The Fallen Sky by Christopher Cokinos

Author:Christopher Cokinos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science, Science & Technology, Biography & Autobiography, Expeditions & Discoveries, Astronomy, History
ISBN: 9781101133224
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

THERE’S ANOTHER REASON FOR the frenzy: A self-described “long-haired rock and roller” with a mailbox shaped like a rocket and a persona as subtle as a fireball. Robert Haag—The Meteorite Man—has been the most influential meteorite dealer since Harvey Nininger. The dude looks like Sammy Hagar, and his address number is 5150—“just like the Van Halen album,” he says.

In fact, when he drove into Portales, New Mexico, in the summer of 1998, he had Van Halen cranking through the speakers. He showed the locals pictures of meteorites, and the locals found meteorites from the just-witnessed fall. Bob Haag paid $15,000 for them. He was so giddy he hugged strangers.

In one of his colorful catalogues, there’s a picture of Haag leaping in the foreground, his head situated in a line with the faces in the background. Mount Rushmore + Haag. In another, the foreground shows a beautiful black meteorite, the background a blurry Rhode Island Red—a chicken. The caption reads, “Chicken Little was absolutely right. The sky is falling . . .”

Haag began collecting and selling meteorites in 1979. Before that, he “stood around shopping malls in a tight silver space suit, hitting on matrons for small change.” He was selling “space passports.” “I nearly starved,” Haag writes in his catalogue. “This is definitely better.”

This is selling specimens of all sizes, types, and prices. This is selling watches with etched iron meteorite faces. This is selling an “asteroid belt”—a leather belt decorated with an iron meteorite, Gibeon. This is surviving a plane crash in Baja, California, while chasing shooting stars.This is “near misses with rattle-snakes, dead hits from dagger plants that ram two inches of hard spike into your shins, and tumbles down steep slopes. . . . Did you say there was beer back at the camp?” This is using “everybody I can to get information—the library, NASA, the police . . . I can’t do one square mile in a year. But lots of people can. . . . The reward system works.”

Mentored by the wealthy collector Jim DuPont and meteorite aficionado Richard Norton, Haag first touched meteorites in Norton’s presence. “The air was electric. I handed him a chondrite,” Norton has written, “then a pallasite. Here was a man possessed.” After selling some meteorites for Norton at the 1982 Tucson show, Haag seized on the business opportunity. With relatively little meteorite dealing going on at the time, Haag searched the area around Meteor Crater before the lands were cut off from dealers and collectors. He and a partner also found more Brenham pallasites, the sales of which financed other searches. The Spanish-speaking Haag, years after the 1969 Allende fall in Mexico of a rare carbonaceous chondrite, found more specimens of that precious stone. Then he placed an ad in Scientific American that cost about $4,000, all that he had. The ad reaped $100,000 in sales. “I couldn’t even talk to anyone unless it was about meteorites. I was absolutely obsessed,” he says. Haag organized mailing lists and contacted the handful of other established if lower-key dealers, including Glenn Huss.

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