On February 1, 2011, my new book, Meteorite Hunting: How To Find Treasure From Space was published.

We were eager to have it ready for the 2011 Tucson gem and mineral shows, so I did the actual writing in record time, but it was the product of about fifteen years of work.

In 1969, five year-old Vicki Allison was living with her American missionary parents in an old adobe home in Chihuahua, Mexico, on the eastern edge of the Sierra Madre mountains. Around 1 am on the morning of February 8, the family was awakened by a bright light and shaking. The shutters flew open and the night was illuminated by a tremendous fireball, followed by a loud boom. “It was almost like high noon,” Vicki recalls. Vicki remembers her father getting a radio or news report, of some kind, about where the impact site might be. The family piled in their van and drove 60 or 70 miles, which took several hours.