Lander, WY – Tuesday’s widely reported crash of a large meteor, reported to be the size of a large bus, in Lander, Wyoming’s downtown business district has launched a court battle over who owns rights to the remaining fragments.
The meteor plummeted in from the east in a very slanted path that ended up tearing a long gash in Lander’s Main St at 8:05AM Tuesday morning all the way from the Middle Fork of the Popo Agie River to Third Street, where fragments landed half-way between Wyoming Catholic College (WCC) owned Crux Coffee and the National Outdoor Leadership School’s (NOLS) Noble Building.
Little damage was done to buildings, surprisingly although major repairs were necessitated in and are now being conducted on the street. But the biggest fallout of the situation, other than a strange mixture of fear and relief amongst Lander residents, is the dispute over the fragments of the meteor, the pile of singed rocks that rest half-buried in the damaged intersection.
WCC Philosophy professor Dr. Grove claims ownership of them, justifying it because he claims he was “driving into his 8:00 class and saw it happen.” Further, as the rocks landed so close to WCC, and he is their foremost expert on rocks, he also claims to be “the best to examine and determine what to do with them.”
But NOLS “spokesperson” Andy McMandy says the fragments are closer to his organization’s property and so belong to them to examine “as they passed by us on their way to stopping in the street.”
Dr. Grove disagreed, saying their trajectory “would have intersected with school buildings had they continued, giving the rights to fully us,” and the two parties today filed mutual lawsuits over ownership of the fragments.
“I’m a little surprised at all this interest in a pile of rocks,” WCC Chief Financial Officer Peter McNow told reporters today. “But Dr. Grove is in the groove and if he sees these as important we’re all behind him.”
NOLS has vowed to pursue their case so they can ultimately “liberate the trapped organisms back to their natural state” as Andy continued mumbling between and behind clouds of vapor.
The suit is set to be brought before the Wyoming State Circuit Court 8 on July 7, 2020. Several dozen WCC students are reported to be planning to attend, cheering Dr. Grove on as “king of the rocks”. Until a final decision is made on their custody, however, the rocks are being temporarily stored at the Lander Police Station.
