Plaque Bought At Garage Sale Turns Out To Be Louisiana's Missing Moon Rock

A long-missing moon rock from the Apollo 17 mission has finally been found. It turns out, it has been sitting in the home of a Florida man who bought it at a garage sale.

The now-found moon rock was a part of a larger moon rock piece collected by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, Robert Pearlman, journalist and space historian, reported in CollectSPACE. It was originally gifted to the state of Louisiana by former President Richard Nixon and was among the many moon rocks gifted to U.S. states that have since gone missing.

Louisiana, for instance, had two moon rocks: one from the Apollo 11 moon mission and another from the Apollo 17 mission. A local journalist found the Apollo 11 moon rock in 2018, the outlet noted, but the Apollo 17 moon rock remained missing at the time.

Apparently, the rock was in the possession of a man in Florida who said he likely bought it at a garage sale at some point in the last 15 years.

"I can't even tell you how long I owned it for," the man, who opted to remain anonymous, told CollectSPACE. "I'm not even sure how much I paid for it. I buy plaques because I take the wood from the plaques and I send it over to my gunstock guy and he makes grips for my Colts and so forth. The wood [in the plaques] is such nice wood that is what I buy them for."

He was looking for wood samples for a repair when he chanced upon his previous purchase and took a moment to check out what was written on the plaque, a part of which read that it was "presented to the people of the state of Louisiana by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration."

"I started reading it and thought, 'Hmm, that's a little strange,'" the man said further. "So I went to the internet and found out, 'Oh! They are looking for this puppy.'"

The man reached out to the Louisiana governor's office, which pointed him to the Louisiana State Museum, and he eventually hand-delivered the plaque instead of simply mailing it.

The museum celebrated the return of the long-lost moon rock, writing, "We're happy to have a Louisiana treasure back in our possession!"

How exactly it went missing remains a mystery, AP News reported, adding that the museum is still planning to review the item's authenticity.

"I just don't know about its chain of ownership," Steven Maklansky, interim director at the museum, said as per The Advocate. "As you can appreciate, I'm just happy that it is here now."

Today, the "vast majority" of the moon rocks returned from the moon landing missions are kept at NASA vaults, but the whereabouts of many of the gifted moon rocks remain unknown.