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$601,500 for a pound of moon rock

There’s apparently big money in rocks from space. Steve Curry, an obsessive, self-taught meteorite hunter, listed some of his own rocks on eBay for huge amounts: a pound of moon rock for $601,500 and a hunk of Mars for $1.4 million. But the rocks weren’t all that they seemed, and Curry’s schemes eventually landed him in jail. [The Verge]


https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/25/17492902/m...cid=SigDig

The rock that fell to Earth

How a meteorite hunter’s obsession took him from the mountains of Colorado, to the Bundy Ranch, and eventually landed him in jail



By Brendan Borrell Jun 25, 2018, 9:37am EDT


Photography by Ryan David Brown; illustrations by Cam Floyd

Over the next eight years, Curry went from a passionate rockhound with a corny sense of humor to a disturbed man trapped inside a distorted universe of his own making. He rejected not only the standards of scientific evidence but also the most fundamental principles of our legal system.

Hmmm

This unlikely trajectory would ultimately leave Reed in desperate fear for his safety and Curry sitting in a jail cell in the desert, facing the rest of his life locked up.

With sovereign citizens, it isn’t easy to determine whether someone has the intent to inflict physical harm or if they just have a bad case of verbal diarrhea. They have been known to move unpredictably from so-called “paper terrorism” to real violence. The movement has its spiritual roots in the Posse Comitatus, a racist, anti-tax group that formed in 1969 and petered out in 1983 when a Posse member killed two US Marshals.

A 2014 survey of law enforcement officials ranked sovereigns as the number one terrorist threat, above jihadis and neo-Nazis. In 2014, a Las Vegas couple declared a “revolution” inside a Cicis Pizza restaurant and shot two police officers. Terry Nichols, the co-conspirator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, is a member of the sovereign movement; so is Jared Fogle, “the Subway Guy,” who was convicted of child molestation.

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