America's Greatest Meteorite Hunter
This has been a very interesting and rewarding year with respect to meteorite hunting.
Not only did I have the opportunity to take part in the filming of a TV show for the
travel channel called “Cash and Treasure” I’ve also had some wonderful hunting excursions.
These treks into the wilderness have yielded some beautiful pallasites, siderites and
of course chondrites both classified and unclassified.
While all of this has been great, I must admit that one experience stands out among the
rest. This year I had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know
Meteorite Hunter.
This prolific hunter has found over one hundred and twenty five unique meteorite
classifications. These include two urelites, one achondrite and a beautiful
His name is Skip Wilson, and for nearly forty years he has been scouring remote areas
of
An amazing fact about Skip is that all two hundred and eleven of his finds were made in
How did Skip find so many unique meteorite classifications in such a small area? The answer
may surprise you, as he did it by hunting mostly in areas called “blow outs.”
A blow out is a bowl-shaped area that is virtually devoid of any sand. The constant wind
in these particular areas formed the bowl by scooping out the sand, and exposing the hard
clay-like surface below. In the process of removing the sand, the wind also uncovered
hundreds of tiny stones. These stones that once rested upon the sand, now lay on the bottom
of the blow out. Occasionally, hidden among these terrestrial stones are meteorites.
Skip told me that he found his first meteorite in 1967 and that it took him two more years
to find the second. This is partly because he didn’t know how to go about finding meteorites
in an area of the state covered by farm land and sand dunes.
It wasn’t until he realized that these blow out areas held meteorites, and that all he
had to do was be able to recognize them in order to find them.
Recognize them he did. Skip found nearly fifty meteorites on just one blow out that was
about 40 acres in size. Incredibly, Skip didn’t find them all in a single day. Inner-mixed
with terrestrial stones the meteorites blended in so well it took him years to collect
them all.
Over the next four decades Skip simply went from blow out to blow out collecting meteorites.
It seems strange that these areas could hold so many meteorites until one realizes that the
ground upon which they
rested is very old. Ground samples collected by Skip were studied and some scientists
have estimated these blow out areas to be over one hundred thousand years old.
This is important because if the ground has remained unchanged for tens of thousands of
years, then it has had plenty of time to collect falling stars. Oddly enough all blow out
areas did not produce meteorites. In fact Skip says that many more blow outs were
completely void of meteorites than those that held them. This is something that no
one has been quite able to explain.
Skip Wilson and others like him have paved the way for meteorite hunters like me. It was
a pleasure meeting him and getting to experience first hand what he does so well.
I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be a meteorite hunter forty years ago
with such little information available on the subject. Somehow Skip made the quantum
leap in logic between knowing meteorites exist and being able to find them. In fact
he did it so well that it may be quite some time before another American meteorite
hunter can even come close.
Skip still hunts meteorites as time, and his knees permit and actually found yet another
new unclassified stone earlier this year. I’m sure that no matter how the meteorite market
changes, Skip Wilson will still be out silently doing what he does best, proving that he is,
America’s Greatest Meteorite Hunter.
