Following the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions, the Nixon administration presented small fragments of lunar soil encased in Lucite acrylic spheres mounted on wooden plaques to 135 countries and all 50 U. S. states.
Intended as goodwill tokens of human achievement, these goodwill moon rocks soon became targets for theft, black-market sales, and legal disputes. The legal status of these extraterrestrial artifacts reached a bizarre climax in the late 1980s with the federal court case United States v. One Lucite Ball Containing Lunar Material.
In this civil forfeiture action, federal prosecutors filed suit directly against the physical object itself—a Lucite ball containing Apollo lunar material that had been stolen from the government of Honduras and resurfaced in a Florida sting operation named Operation Lunar Eclipse. An undercover NASA Inspector General investigator negotiated to purchase the plaque for $5 million from an art collector who claimed legitimate title. The federal government seized the object, asserting that under the Appropriations Act and federal administrative law, all Apollo-era lunar samples collected by NASA remained exclusive property of the United States government unless explicitly authorized for transfer by Congress.
The court ruled in favor of the United States, confirming that foreign nations could hold possessory rights as custodian gifts, but individuals could never establish private legal title over Apollo lunar material. This precedent established that extraterrestrial samples brought to Earth by federal space missions are sovereign government property protected by federal criminal and civil forfeiture statutes.