‘It was a door stop for 51 years. It was recognized as a meteorite by a prisoner.’

Bruce Wegmann was bored--laid up for a year with a back injury--when he started rummaging through old boxes and found a meteorite he had bought as an 11-year-old visitor to Arizona’s Meteor Crater. It sparked a trip to the library for research and launched a passion that left his 10-year career as a machinist in the dust. Now well-versed in meteorites, the 36-year-old Wegmann is a fixture at local gem and mineral shows . He gives talks at schools, clubs, museums and the Del Mar Fair and is bent on putting San Diego County on the map--meteorically speaking. Not a single fallen star has been found and documented here, but he plans to change that by educating the public. He lives sparingly in an apartment with three pet parrots and numerous safes that store his meteorite collection. He trades specimens that range in price from $5 to several thousand dollars. It barely pays the rent, but Wegmann is waiting for the payoff he is convinced will come--when someone finds a funny-looking rock and realizes it is the first extraterrestrial specimen found in the county. Wegmann was interviewed by Times staff writer Nancy Reed and photographed by Dave Gatley.

Meteorites have turned up in very unusual places. The craziest story I have heard that I know to be true is in the case of the Beaver, Okla., stone meteorite. It was found in the 1930s, plowed up by a farmer, and it weighed 56 pounds, so this was not just a pebble. And the farmer had it lying around the yard for a while. Evidently at that time Beaver was one of those tiny little towns, and the local sheriff knew everybody and made periodic trips just to see everybody and make sure they were OK. Somehow, the sheriff saw the stone in the farmer’s yard, and the sheriff had a use for it. The farmer said, “Take it.”

As far as the farmer was concerned, it was just a nuisance rock.

The sheriff took it back to the station and it was used as a door stop for 51 years. It was recognized as a meteorite by one of the prisoners.

During the American Meteoritical Society Conference in 1984, we spent some time outside Albuquerque hunting for meteorites. There is a field about 60 miles from the city and we spent a day broiling in the heat, at the end of which, after 18 hours, we recovered two pieces.

That little rock is almost 4 billion years old--it fell out in the desert some hundreds of years ago, totally unobserved--and I was the first human being to see it and pick it up.

It was wonderful. I must admit it was terribly uncomfortable out in that heat--I must have walked 10 miles--but finding that made it all worthwhile.

There are 26 known meteorites in California, one of which is a witnessed fall.

It was in San Juan Capistrano in 1976, I believe. A 50-gram stone went through the aluminum roof of a guy’s carport and it hit the driveway and broke into two pieces.

The guy was in the habit of sweeping out his carport every morning, and he didn’t pay any attention to it. He swept it into the garbage. Later on, somebody noticed the hole in the roof and the guy knew the hole wasn’t there the day before. That initiated the search for the offending projectile and he found a meteorite in the trash. If it had missed his carport, and still been in plain sight on the ground, it never would have been recovered.

I always encourage people to bring over things that they think are meteorites. Finding one in San Diego is long overdue.

Obviously, hardly anybody living today is going to get a chance to get out to explore space, but little bits of space are always coming down to us.

Finding a meteorite is the closest thing to space exploration you or I are ever likely to get a chance to do.

The odds are that the first San Diego meteorite has been found, but the person who picked it up doesn’t know it. It could very well be in somebody’s shoe box someplace.