In March 1975, two amateur prospectors trekked deep into the remote Old Woman Mountains in the Mojave Desert. Like others long before and after them, the pair were hoping to find gold and strike it rich. 

Instead, they stumbled upon something much rarer: a giant, shiny dark hunk of rock, gleaming against the dusty browns and tans of the surrounding desert. ‘‘I tapped it, and right away I knew what it was,” recalled Mike Jendruczak, one of the wannabe gold miners, in a 1977 article by the Washington Post. 

Jendruczak had seen similar rocks in pictures and at museums. “So I was pretty sure it was a meteorite,” he told the paper.

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At first, Jendruczak and his prospecting partner, David Friburg, thought they still might get rich from the hulking piece of space rock, which weighed in at over 2 tons. But what followed was a yearslong legal battle that raised broader questions about who owns geological specimens found on public lands, the value of keeping items for scientific research versus putting them on public display, and tensions between California and the federal government. 

By some counts, California won the battle. Around 50 years after that saga, the meteorite is still here in the state, sitting in a sandy-colored government building in Barstow, just off Interstate 15. At least, it’s supposed to be.

There’s just one problem: Basically, no one has actually seen the meteorite for years now. Despite public plans to rehabilitate the Old Woman Meteorite’s home, Barstow’s Desert Discovery Center, the place is locked up tight. Trash blows in and collects in crevasses around the building, and it’s not clear when, if ever, the building will return to public life.

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Because the Old Woman Meteorite — the largest ever found in California and the second largest in the U.S. — was collected from public land owned by the United States, it falls under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which places the ownership of certain objects found on federal lands with the United States government, according to a 2012 paper on the meteorite’s discovery by researchers at the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Mineral Sciences and another researcher from the University of Western Ontario’s Department of Philosophy.

—The Disney adult is a made-up problem—Eerie........

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