A Mysterious Meteorite

In the summer of 2016, retired Alabama state trooper Joe W. Champion decided he needed a level spot to park on his steep property on Lake Jordan in Elmore County. He ordered a 12 yard truckload of unsorted road gravel from a pit near the River Parkway Toll Bridge near Prattville to fill it in. As he spread it out, he looked through the gravels for interesting rocks, like agates and chunks of petrified wood. Every once in a while since then, he gave his new gravel addditional searches.

About the year 2022, he found a very peculiar 3.5 inch chunk of iron that really puzzled him. It looked like a natural rock and showed no signs of being manufactured, cast, or forged. It was filled with holes and cavities that resembled Teredo boreholes.

I knew that there are no manufactured items that looked anything like this. The only natural iron that could even come close is a rare pallasite meteorite. It appeared to be one, but the olivine inclusions that would have filled the cavities were absent, except for a few tiny bits I saw at the bottoms of a couple of the holes. They did have the proper color of olivine. I told Joe that it was a seriously weathered pallasite that had been exposed to the outdoor elements for anywhere from a century to more than a millinneum. Oddly, it was only lightly rusted.

The specimen was smooth and rounded on one side and rough and somewhat flat on the other. It appeared to have broken from a larger piece when it fell through the atmosphere, a very common occurrence in many meteorites.

In spite of its weathered condition, I advised Joe to keep it. It is a freakishly rare chance to find a real meteorite in your own yard.

Joe showed it to many of his friends and the members of the Montgomery Gem and Mineral Society. It was his hot bragging piece.

Last year (2025), Joe decided on a whim to make a solo trip to Maine and back, spending the nights sleeping in the back of his Toyota Camry, which had room for only one person. He made several stops, including the Smitsonian, where he had his picture made standing next to the Tucson Ring.

While in Bethel, Maine, Joe found a laboratory at the Maine Mineral and Gem Museum that could give his meteorite a serious analysis. The lab is considered one of the finest in the nation. When Joe received the results, he and I were both absolutely shocked. What we thought would be a simple analysis of a badly weathered pallasite turned out to be something even the lab could not understand.

In the lab's own words:

"This is a strange specimen. The dark olive green parts show gas bubbles. They are GLASS! The metallic part is mainly iron with 4.5 – 5.3 wt % nickel. This is slightly low for pallasites where 7 or more wt. % of nickel are commonly found. Another problem is that there are NO noticable kamacite / taenite intergrowths. The nickel content is overall consistant.

"The dark olive green material is NOT OLIVINE, but a high sodium-calcium GLASS with about 5-7 wt % iron and about 10 wt % zirconium with clearly visible bubbles... This glass is without doubt man made and not of meteoritic origin...

"Nickel iron meteorites with poor exosolution do occur and can also be at times very coarse-grained so that a uniform appearance is presented.

"The specimen is not what I expected, and somebody either made it up like this or we have some other material from some industrial product here. The relatively flat surface is also a little odd. Metal tends to separate in a more irregular fashion. Everything about this specimen brings up questions."

Yes, fake pallasites have been made. One noteworthy example came from Russia about 2002. Pieces were sold to dealers under the name Shirokovsky. In 2003, at the InnSuites mineral show in Tucson, AZ, in meteorite dealer Mike Farmer's room, I actually saw a slice of one for sale. At that time, Mike was not aware that it was fake.

Making a fake pallasite apparently is not all that difficult-as long as the telltale outside surfaces are completely trimmed off. But duplicating the natural outside's patina and weathering like on Joe's specimen is just about impossible. Even though its nickel percentage is near the lower boundary, there can be no doubt that Joe's specimen is genuine.

Joe told me that even though the lab did not accept it as a genuine pallasite, one member offered him $20,000 for it because of its peculiarities. Joe refused the offer and decided to keep it.

On the phone, I later talked to the lab's curator, Scott Harris, and he told me something that was missing in the lab report. He said the melting temperature of the glass inclusions was higher than the melting point of the iron-nickel specimen. He also said that it was fused into the iron. That suggests that the iron and glass were melted together.

If the glass had been natural, I could write off Joe's specimen as a freak pallasite with a different inclusion other than the usual olivine. But if the glass is really man-made, has a higher melting point than iron, and is fused into it, then the iron portion is also man-made. Considering its complexity, the labor and technology required to fabricate and age a "pallasite" like this, creating it would borderline on the impossible, especially without a financial incentive.

Or is it possible that the glass is a currently unknown natural material that became included with the iron?

The big mystery is that the remnants of "olivine" were identified as man-made glass inside of an almost impossible to produce fabricated weathered "pallasite."

THE VIEWS OF SUBMITTED EDITORIALS MAY NOT BE THE EXPRESS VIEWS OF THE ALABAMA GAZETTE.