Nixon gave fragments of Apollo rock to 135 countries and all fifty US states. By 2002 about 160 of them could not be found.

They were mounted on plaques and handed to heads of state, and then governments fell, offices were cleared and nobody kept a register. A retired NASA investigator and his students have since tracked down something like seventy-eight, one of them through a sting operation in a Miami restaurant. Selling one is illegal: they were gifts to nations, not to people.