Need Cash? Just Auction Off a Meteorite

In the morning, Darryl Pitt said he was feeling the pressure. He was talking fast, very fast, as is his habit.

First he said that having his photograph taken felt “uncomfortable and wrong.” He changed his mind later on. That was after a public relations person from the American Museum of Natural History showed up and interrupted Mr. Pitt, who by then was talking about the mineral troilite.

The public relations person, Stephen A. Reichl, said to the reporter interviewing Mr. Pitt: “Mr. Pitt is not a curator of this museum. I hope you will get information from the curator.”

But Mr. Pitt had not run out of information. He was talking about meteorites. Not just any old ones, but one that will be auctioned on Oct. 28, a 30-pound chunk sliced off one of the most famous meteorites in the world, the 15 ?-ton one that Mr. Pitt was standing next to at the museum: the Willamette meteorite.

Once again, as it was at the opening of the museum’s Rose Center for Earth and Space in 2000, the Willamette meteorite is at the center of a brouhaha. An American Indian group in Oregon heard about the auction and accused Mr. Pitt of insensitivity for selling his fragment, which Bonhams, the auction house handling the sale, says has an estimated value of $1.1 million to $1.3 million.

The Indian group, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, considers the entire meteorite — which was found on their land in the Willamette Valley in 1902 — a sacred icon, so much so that it filed a claim in 1999 seeking its return. The museum countered with a lawsuit that asked a judge to declare it the rightful owner, and in 2000 a compromise was reached that left the meteorite in the museum. That deal came a little more than two years after Mr. Pitt got his chunk from the museum.

The tribe believes that selling off even a small piece is “highly inappropriate,” said Siobhan Taylor, a spokeswoman for Grand Ronde.

“We’re dismayed and hurt,” Ms. Taylor said. “To see that there are people who would take something that they know is held in such sacred esteem and barter it is a dismaying experience.”

She also said the tribe would not try to buy it, although she said that someone else could — and “bring that meteorite back to its home.”

Word that the tribe was upset troubled Mr. Pitt. So did the fallout from an Associated Press article on Thursday. That article followed one in The New York Sun that focused on the auction, to be held at Bonhams, at 595 Madison Avenue.

“You’re talking about the Grand Ronde, and this is actually making me sick,” Mr. Pitt said. “The Grand Ronde is such a small fraction of the story. This thing is older than the universe. This is a conspicuously missing piece that is being offered for sale.”

That was in the morning. By midafternoon, after a stream of calls prompted by the A.P. story, he sent an e-mail message saying, “I’ve just so had it.” He added, “The beliefs of the Grand Ronde should not preclude science or the commerce of meteorites.”

Back to the interview in the morning, which began outside the museum, a location suggested by a public relations person for Bonhams. It developed later, when Mr. Reichl, the spokesman, walked over, that the museum may not have been comfortable with the idea.

Mr. Pitt said he got his piece of the Willamette in a trade with the museum for a piece of a meteorite from Mars known as the Governador Valadares. He said he had been doing some “subdividing,” cutting off pieces that went to scientific institutions like the British Museum, when he met with Martin Prinz, the longtime curator of the meteorite collection at the Museum of Natural History, in 1998. Mr. Prinz asked what he wanted for a piece of the Governador Valadares.

“I said, as a joke, the Willamette meteorite,” Mr. Pitt recalled. “He was relieved. He thought I would chase some of the more scientifically important meteorites, from which there was less material. He said, ‘I have been thinking of cutting the Willamette to study its recrystallized structure. Would that do?’ ”

Mr. Pitt pointed to the place where, using a portable diamond saw, “Marty, a couple of guys and myself cut off a piece.” (Mr. Prinz died in 2000.)

Mr. Pitt said he was selling his chunk now because he needs the money. His business is managing jazz musicians, but he said he had spent so much time caring for the Grammy-winning saxophonist Michael Brecker — who died of leukemia in January — that his “cash flow was getting hit hard.”

By the end of the day, Mr. Reichl, the museum spokesman, had found a curator, Denton Ebel, officially an assistant curator of earth and planetary sciences. He said that troilite was pretty much what Mr. Pitt said it was: “a common mineral found in meteorites.”