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Gutheinz was responsible for the 1998 "Operation Lunar Eclipse" sting at NASA and intercepted a $5 million sale of a moon rock President Richard Nixon gave to the government of Honduras after the last Apollo mission. Of the 270 moon rocks given to nations around the world as gifts, Gutheinz said 160 are unaccounted for, stolen or lost. Another 18 moon rocks from Apollo 11 and six from Apollo 17, gifted to U.S. states, also are unaccounted for or missing. Gutheinz and students from his classes are responsible for directly or indirectly recovering 79 moon rocks since 2002, including lunar rocks presented to several governors. A retired dentist had the West Virginia rock, which Sandy Shelton, one of Gutheinz's former students, tracked down. "I am very pleased that I was able to give back to West Virginia what was rightfully theirs, and to know that the young generation will have a piece of history to look at from the moon," said Shelton, who lives in Minneapolis. Bill Clinton's gubernatorial items yielded the Arkansas moon rock. The Alaska rock is now part of a court battle. The Missouri rock was found among boxes of things when former Gov. Kit Bond retired from the U.S. Senate. The late Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi's U.S. moon rock remains lost. But there's evidence a grandson of the late Spanish dictator Francisco Franco has tried to sell his grandfather's U.S. gift in Switzerland. A few lunch customers at the Pitt Grill looked up curiously from their chicken fried steaks as Navarro set up a microscope for Gutheinz to inspect his prized possession: a pointy, black metallic pebble an inch or so tall and its crumbs. The scrapings are from the rock that Navarro carries in his pants pocket, wrapped like a tamale in plastic food wrap and aluminum foil. He said he got the rock from a maid, now elderly and in failing health, who worked for a Venezuelan diplomat who told people it was a moon rock. "No way NASA can say the rock is not," he said, showing letters from NASA experts who told him a few years ago it wasn't from the moon. Gutheinz said Navarro reminded him of others who claim to possess a moon rock. "But the difference is they hide it," Gutheinz said. "They squirrel it away and they don't want anybody to know they have it."
[Associated
Press;
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