The opening of Ben Paynter’s “The Meteor Farmer,” a 2007 Wired article about a Midwestern man hunting for the remains of rock that had fallen to Kansas from heavens:

“For two weeks, Steve Arnold trudged through the dusty farmland of Kiowa County, Kansas, a 6-foot rope trailing over his shoulder. Tied to the end of the rope was a metal detector cobbled together from PVC pipe and duct tape. Back and forth Arnold paced, pulling the jury-rigged device across the dirt, hunting for meteorites. He had already found a few, but nothing bigger than 100 pounds or so. Mostly, he found horseshoes. And beer cans. Soon the farmers would want him off their land; planting season was coming. To speed things up, Arnold attached his contraption to a tractor. He was sure there was a bigger rock out there, just a few feet beneath the turf.

On a Thursday afternoon, his rig yelped, a shrill beep sounding through his headphones. He drove forward, tires pulling in the fine soil, and the detector crescendoed to an electric wail. Arnold saved the coordinates on his GPS receiver, marked the spot with a pile of dirt, and pulled out his cell phone.

Three days later, Arnold and his partner and investor – an oil and gas attorney from San Antonio named Philip Mani – were attacking the site with a backhoe. After digging down about 5 feet, Arnold scrabbled into the hole with a shovel and started clearing. Finally, the blade clanged against something metallic. The more dirt he moved, the more meteorite he exposed. They lowered the backhoe scoop and strapped the rock to it. Grinding and whining, the machine pulled free the biggest meteorite Arnold had ever seen.

Its shell was mottled, stippled like ground beef. That’s a pattern typical of pallasites, the rarest type of meteorite on Earth. One side was rounded and streamlined by passage through the atmosphere. ‘It’s oriented, Steve!’ Mani shouted. ‘It’s oriented!’

About the size of a beer keg, the rock weighed 1,430 pounds, the largest pallasite ever found in the US. By Arnold’s reckoning, it was worth more than $1 million.” (Thanks Longform.)

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“A modern-day treasure hunter was searching for something out of this world–literally”: