle was getting  the code to enter the building. That turned out to be easy.

All he had to do was lie to a colleague, and claim he needed to process  some photos in his old lab. Saur stayed in the car, while Roberts and  Fowler headed to Professor Gibson’s lab, hitting hurdle number two: a  five-button cipher lock on the door. That turned out to be an inconvenience,  but not a complete deterrent.

Roberts knew the code must be a  combination of four of those five buttons without any repeats, so he simply  worked his way through many of the 232 possible combinations as he  could until he found the right one. Once they got into Gibson’s  office, Roberts and Fowler ran into hurdle number three: the  locked safe containing their prize. But here’s where their plan went awry.

Roberts thought that the card  he’d seen Gibson reference had the safe’s code written on it. But it was actually Gibson’s hint  to himself for remembering the code. It was of no use to them, and the combination lock was harder to crack than the one on the door.

So the two lovers had to go with Plan B. They took the whole safe. Lifting it together onto a dolly, they  wheeled it back to Saur and the Jeep.

The team loaded it up, drove off the campus  without a single blink from security, and took it to a Motel 6, where  they used power tools to break in. Say what you want about motels, but you really do get the privacy  to do … whatever you like! Inside the safe, the trio found  more than 50 lunar samples, all stored inside vials and boxes in teflon bags.

In total, there were just over  100 grams of the Moon in there.   There were also around 150 meteorites, including eight rare and  valuable Martian meteorites. That’s right, the little bits that  got blasted off the red planet and came crashing down to Earth. One of them was a piece of ALH84001, a martian meteorite that became famous for potentially containing alien microfossils.

Roberts, Fowler, and Saur … along with McWhorter hanging back in Utah, had hit the motherlode. In addition to the physical samples, Gibson’s safe was also filled with documents that supported the identity of those  samples, as well as their current state. Just the proof Roberts needed to convince his Belgian buyer that his rocks were legit.

Over the course of the night,  Fowler documented what they found and took photos of their progress. Then, the trio put the lunar samples and  meteorites into a fishing tackle box, and scattered the mangled  safe across several dumpsters. Even with that hiccup involving Gibson’s  safe, it was a nearly perfect heist.

No one had seen them come or go. The theft itself wasn’t noticed  until the following Monday. Gibson was in Australia at the  time, and received a call at four in the morning to tell him the terrible news.

He came straight back to the US,  but there was nothing he could do. There were no leads to follow. On July 19th, Roberts and Fowler started  their drive from Houston to Orlando.

Meanwhile, McWhorter flew in from Utah, keen for some of the excitement  … and for the money.   The three met up at the Sheraton  hotel on the morning of July 20th, and took their tackle box full of stolen  moon rocks up to the room they’d booked. Then, depending on the sources you read, this is where things get a bit steamy. Roberts has claimed he put the  samples under the sheets of the bed, and made love to Fowler on top of them, so they could be the first  people to have ‘sex on the Moon’.

That’s not how that works and,  also, that sounds uncomfortable. It’s a good story. But later FBI photos showed the  room with a perfectly made bed, which casts more than a  little doubt on that claim.

As the time for the sale approached,  they slipped the tackle box under the hotel bed, and headed to the  Italian restaurant to meet their buyer. Four years earlier, Alan Rosen had also  agreed to sell his moon rock in Florida. He arrived at a Miami bank, expecting to meet a representative of John’s Estate Sales.

That representative, however, turned out  to be an undercover US Customs agent, who seized the rock and arrested Rosen. Joseph Gutheinz and his team got their man. Once he had the plaque in hand, Gutheinz could see that this  Goodwill rock belonged to Honduras.

But before anyone could  celebrate, scientists had to confirm the rocks inside the leucite  ball really were from the Moon. I put the moon rock in my  pocket for about 24 hours and flew it back to Houston to be tested. I had my briefcase, was doing a real  good job putting it away in case anybody knew that we had the moon rock, but  it sat in my pocket the entire time.

Back in Houston, NASA’s lunar  curator examined the piece. Sure enough, our geologists could  tell not only that it's from the moon, but which mission it came from. It was from our last mission there, Apollo 17.

All the Apollo 17 Goodwill rocks, it turns out, were cut from a single rock named ‘Sample 70017’. Since some of that sample still  existed, the lunar curator just needed to compare its chemical fingerprint  to that of the seized rock. And they were identical.

But despite having a genuine Goodwill  rock, and its seller in hand, the legal case that followed was long and messy. The crime actually came down more  to customs than any kind of theft. Titled “United States of America v.

One  Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material (One Moon Rock) and One Ten Inch  by Fourteen Inch Wooden Plaque”, the five-year case examined whether  Rosen actually had the right to sell the Honduran moon rock  after he had bought it, and whether he’d declared it when  he brought it into the country. The problem was, NASA gave over  all rights to the Goodwill rocks when it gifted them to their recipient nations. And the agency made no effort to  keep track of them afterwards.

But they were always meant  to be owned by the people, not to be traded for the leaders’ personal gain. So when the case finally  went before a judge in 2003, it was the colonel’s acquisition  of the rock that was ruled illegal. That gave US customs the right to seize it, and allowed Alan Rosen to get  off without being charged.

The plaque was returned to Honduras, and it is now on public  display, as originally intended. And Joseph Gutheinz earned a  NASA exceptional service medal for leading the operation to retrieve it. But he wasn’t even working for NASA at the time.

A few years earlier, Gutheinz  had retired from the OIG and started working as a lawyer. By 2002, he was also teaching  at the University of Phoenix and Alvin Community College, training  the next generation of police detectives. My mentor said, "You know, we encourage  our instructors to teach what they know.

And you were with NASA and  you're the only guy from NASA OIG and would love for you to give some sort  of your background into the teaching.” But Gutheinz didn’t just teach. He also recruited his students  into his own unofficial task force. Because during Operation Lunar Eclipse, he realized just how many  Goodwill rocks had disappeared.

When I realized that a lot of  these countries have no clue where their moon rocks were,  I encouraged my agency to do a broader investigation beyond  Operation Lunar Eclipse. We didn't have the resources. We were a very small law enforcement agency.

And so all of a sudden, now I  had graduate students learning to be criminal investigators. And I decided, why not give them a real task? I'm going to send them out  there and we'll see how it goes.

Whether or not a student actually found a  missing rock, at the end of their project, they’d have to either write a report  or publish an editorial in a newspaper. What I like about the Moon rock  cases is nobody’s going to get hurt going after the Moon rocks. And if they find a Moon rock,  people are going to benefit.

The kids are going to see them in museums. I believe what NASA believes. I don’t believe private individuals  should own Moon rocks or dust.

I believe they belong to the people. Half my students would start off  by going like, “Are you kidding? We’re hunting for a Moon rock.” And about halfway through, they would  be just as involved in it as I am.

While getting a bunch of college  students to sniff out missing Apollo souvenirs might seem a bit ridiculous, Gutheinz’s project was actually a huge success. For one thing, the students  were able to track down rocks that had simply been lost, or misplaced. California’s was found in storage at  the San Diego Air and Space Museum, where the curators had forgotten they had it.

In North Carolina, there was  a moon rock found in a drawer. Nobody knows why it was there. Canada’s rock had been lost since 1978, but it turned up in a storage facility  owned by Canada’s Natural Science Museum.

My student, Kevin Griffiths, finds out that the Apollo 17 moon rock of Colorado is missing. There's a front-page story  out, and that day the governor, after 30-some years of having it, says,  "I've had it on my wall the entire time," and now it sits at the Colorado School of Mines. But sometimes, the rocks had actually been stolen.

In 1973, an arsonist set fire to  Alaska’s state transport museum, which had been charged with displaying  the state’s Apollo 11 Goodwill rock. After one of Gutheinz’s students  published her report in a local newspaper, unable to find the rock herself, a  man came forward to … sue Alaska. He claimed that he rescued the rock  from the rubble during the clean-up, and demanded he either be declared the legal owner of the rock, or given $5 million.

An FBI investigation revealed, however,  that the plaque had gone missing some time after the fire. The man … who’d been the foster son  of the museum’s curator a the time returned the rock to the government. Just like Alan Rosen, and he  did not get his $5 million.

But this was not the only theft  Gutheinz’s students ran into. I want to find Malta’s Apollo 17  Moon rock because one of my students woke me up at three o’clock in the  morning to tell me that it had been stolen from a museum where someone  walks in, opens up a case, takes the Moon rock off the plaque, and walks out. Gutheinz believes that that  theft, which happened in 2004, was made by an opportunistic amateur.

They only took the leucite  ball, and not the plaque that would prove its authenticity and its value. But despite offering amnesty, and  a $10,000 reward for its return, at the time we’re filming this episode,  there’s still no sign of the Maltese rock. Losing a Goodwill rock is one thing.

Having it stolen is another. But the most dramatic cases might be  the ones that feature political unrest. Like in Romania, where a Goodwill rock wound up sold in an estate sale after the country’s  dictator and his wife were executed.

Or in Cyprus, a Mediterranean island  with an ongoing conflict between Christian Greeks in the north,  and Turkish Muslims in the South. Cyprus allegedly was missing  both of their moon rocks, believed destroyed in the fire when they  were going through civil unrest in 1973. But in 2009, when Gutheinz’  students contacted them, the national museum had never  even heard of a goodwill rock.

It turned out that one had been  sent to the island in 1973. But a year later, there was a  coup attempt and an invasion. The president was ousted, and the  presidential palace burned to the ground.

There was also violence at the American embassy, in which the ambassador was assassinated. Likely before he had a chance  to give the rock to Cyprus. Gutheinz and his students worked  with a Cyprus newspaper reporter to publish a media blitz,  demanding NASA investigate.

Not long after, the agency  was contacted by an attorney representing the rock’s custodian. He was the son of an American  diplomat claiming his father took possession of the rock when the  embassy was evacuated in 1974. In 2010, he handed it over in exchange  for immunity from prosecution.

And then it took me another  12 years to get NASA to do the right thing to return it to Cyprus. And they didn't want to return it to Cyprus  because of all the political turmoil, the politics, and everything  else, they forgot the whole reason why we gave these moon rocks in the first place. We weren't picking winners and losers.

We were giving the moon rocks for  the people of each country to enjoy. And just because Cyprus had  some strife down there was no reason not to give them back their property. It turns out the threat of  prison time is enough to dissuade many people from trying to keep  or sell an Apollo moon rock.

Just not Thad Roberts. Lynn waited alone at her table  for Orb Robinson to arrive. And when he finally did, she  recognised him from the clothes he said he’d be wearing.

But Orb, a.k.a. Roberts, was not the  professorial type she was expecting. Likely nervous, he talked a  lot, boasting about how he’d broken into Building 31N and stolen the safe.

At the end of his story, Roberts joked  that he hoped she wasn’t wearing a wire. But everything seemed to be going well. Lynn’s husband Kurt soon joined them at the table, as did Fowler and McWhorter.

Both sides of the deal judged the other as  legitimate, and they agreed to the sale. They drove back to the Sheraton in two cars. But before they could even leave  the parking lot, the FBI descended.

Lynn had, in fact, been wearing a wire. Not only that, she herself worked for the FBI. Back in May, when Axel Emmerman  first received Orb’s emails, he nearly dismissed them as spam.

But something nagged at him. Whatever Orb was doing was a crime. At best it was fraud, and at worst, it was theft.

So the mineral collector  contacted the FBI in Tampa, where Orb said he was based. The entire time he was emailing Orb, he  was also coordinating with investigators. The FBI was able to analyse Orb’s emails and found they weren’t coming from anywhere in Tampa.

Or Florida, for that matter. Sometimes, they originated  from the University of Utah, and sometimes from Johnson Space Center. They didn’t start asking around NASA, though.

Because if this were an inside job,  they could spook the perpetrator. But they did have their eyes on a couple  Utah professors who also worked at JSC. And they eventually teamed  up with NASA’s investigators, once they both realized they  were investigating the same case.

They still had no idea it was an intern  they should be looking for, though. It was the FBI who suggested Emmerman  schedule a meetup on American soil, to lead Orb … whoever he was … into a trap. And to help sell the ruse, they  recruited special agent Lynn Billings, who had trained as a geologist.

Her fake husband “Kurt” …  who’s real name is Lawrence … was also an FBI agent, and learned a  single line of Flemish to play his role. In the event that Lynn needed to  confirm the moon rocks were legitimate, Emmerman told her to look for zap pits. On the Moon, tiny particles  constantly rain down from space.

But without an atmosphere to slow them down, they hit the surface going as fast  as 80,000 kilometers per hour. They’re basically microscopic meteorites, creating correspondingly tiny  impact craters called zap pits. They have a surface of black glass surrounded  by a white halo of pulverised rock, and every moon rock is covered in them.

Although the pits themselves can be faked, the unique textures within them cannot. Thad’s zap pit-covered rocks were  found right where he had left them. In the fishing tackle box,  under the bed in room 905.

The trio of criminals who had come to  Florida were arrested then and there. Two days later, Saur was arrested in Houston. Professor Gibson got all of his  moon rocks and meteorites back, and the four criminals were  charged with conspiracy to steal, transport, and sell government property.

But to determine how severe  their punishments would be, prosecutors needed to calculate  the value of what they had stolen. And instead of going by black  market rumours or a few legal sales, the FBI used the cost of the  Apollo missions themselves. In 1961, Kennedy announced that  the space program would cost every US citizen 50 cents per week.

The final total was more than $25 billion dollars. Now not all of that went towards  bringing moon rocks to Earth, of course. So the government’s number  crunchers only took into account what proportion of each mission  was dedicated to sample return.

For instance, every gram of material  removed from the lunar surface needed three extra grams of propellant. Eventually, they arrived at  $50,800 per gram at the time, or $203,000 per gram in 2003,  and a total of $21 million for the moon rocks that Roberts and company stole. The meteorites added even  more to the sticker price.

The famous ALH84001 sample from Mars was  valued at $1.8 million all by itself. NASA’s cost analyst pegged  the total replacement cost for all the samples at $32 million. That’s a lot of money for what Roberts  claimed was a victimless crime … giving “trash” lunar samples a new lease of life.

But Roberts had just conveniently  ignored the fact that while contaminated samples can’t be used  for everything scientists want to study, that doesn’t mean they’re completely useless. As we’ve heard from Professor Russell, experiments are done outside of  the Lunar Sample Laboratory’s pristine environment all the time. You just have to be very careful and  keep track of everything you did to them, so future scientists know what  to account for in their research.

And honestly, Thad, scientists  do research on lunar meteorites which have gone through the atmosphere  and like burned up a little bit. Obviously these things are still valuable. To date, only about 20% of  all Apollo rocks have been so degraded that they have no scientific use.

However, the indiscriminate  handling of these stolen samples created a different type of contamination: a broken chain of custody  that had started the moment the astronauts selected the  rock on the Moon’s surface. The four students had  personally handled the rocks, and there are even reports  that one of them ate some! Without knowing which samples had been affected, and to what degree, the event basically  ended these rocks’ scientific careers.

But even then, they wouldn’t be considered trash. They could still be used  for education and outreach. As it turns out, the most damage  wasn’t done to the rocks themselves.

Professor Gibson reported that  his stolen safe also contained 30 years worth of hand written research notes. And while the lunar samples were  recovered from the Orlando Sheraton, there was no sign of those notes. Roberts maintained that he never saw them, but Fowler’s photographs taken the night they broke into the safe clearly show them  lying on the floor of the motel room.

When this information came to  light during Roberts’s trial, the judge weighed it heavily. I mean, if you don't have notes  on what you did, then, basically, it may as well never have happened  if you don't write about it then, then no one will ever know that you did this work. And many of these analysis  are destructive analyzes.

So you know, unfortunately, you  have to destroy bits of the rock to be able to get this data. And you know, once it's gone, it's  gone, and you can never get it back… losing the Data is as  devastating as losing samples In the end, a hearing set the official  cost of the theft at $7 million, for loss of research and productivity. But to deal out the punishments, the courts considered each student’s  contributions to the theft and sale.

Both Fowler and Saur got off fairly lightly. They were sentenced to three years  probation with six months house arrest, 150 hours of community service,  and $9,000 restitution. McWhorter ended up making life harder for himself.

He went against his attorney’s advice  and pleaded not-guilty to the charges, meaning his was the only one to go to trial. And then, he jumped bail. At his trial, the witnesses who testified  against him included FBI agents, a former Apollo astronaut,  NASA’s lunar sample curator, and Thad Roberts and Tiffany Fowler.

So much for him and Roberts being friends. Ultimately, McWhorter was sentenced to 5 years, 10 months at a Federal Correctional  Institution in Colorado. But as you might expect, Roberts  bore the brunt of the blame.

The prosecutors even threw in a  charge for the stolen museum fossils. But because of those missing notebooks, his sentence ended up being nearly double what the sentencing guidelines suggested. In 2003, he was sentenced to  8 years, 4 months in prison, plus 3 years probation and 150  hours of community service.

He ended up spending 6 years behind bars. Even though I'm a defense attorney now. I still have that old law enforcement mindset.

You go into hallowed ground, you're  given the privilege to do so, and you steal from not only  the United States but the world because you're greedy or whatever. I don't think eight years was enough. I would have put them in for 20, personally.

It has been 23 years since Thad  Roberts and his crew stole a safe full of moon rocks and meteorites. And 27 years since Joseph Gutheinz first embarked on his quest to hunt down missing Goodwill rocks. And while some of the characters have  since steered clear of the limelight, Roberts is not among them.

During his years in prison,  he taught himself physics. He became especially  interested in quantum physics, and now publishes and speaks  on the subject occasionally. Although we weren’t able to find any of his work that has made it through peer-review.

And our attempts to reach  Roberts through his social media and email accounts for this  story were not successful. Fowler and Saur, understandably,  have kept a low profile since their headline-grabbing escapades. Despite their passionate love affair, Fowler never spoke to Roberts again after they were caught.

McWhorter claims his prison time saved  him from a downward spiral of drug use. He’s now an author and a  father to several children. Joseph Gutheinz eventually retired from teaching, and is currently focusing on his work as  a defense lawyer at a firm with his sons.

But he will never let go of  the missing Goodwill rocks. Right now, there are about 159 of  these moon rocks still missing… but we helped recover 78. When I retire—my wife and I  are going to go worldwide.

We’re going to go hunt down every moon rock that’s still out there that we’re missing. NASA has acknowledged that  hundreds of rocks that it’s loaned to researchers have been  lost or stolen over the years. But these still make up a tiny fraction  of the whole Apollo lunar collection.

Meanwhile, the agency did  tighten its inventory controls, and introduced more stringent  security requirements … including that office safes  must now be bolted down! But without Gutheinz, there’s never quite been the same determination to chase  the missing Apollo moon rocks. Which is a shame.

But the truth is, if we want to  keep learning about the moon, we need to move beyond what we  gathered during the Apollo missions. Although those samples  transformed planetary science, they can’t tell us everything we need to know. The Apollo missions only sampled  a very tiny part of the moon, so they only visited the near side of the moon … and they only went to the equator of the moon.

So that means we still know very little about the polar regions and also  the far side of the Moon. Some of that new sampling has already started. In 2020 and 2024, China launched  two robotic sample return missions named Chang’e 5 and 6, respectively.

And together, they’ve brought back  over 3.5 kilograms of lunar material. That’s about the weight of 2 2 kilogram  hand weights. It’s a little less.

India is planning to launch their  Chandrayaan 4 lander in 2029, and collect 3 kilos near the Moon’s south pole. And then of course there are the  much-anticipated private missions, which have the potential to change the  landscape of lunar science altogether. We're sort of on the cusp  of a really exciting time, because there's so much interest  in returning to the moon.

And, you know, for most of my professional life, Lunar Science was sort of bit in the doldrums… But now there's real interest, again, in having human beings going back to the moon, The Apollo moon rocks were  special for decades because they were among the only ones we had. But what will always make them valuable  is the fact that they represent a unique period of history when  we first reached for the stars. A time when humanity chose  exploration over annihilation.

For some, like the custodians  of the lost Goodwill rocks, that might not mean much. But for others, like Joseph  Gutheinz, and maybe even in his own way Thad Roberts,  it means an awful lot. I gotta tell you, walking around with  the moon rock for 24 hours in my pocket, I'm going like, yeah, that's  a connection to something bigger than myself, bigger than any of us. [♪ OUTRO]