Meet the Pennsylvania man who hunts meteorites for a living

Brett Joseph Cohen was manning the only meteorite stall at the Philadelphia Mineralogical Society‘s annual trade show on Sunday morning. Chunks of asteroids and lunar rocks glinted on his table. He’d affixed a hand-lettered sign to one display: “This meteorite fell 12 days ago and was recovered by me in Northern Ohio.” And he was desperate to get back there. Two weeks before, Cohen had been at home in Ambler, Pennsylvania, recently back from another gem convention in New York, when word began spreading that a massive meteor had crossed the skies of northwestern Pennsylvania and Ohio. Social media lit up with accounts of a “sonic boom.” Cohen dropped everything and hit the road.

“It’s immediate. You pack your bags, say goodbye to everybody, and just leave,” he said. For the next several days, in the company of about 25 other professional meteor hunters, he scoured muddy farm fields and public lands in Medina County, Ohio, searching for pieces of a six-foot-wide, seven-ton chunk of asteroid. Meteor hunters use radar, weather reports, and other techniques to pinpoint an area in which meteor parts might have fallen. In Ohio, this “strewn field” is about 10 miles wide.

Cohen and his counterparts search publicly accessible land first, and then start door knocking at farms. He typically offers a share of the profits if he finds a meteorite on private land. Pieces of the Ohio meteor — likely from Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the belt that hovers between Mars and Jupiter — are selling for about $400 to $500 a gram. Prices will likely drop over the next few weeks, Cohen said.

So far, Cohen has found five fragments of it, shimmering black pebbles with unique “spikes” that formed as the stones separated from the larger meteor, melted as they plummeted through the upper atmosphere, and cooled on their journey toward the earth.

On Cohen’s website, larger meteorites — including lunar fragments blasted into Earth’s atmosphere when another asteroid hit the moon — can fetch thousands. But, Cohen says, for him, the lure of meteor hunting is less about the money and more about the chance to touch a piece of the cosmos.

“It’s about recovering a stone that was just flying around in outer space for 4.6 billion years,” he said.

He sends some of his finds to scientists for research, and sells and loans others to museums. On the ground in Ohio, he’s taken time to show locals how to identify meteorites they might find on their own land. Sometimes, he buys fragments from them.

One hopeful meteorite hunter turned up with a pile of potential asteroid chunks that turned out to be pieces of asphalt. “I told her that it wasn’t a meteorite. But she actually found two the next day,” Cohen said. “I ended up buying one of them off of her at a retail price.”

Cohen, 41, grew up in Huntingdon Valley and majored in marketing at Colorado State University. He has been fascinated by meteorites since childhood. Six years ago, he decided to turn his hobby into a full-time job. He splits his time between chasing recently fallen rocks and attending gem and mineral conventions. He can rattle off his favorite meteorites (a chunk of a 160-foot meteorite that fell in Arizona 50,000 years ago; a piece of a meteorite that fell in the Czech Republic in 1400 and is rumored to be haunted).

And he has formed friendships with the other meteor hunters who travel North America for finds. On the trail in Ohio, they’ve eaten dinner together every night and swapped tips about their searches.

“I feel a little bit like Indiana Jones,” he said, laughing. “This is the most fun I’ve had on a meteorite hunt.” Cohen said he was eager to get back to Ohio. The main mass of the meteor was still out there — and time was of the essence. It had been rainy lately, and the ground was soft. He worried it would soon swallow the last traces of Vesta’s fragments.

“Somewhere in Ohio, there is an enormous stone,” he said. “It would be nice to get there before it’s hidden forever.”

Tribune News Service