It's December nineteen seventy two. Canadian Jamie Matthews, age fourteen, is sitting comfortably in his airplane seat. It's his first trip away from home. Jamie's first love is astronomy, and astronomy has earned him the trip of a lifetime. He's been to the White House, to NASA's Mission control in Texas, to the United Nations, and now he's returning home. But there's a problem, and no it's not the airline food.
Someone is threatening to kidnap Jamie because he has a rock, and not just any rock, a moon rock, one retrieved by an astronaut two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth.
This is your captain speaking, Jamie Matthews. Please come to the front of the plane. Jamie Matthews to the front of the plane. Two scary men are here to pick you up. I repeat, two very serious looking men are here to take you away.
Jamie takes some tentative steps forward. He's just landed in Detroit. Two adults in dark suits meet him on the tarmac. Now these men are not the kidnappers. They're from the United States Secret Service. They explain to Jamie what's happening. His parents back in Canada received an alarming phone call threatening his safety all because of this rock. They want to escort him to the Canadian border just to be safe. Because the moon rock isn't exactly a souvenir, it's one
of the most rare and valueable materials on Earth. It could be worth millions. To Jamie, it's worth even more. But what the kidnappers don't know is that Jamie doesn't have it, not yet anyway, but he will. And the men who called Jamie's parents, they're not the only ones who want a piece of the moon. Welcome to very special episodes and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, and this is Operation Lunar Eclipse. Okay, so you know how like when kids are like five or six, they
have like hyper fixations. I feel like it's like dinosaurs, it's like trucks. For me, it was like Greek mythology. But I feel like for some kids it's also space. Were you a space kid, Jason or Zarin?
Oh, you're a space kid completely.
I'm still mad that they took planetary status away from Pluto. I'm one of those space kids.
Oh my weird. I mean not weird at all. My like space connection is. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and when I was in high school, every Sunday I would drive down to the Adler Planetarium and volunteer all Sunday to like teach kids science and space demonstrations.
Oh wow, I love you for that. That is awesome.
It was so cool because it's like every kid, I mean I was not every kid. I as a dork, loved museums and this idea that I had like a badge, and I could, like I knew the code to like get backstage at the museum.
It was the coolest thing in the world.
You're a museum insider.
I was a museum insider.
I don't mean to like, you know, big time you because I'm a huge celebrity.
Yeah, no, I understand. I mean you can brag on that. That's worth it. Sometimes you got a flex on us.
I taught them about the Moon mission.
I taught them about gravity, but I had no idea about like the legality of buying and owning lunar rocks.
They don't want you to know that that's what it is.
Those kids couldn't handle that.
Yeah, we're it's all hidden from all of us.
All right, Well, do you guys want to hear a story about stealing moonrocks and they the black market for illegal moon rock commerce.
I am buckled up and ready, Jason, you let's blast off it.
Do some kind of countdown now, just let's just go to the episode.
For a kid super into astronomy. Jamie Matthews had more run ins with the law than you might have expected, not because he was breaking the law, but because police kept finding him alone in the middle of the night when he was just eight years old in the last place you'd expect.
My parents were not rich, and we had a house that was close to the cemetery, and so that was the best place to look at the stars.
At night, That's Jamie.
So occasionally the police would come back by and see this guy. And they would come and see a guy with a telescope, and so they got me home. I said, yo, I knew who I was.
As a kid.
He lived in Chatham, Ontario. It's rural with lots of farms and lots of stargazing. As an only child, his parents, Jim and June, bought him a telescope, which Jamie took to the darkest part of the neighborhood, the graveyard. There he found ink, black skies, and a galaxy to explore. Jamie isn't sure where his love of science came from. His parents were blue collar workers. Neither was a college graduate, but they recognized their son had a fascination, so they nourished it any chance they could.
First memory was at two, looking at the stars, and from then on I was totally gone with the stars.
Of course, they all watched as Neil Armstrong took Mankind's first steps on the Moon during the Apollo eleven mission in nineteen sixty nine.
Paul for Man arm By a faf for man.
Everyone remembers that it was a monumental milestone of the twentieth century, but people tend to forget how quickly the world moved on, how easily the impossible became routine. NASA continued to visit the Moon in future Apollo missions, six of them in all, but each time public interest fell off. By the time of the Apollo seventeen mission in December nineteen seventy two, NASA had decided this would be the last mission for at least a decade to commemorate it.
NASA and the US State Department sponsored what they called the International Youth Science Tour. It worked like this, Every country in the UN was invited to send a youth representative to watch the final Moon mission. Kids aged fifteen to seventeen were eligible. They'd see everything from the launch at Kennedy Space Center to the splashdown on TV from
UN headquarters in New York City. The seventeen day trip would also include Disneyland, and the kids would get something else besides a front row seat to a Moon mission. NASA was arranging for each kid to receive a piece.
Of Moon rock.
They would present it to their country as a good will gesture from the United States to the world. Gathering moonrocks was a priority of the Apollo missions. The samples revealed clues about the age of the Moon and how it might have been formed. A Moon rock was one sentence or a sentence fragment in the story of our galaxy. For Jamie, the chance to hold the rock in his hand would come later. For now, his objective was seeing a rocket launch, which was plenty exciting. Canada's Youth Science
Foundation organized an essay contest the topic. The importance of space exploration to humanity. I mean, obviously two thousand words in which Jamie brought forth a passionate argument for reaching the stars and beyond. He and a friend both entered, both sent their essays off, and then they waited. In November nineteen seventy two, Jamie received a letter from the US embassy in Ottawa. There were a few words on the page, but Jamie just focused on one of them, congratulations.
It said You're.
Going to the United States. It was somewhat bittersweet. Jamie winning meant his friend didn't. There was another wrinkle. Remember that the contest was only open to kids between fifteen and seventeen. Jamie was thirteen. He lied about his age when he submitted his essay.
They found out a little bit before I got there, but because there are other things that I had to do, and I guess finally I said that how old I was. They didn't like it, but by that time it was too late, so I got to go.
Jamie had just turned fourteen, so they let it slide. Still, he was the youngest of the eighty kids from around the world who would see Apollo seventeen touched down on the Moon. His parents naturally were thrilled.
Oh, they loved it, so they thought it was wonderful for me.
The International Youth Science Tours first stop was in Washington, d C. Where a chartered plane delivered an assembly of students to the current president, Richard Milhouse Nixon. Nixon was a proponent of the space program. He had arranged for moon rock samples to be dispensed from the Apollo eleven mission and was doing the same for Apollo seventeen. Jamie met Nixon, but the President didn't leave much of an impression.
To be honest, I don't remember anything that he did. I remember shaking his hand, and that's about all I know. I know, to be honest, that that time. To me, it was just another guy. So there were other more people later that I liked, but Nixon nah.
When the tour moved to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Jamie was put in a hotel room next to the man he really wanted to meet, the first human on the moon.
We were in a hotel with Neil Armstrong, and in fact I with Neil Armstrong. His wife and his kids were in the pool together for the entire afternoon, and so I got to do Marco Polo with the man that went on the Moon. There you go.
All of them went to Kennedy Space Center for the launch of Apollo seventeen. This launch was notable not only for being the last manned Moon mission, but the first Saturn five rocket to take off.
At night one zero.
We have a lift dog.
It's just like daylight here at Kennedy Space Center.
The Battern five is moving off the pad. It lifted off at mid nate and so it was like the sun rose. It was really amazing. It really was amazing.
Jamie and the others were situated about three miles from the Saturn rocket. That may not sound close, but consider that three miles was roughly the distance any shrapnel would be able to travel in the event the rocket blew up.
Yeah.
Yeah, In fact, it's really loud, but also so loud that all of your body is shaking at the time. It's it's really loud. But it was wonderful. It really was. I had not known what it would be like, and no one else will ever see it again, so it was wonderful for me.
Later, Jamie went to mission control at the Manned Spacecraft in Houston, which is now named for Lyndon Johnson. You've seen it or a version of it in practically every movie ever made about space travel. Lots of guys with flat buzz cuts and short sleeve shirts, sweating over every switch, flipped and root to the moon. But Jamie got to see the real thing in person on a screen. Astronauts
Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt traversed the lunar surface. Cernan was the commander, Schmidt the co pilot, and the only trained geologist to ever visit the Moon.
There mark gravity okay down to get to.
Work, the men leapt between boulders the size of U haul trailers in the Moon's Taurus litro valley. They rode a lunar rover over uneven terrain and they chipped away rock, coming away with one sample, in particular the size of a brick. But it was when Eugene Sernon spoke to the camera that the Youth Tour really began to perk up.
During the moonwalks, we were there at mission control and then on the last moonwalk just before they left the moon, Sunan, who was the captain, and Smith, who was the other person on the moon. They got a big rock, and they brought it to the camera and said, this is for you, this is for us. They said, when they gets back to Earth, they'll you get it into small places and each of us will get one.
And we did so.
Yeah, the Moon Rock was what we're getting that. It was wonderful, It really was.
Here's what Eugene Cernan said to the kids that.
Day, when we return this rock. Are some of the others like it? The Houston, we'd like to share a piece of this rock, but so many of the countries throughout the world. We hope that this will be a symbol of what our feelings are, what the feelings of the Apollo program are, and a symbol of mankind that we can live in peace and harmony in the future.
The tour wound down after that, Jamie and the others watched on TV from the United Nations Building as the capsule splashed down, and soon Jamie was headed back home to be escorted to the Canadian border by Secret Service agents. But Jamie wasn't yet in possession of the rock.
No well, because it was on the moot, So they had to wait until they got back and then they had this right get into little pieces and then each one was not in a peaks of plastic. And then it got to me like in a month or so, so somebody had held them and said that they were going to kidnap me and the rock, even though it wasn't there.
The police guarded his house for a few months afterward. Eventually they grew satisfied that the kidnapping threat against Jamie would never materialize. This isn't a story, by the way, about a young Canadian science enthusiast getting kidnapped, but that young Canadian moonrock. The brick sized moonrock would be analyzed by NASA scientists before it was divvied up for one hundred and thirty five countries plus every US state and territory.
A few weeks later, via special delivery, Canada's Peace arrived on Jamie's front doorstep. The rock fragment was encased in looseight. Below it was a Canadian flag which had been brought to the Moon and back. The junior astronomer was in possession of something very few civilians have ever seen up close, a moon rock, a little over one gram in size.
It was very dark. People don't realize that the moon is really dark. We only see it because it's in the sky at night. But if you look at it without that, it reflects only about five six seven percent of the light from the sun, so it's almost like carcoal.
Jamie didn't put it in a safety deposit box, nor did he stick it anywhere for safe keeping. It went in a shoe box under his bed, where it could be periodically pulled out to show family or friends, or just to stare at before going to bed. Once it even wound up in the family car.
It was in our car without theos locked at all for about two hours, and it was just there. Somebody could have done it.
But Jamie had been only a temporary custodian. The moondust sprinkled over his life for a fleeting period of time. In early nineteen seventy three, he got a notice it was time to hand the moon Rock over to its intended recipient, the country of Canada. During a ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, Jamie dutifully but dolefully handed over the rock to Roland Missioner, the Governor General. Because Canada didn't want him to leave empty handed, they prepared a gift for him in return.
You know what I got in Retune. I got a book called the Birds of Canada.
Did Canada confuse astronomy with ornithology? Jamie never found out why he was given a book about birds. Maybe it's all they had lying around. But Governor General Mishner was not the final stop for the moon Rock. It was given to the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Ottawa, and for Jamie it was like being forced to put it up for adoption. He agonized over the rocks well being for.
A few years. I didn't go and see it, but I would call them occasionally and just say how is it.
Then in nineteen seventy eight, Jamie made his customary call. The museum had some bad news for Jamie.
I called and it was gone and they said that it was stolen, And I thought, jeez, if you could have done that, I should have just kept it in a jew box in my bed.
There was a reason the US government dispatched the Secret Service to meet Jamie Matthews at the airport. Of course, they were concerned for the welfare of a child on a good will trip to improve foreign relations, but there was another factor at play. Moon rocks are one of the great black markets in the world. They're worth millions.
This moon rock ended up in my pocket for almost twenty four hours.
That's Joseph Goudheims. Joseph has one heck of a resume.
Started off as an Army aviator and intelligence officer and went to work for the FA. I was recruited away as a special agent, recruited away from the FA by US Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General. And then I was recruited away from DOTIG by NASA Origent, where I served for about ten years a loooover actually as a senior special agent, which means I headed up task force investigations.
That's right, NASA has special agents. They're armed, they can make arrests. They look into things like missing NASA property, people pretending to be astronauts, and cybercrime. How this isn't a CSI spin off yet is beyond me. But anyway, In the late nineteen nineties, Joseph took note of the fact that a number of the moon rocks gifted by the United States to foreign governments couldn't be accounted for. Some countries said they had no record of receiving them.
Others said they had been reported missing or stolen, and sometimes Joseph would get word of a con man who purported to have a moonrock for sale. Usually they didn't, it would be a fake, like two brothers who insisted their father had been given some moon rocks by astronaut John Glenn. John Glenn was an astronaut, but he never went to the Moon. For the most part, moon rocks
belong to NASA and the US government. Some have been retrieved by Russia and China, and some lunar meteorites have landed on Earth, but most moon samples were from the Apollo missions. They can only be gifted or loaned out by NASA. If anyone acquires an Apollo mission moonrock from anyone other than NASA, well that would be wrong. It would have to be offered, as in the case of the Apollo eleven and seventeen missions.
NASA takes the position, as does the United States, that nobody can own a moon rock or duns. And so we gifted to the nations the world one hundred and thirty five Paull eleven moon rocks on a stand. And we gifted to the nations of the world one hundred and thirty five moon rocks on a plaque like this, And essentially these were our way of saying, hey, look all the members of the United Nations were all in
on this together. We may be sending the rockets to and from the boon, but this is a global effort.
There is one sort of exception.
The astronauts when they came back from the boom.
The moon isn't exactly a sterile working environment like coal miners, astronauts can come home dirty.
They were allowed to keep their gloves and patches, and on the patches and gloves was lootered debris. And so there was one astronaut that would actually bang on his gloves and cut pieces of his pattions apart and put him in painting city. And so essentially NASA ruled Okay, we kind of gifted that away too.
But for most people who haven't been blasted into space, being in possession of a lunar rock is suspicious and it didn't sit right with Joe.
Risk to our astronauts. Remember we had astronauts guy in practice and a follow one. These guys were risking their lives. They got it, they accomplished something. The world united seeing Gil Armstrong take that first step down the boom and the idea that petty thugs would be stealing these moon rocks for their own wealth something that I never could understand and it seemed wrong. It's something that I wanted to accomplish when I was an agent.
So in nineteen ninety eight, Joseph decided to take a closer look at the illicit moon rock market. His idea was incredibly simple. He would invite criminals to come to him.
And essentially what we did was we put an ad in USA today moon Rocks wanted with an astronaut jumping on the moon, and I was looking for con artists to approach me so that we could do the sting operation.
Moon Rocks wanted send asking price. What Joseph expected were a series of calls from con artists, and he did get some of those, but then he got a call from someone named Alan.
What we didn't expect guy by the name of Alan Rosen to call me and say, hey, look, get all those other guys that are calling you. That's bogus. You're not you know, nobody's allowed to own a moon rock. But guess what I've got and it's for sale. And I said, what's the asking price? He said five billion dollars.
Alan didn't sound like the others. For one thing, he had proof he was in possession of a moon rock. He sent Joseph ado of the very same plaque used in the Goodwill Moonrock Tour, the wooden plaque with the country's flag and Nixon's dedication. Alan, however, had taken one measure to make a positive identification of which country it was from a little more difficult.
The center of the flag was blocked out, as was the recipient country. We contacted one country after the next, and we found out, guess what, nobody knows where their moon rocks are. We gifted the moon rocks, and they don't know where they are. Some thought they never even received them.
Joseph later learned that the rock belonged to Honduras. So began the plan for the world's first ever sting operation to recover a stolen moonrock. But there was another problem. Alan knew what he had was very rare and very valuable. His asking price was five million dollars. In order to provide Alan with proof of funds, Joe needed five million dollars and Nasaid didn't pay him that well. So he went to the FBI, who, according to Joseph, told him they couldn't help. So he went to the CIA, and
they couldn't help either. Finally, Joseph called his father, a former marine. His father didn't have the money, but he had something more valuable, some fatherly advice. His dad told him to make a phone call to one person in particular.
And so what we did was we contacted the guy by name of h Ross Brung, the billionaire who ran for president nineteen ninety two, and got through to his secretary and I said, hey, look, I need a need a favor I'm looking for somebody. Can't really talk about it, but if h Ross broke all life, I'll convey that information to him.
H Ross Proro was one of the great characters of the nineteen nineties, an excitable Texas billionaire who ran for president in nineteen ninety two as an independent. He got almost twenty million votes and lost to Bill Clinton, but that didn't affect his patriotism.
Ten seconds later, the phone rings and h Ross pros on the other side and he goes, hello, Joe, how can I help you? I said, mister prow what we need is five million dollars to get back a moon rock.
He goes no problem, and with the money in hand and the bank willing to give a letter saying that we had the money, and so forth we set up staying at a bank in Miami where he had the moon rock in a vault, and so we put in an undercover agent in the bank to pretending be an official that's going to photograph it.
Alan agreed to meet in Miami and have a bank official photographed the moon rock so Joseph could verify that Alan had it. Only the bank official was an undercover agent. Joseph and his colleagues were waiting for Alan outside. It turned out Alan had acquired the rock from Colonel Argucia Ugarte, who claimed he'd been given it in the nineteen seventies during political unrest in Honduras. Alan had agreed to buy
it for fifty thousand dollars. A judge had approved a warrant to seize the rock, But now Joseph had to get it back to NASA, which brings us back to his pocket.
And so I fly back from Miami to Houston, and the boot rocks in my pocket, got a briefcase I've armed, and the whole nine yards and what I was thinking was, if someone's going to steal anything, they're going to steal the briefcase. They're not going to steal what's in my pocket. And so then we brought that back immediately to Space Center's Lunar Lab, where it was tested.
The sting, which was dubbed Operation Lunar Eclipse, was successful. Alan Rosen tried to get the rock returned to him in court, arguing he obtained it legally, but a judge sided with NASA and ruled the rock had to be forfeited to the US government. The Space Agency then returned it to Honduras, but NASA didn't have the resources to make a hunt for missing moon rocks an ongoing project.
When Joseph retired from the Space Agency in two thousand, he decided to outsource the search to a group he knew would be very devoted to the cause, his students at the University of Phoenix.
But again, NASA Office of Inspector General is very, very small. We have under one hundred agents, and so I could not sell them with the idea of expending resources to look for moon rocks that we gifted away. And so when I retired from NASA, i started telling my graduate criminal justice graduate students, I've got this really great investigative rill that i want you to go through. It's called
the Moon Rock Project. And here are all the moon rocks that we're trying to account for all over the world. I want you to go out and try to find it. And what we did not realize at the time was that so many were actually stolen and missing, and that virtually no country had it in an inventory control system, that even if they had it, they knew where they were.
Systematically, He and his students tried to chase down as many leads as they could for the missing rock, which turned up in some surprising places. The Apollo seventeen rock gifted to Arkansas was found in the archives of former Governor Bill Clinton. His predecessor, David Pryor, had received it in nineteen seventy six, and it was probably just packed
up when Clinton lost reelection in nineteen eighty. He was one of three governors who happened to be in possession of a rock in Cyprus, the American ambassador had been assassinated. A diplomat's relative grabbed the rock and held on to it until she read about the missing rocks. In two thousand and nine, some rocks were in storage, at least one probably wound up in a landfill. Joseph and his team found seventy eight of them, but many are still missing.
And those are just and again one hundred and fifty are missing. Some of the states are missing them, the Orcs missing their Paul Levin. Delaware's missing their apoul eleven. New Jersey's missing their Poulo seventeen, and a lot of the nations the world are missing them. No doubt, there's no doubt in my mind that there is a black market.
But what about Canada's Goodwill Rock, the Jamie Matthews Rock. By the time Joseph began his Moon Rock project in two thousand and two, Jamie's rock had been missing for well over two decades, and it carried a significant price tag.
One of a kind and to a collector, that's in value. When we in Operation Lunar Eclipse, and remember this goes back sometime the seller Alan Rosen offered it to be for five hundred dollars and I said, oh well, let me research that and talk to you. And I talked to some experts in Nassa. Prices that's what they said. But along the lines of priceless, five million dollars could be a re.
And as Jo's students began diving into the story, they discovered something odd.
In two thousand and two, they started finding the story that he's recounting that it was stolen in nineteen seventy eight. And I'm going to my students, I go, that's not acceptable. It's not acceptable that you're getting a story that says it was stolen. Where's the police report, where's the newspaper stories. You know, this is a piece of Canadian history and NASA history. Where is the trail? And so they kept cracking it.
There was no police report and no news stories. Jamie's Moonrock was nowhere. For years afterward, Jamie had kept on calling the museum asking if the Moonrock had reappeared.
I kept calling back like every year to find out, and they said, we don't know. And finally, after like ten years, I just said, Okay, it's never gonna get back.
The nineteen seventies turned into the nineteen eighties. Jamie attended the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario. He got a job. He sometimes forgot about the rock the nineteen eighties turned into the nineteen nineties and then the two thousands. When something is missing for decades, the odds of ever finding it again are slim. The moon Rock had officially wound up on the proverbial milk carton.
Then one day in two thousand and eight, Jamie decided to use the single best investigative tool of them all, Google. In two thousand and eight, Jamie wasn't really looking for the rock fragment, but for the rock itself. He was hoping to find a picture of the larger piece, the one the astronauts of Apollo seventeen had returned to Earth with before it was segmented into smaller sections. But when he tried googling, he found something else instead.
And I wanted to get a thing before it was gotten into all those passes, so the big thing the first time. So I was looking there, I figured somebody must have it, and then I found my thing.
What Jamie found was a photo of a man holding his moon rock, really Canada's moon rock, but still it was on the plaque. The digital photo had a visible watermark with the date. The photo was from two thousand, eight years prior. Jamie was able to trace the origin of the photo to a storage facility in Aylmer, Quebec, one that belonged to the museum. He phoned the curator and.
I said, wait what And so I looked and I found out that it was in a warehouse in a place in Quebec for thirty five years and nobody knows how it got there. But as soon as I knew it, I called the curator and I said, hey, you've got my room rock. It took me a while to say because he didn't believe me at first.
As more of the story came out, it seemed increasingly unlikely the rock had ever been stolen. The museum had no record of a theft, Joseph Goudheinz had never found a police report. More than likely it had been clinton and misplaced for decades. Here's Joseph Goodheinz again.
What my guess is, and only having dealt with these all over the world is because nobody accounted for these that after they were done with their lou tour, they they said, okay, where do we put them over in storage over here? They did and it was sort of like you know in box three thousand and five, who knows, But they just lost bracket it over the decades.
But why had the museum told Jamie the rock had been stolen instead of misplaced?
And nobody knows how it got there. So it's a little bit like Indiana Jones at the Last movie, except for me. It's like Indiana Jamie and the Lost Run Rock. It was just there and nobody knows how it got there. Nobody knows because if you go back to that time, nobody is around anymore.
Maybe they simply wanted him to stop calling. But there's another wrinkle to the story. Remember that Joseph and his graduate students were looking into the rock as early as two thousand and two. Jamie found the photo in two thousand and eight.
My students actually tracked it down in two thousand and three.
Then, according to Joseph, his students had actually located the rock five years earlier, in two thousand and three in Aylmer, not through Google.
But through detective work.
They called every museum and museum associated building in the area. The problem was, no one told Jamie.
Well, here's the thing, He's not wrong two thousand. He probably did discover it two thousand and eight because the problem with that Boon Rock is. It was never into an inventory control system, and maybe there was somebody that discovered it nineteen ninety five, but to discover it, there it is, and then you forget about it.
Jamie didn't realize they had it until two thousand and eight, and it wasn't until two thousand and nine when Boy and Rock were reunited. The National Museum of Natural Sciences now known as the Canadian Museum of Nature wasn't able to put the Moon Rock back on display, so it went to the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa on loan. There, Jamie was able to see it for the first time in over thirty years. Fittingly, it was
the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo eleven moon landing. Canada's goodwill Moon Rock is now with the Canadian Museum of Nature, where it periodically goes on display. The rock's journey had been a little murky. Jamie's wasn't. A love of astronomy turned into a love of astrophysics. He became doctor Jamie Matthews and then Professor Jamie Matthews, an astrophysicist at the University of British Columbia, where he measures the vibrations of stars too far away to be seen by a telescope
on Earth, not even a telescope in a cemetery. A stroke has resulted in some expressive aphasia, a little trouble finding words, but it hasn't slowed his work.
Or his love for it.
Bearing witness to the Apollo seventeen mission, caring for a piece of lunar rock set him on a path for life.
Oh no, it was really good for me. So after this I did lots of things after that with space and astronomy and so on. So no, this was like, come on, how many people have their own moonlock? I mean, it's wonderful for me, and so that will always be one of the things that I'll like is the fact that I actually am had a real moon rock. And so yeah, I couldn't expect anything more than that, to be honest.
There was a study released in late twenty twenty three the Apollo seventeen lunar lander module, which was left behind on the Moon, may be causing tiny moonquakes small changes to the lunar surface from the materials expanding and contracting with temperature changes. But Apollo seventeen has been causing those
tremors For a long time. The mission reverberated through dozens of teenagers who were invited to witness history in nineteen seventy two, Through people like Joseph Goodheitz, who want to protect the legacy of those missions, missions that were only possible because astronauts sacrificed themselves in our pursuit of lofty goals, And through Jamie Matthews, who for a brief time owned a tiny piece of it all and got a book about birds in return.
And I still have it, of course, So no, now it's it really is nice for me, But at the time it was like birds.
Nah, okay, I have to feel like coming back that. Playing Marco Polo with Neil Armstrong is like maybe the biggest flex of all time.
Oh are you kidding me? He touched the moon? You got touch him playing Marco Polo. I mean, not to be weird about it, but you're like, Neil Boom got you.
That's crazy.
He touched the moon and so if you touched him, it's like you've touched the moon.
Yeah, it's like two degrees of Kevin Bacon but the moon.
And in that story he just casually mentions like, oh, Yeah, I met Richard Nixon, but nah didn't do anything for him.
Yeah, so good.
I love Jamie.
I have to say, though, like living in LA and like pitching TV constantly, you're always like talking to network executives who are just like we're looking for like the next procedural we really want, just like a crime procedural.
And I'm like, where is NASA's Special Agents? Where's that show?
I mean that is like CBS written all over it.
Oh God, right CSI, NASA?
Yeah, are you kidding me?
Now?
Did you guys have a very special character of this episode that was your favorite?
Do you have one that just jumped out for you? Hmm?
Jason, I was thinking about going with Neil Armstrong and his wife and kids splashing around the pool, which.
Just was a cool cameo.
But did we just talked about Neil?
I actually think the very special character in this episode is me, Dana Schwartz, the volunteer at the Adler Planetarium, tangentially related to the story, just devoted to educating the next generation of space loving kids.
Actually, I have a different character.
Let me just is it awesome? Me?
How about the guy at the museum who, after fielding these calls for several years, just decides like, I know how to put an end to this.
This.
I'll tell him it's stolen. What a great way to get someone off your back.
Yeah, that is one hundred percent a great way to get someone off your back. In fact, I think I've done that. They're like, oh, I don't know where it is your carb has stolen? Man to stop calling me now, Dan, I gotta say, in all honesty, you were also my favorite Special Episode characters. So I don't know what you know why Jason was thinking, but I went with you too.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Top five, Top five.
Yeah, come on, volunteers. We got to support the volunteers. Do it for love.
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people. This episode was written by Jake Rawson. Our producer, editor and sound designer is Josh Fisher. Additional editing by John Washington, Mixing and mastering by Behead Fraser. Very Special Episodes is hosted by Danis Schwartz, Sarah Burnette and me Jason English. Original music by Lise McCoy. Our story editor is Marisa Brown. Research in fact checking by Marissa Brown Austin Thompson and
Jake Rawson. Show logo by Lucy Kntania. Our executive producer is me Jason English. Go to see you back here next week after our first Very Special field trip Very Special Episodes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.