Monday, December 19, 2016

"Good Night, Moon"

The waning gibbous

20.2 days old

69.1 lit

December 18, 2016
By Brinke Guthrie

It seems that Nancy Carlson (click here) of Inverness, Illinois spent $995 to buy a small, rather innocuous looking “lunar sample return bag” at an auction held by the U.S. Marshals Service. No problem there, right? Go shopping, place the winning bid, pay the amount, have a nice day. Ah, but there’s more to the story than meets the eye.

Houston, we do indeed have a problem.

According to the website collectSPACE.com, the bag came to be at the auction after it was “forfeited along with other artifacts found in the home of Max Ary, a former curator convicted in 2006 of stealing and selling space artifacts that belonged to the Cosmosphere space museum in Hutchinson, Kansas.” Ary spent two years in prison and was fined $132,000....

Mark your calendars for 2017.