Former NASA agent toils to find missing moon rocks - USA TODAY

Of the 370 moon rocks collected during two missions in 1969 and 1972, 184 are missing - and Joseph Gutheinz Jr. is looking for them.

The Texas-based lawyer and former NASA agent is known as the "moon rock hunter," the BBC reports.

After astronauts returned from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions, 270 of the rocks were given to countries around the world and another 100 given to the 50 states, according to the BBC.

But over the years, dozens of them - 160 overseas and 24 in the United States - vanished, including rock fragments that were gifted to Romania and Libya, the BBC reports.

Since 1998, when he was still at NASA, Gutheinz has made it his mission to try to find the precious rock pieces. He set up an undercover sting operation known as Operation Lunar Eclipse and even placed an ad reading "Moon Rocks Wanted" in USA TODAY. That effort yielded a response from someone claiming to have the Honduras moon rock who asked for $5 million.

Gutheinz didn't pay it, but he believes that rock was the real thing.

Gutheinz believes the rock bequeathed to late Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was sold after his execution. He offered $10,000 for the rock gifted to Malta, but that transaction never went through. After a fire at an observatory in Dublin, Ireland's rock wound up in a dump and is still there, Gutheinz tells the BBC.

"I'll tell you where it's at," he says. "It's at the Finglas landfill dump in Dublin."

These days, Gutheinz has help. He's enlisted the students in his criminal justice classes at the University of Phoenix and Alvin Community College, in Texas, to help find the rocks. So far, they've tracked down 77, the BBC reports.

Doug is an unrepentant news junkie who loves breaking news and has been known to watch C-SPAN even on vacation. He has covered a wide range of domestic and international news stories, from prison riots in Oklahoma to the Moscow coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Doug previously served as foreign editor at USA TODAY. More about Doug

Michael Winter has been a daily contributor to On Deadline since its debut in January 2006. His journalism career began in the prehistoric Ink Era, and he was an early adapter at the dawn of the Digital Age. His varied experience includes editing at the San Jose Mercury News and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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