Clay Diggins

Well it's been a long month of testing and tuning but the Land Matters servers are ready to service a lot more users more quickly now.

There was a little over a week during the past month where the mapping functions were pretty unreliable for some users. Although Land Matters was still serving more than a thousand maps an hour about 14 people a day had their maps become unresponsive during that time. 14 people out of thousands of users might seem like a small percentage but I'm sure it was a frustrating experience for those it happened to. I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you experienced.

Land Matters servers have been running with the new server tunings for a week now with no errors or glitches. Even the most complex maps are being produced in under 4 seconds on average. All is good now.

Thanks for your patience.

6 hours ago, Johnny Luck said:

I would love a copy of the order, too!  Tried going to the Land Matters Mining Library and searching but was unable to find it.  I used both WPB L-208, which is what was suggested in the post above, and WPB L-2084, which is the number given in the Supreme Court case.  And "war powers".  All three times, no result!

Sorry for the difficulty Johnny. I just searched the Land Matters Library for all these terms individually:

war

powers

board

L-208

Each of those searches returns the War Powers Board L-208 order download as a result. So does a search for "gold", "mining", "limitation" and "order".

If that still isn't working for you here is a direct link to the War Powers Board L-208 order.

51

The ban was only on locating mining claims. Mining sales and leases were still allowed. Prospecting was still allowed. Mining of non locatable minerals was still allowed.

The BLM enforced the ban by refusing to maintain a mining claim case file for a new location. No BLM case file = no mining claim.

The line was drawn at locating a mining claim. You could prospect for and discover valuable minerals but you couldn't claim those minerals for yourself.

If you discovered oil, coal, sulfur, phosphorous or a bunch of other non locatable minerals you could lease the discovery and mine it. If you needed sand or construction materials you could buy those and mine them. Only the valuable minerals like gold, silver, copper, lead, tin etc. were banned from location.

Neither hiking nor anything else was banned.

Land Matters is going through growing pains. The Land Matters website volume has been doubling every two weeks.

A month ago there were usually 35 - 50 people making maps at any given time day or night. Now there are around 200 - 250 people creating maps at the same time. That's a much bigger load on our servers and resulted in some stress on the mapping system. That's led to some glitches. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

We are actively "tuning" our servers to deliver more maps for more people. The system is running much smoother now but with continued tuning there will be occasional slowdowns, it's unavoidable but we will try to keep any disruptions to a minimum.

We like it that more people are discovering Land Matters every day. We are setting up the Land Matters servers to handle a lot more traffic now so we won't be having problems in the future. Please bear with us over the next week or two as we build a faster more responsive website for you.

I'm surprised the prospectors in Southern California haven't picked up on this.

The Obama administration went on a public land closure spree just after Christmas 2016. The most disturbing of those withdrawals was the withdrawal of the last scattered bits of public land not already under withdrawals for wilderness, military, National parks, wild and scenic sewers, or study areas in the Southern California Conservation Area.

This particular December 28, 2016 withdrawal was literally the last gasp for public lands open to location in the desert conservation area. 1,337,904 (1.3 million) acres were closed in dozens of small areas.

These little bits of land were withdrawn from mining only "to protect nationally significant landscapes with outstanding cultural, biological, and scientific values". Literally some of these areas were parking lots (scientific values?). Virtually all of the area was desert scrub land (biological?) with the usual 4WD tracks (nationally significant landscape?) and trashy drinking spots (outstanding cultural value?). Only mining was restricted. This withdrawal was the most disheartening and downright spiteful of all the withdrawals made just before the end of Obama's presidency.

The withdrawal is now being cancelled. The 1,337,904 acres will be open to location again at 10 a.m. on March 9, 2018.

It's still out there and now you can get u sum!

I don't have a metal detector that uses XChange but I did look through the "program". It appears to be simple stupid XML with a custom header. It shouldn't be too hard to convert the data to something useful like GPX or KML with a little work in a text program.

If Steve can figure out how to get the data out of the machine I'd be happy to help create a converter app to make that data useful.

At present there isn't a way to do that AU_Solitude. The USGS stopped hosting that information.

I have the data for all those historic claims in my company database. Land Matters would like to provide something similar to the old USGS historic mining claims info pages but with more detail. From what I understand it's one of the most requested features at Land Matters. Seems a lot of folks were studying those old claims. That may be why the USGS removed the info. Like the geocommunicator functions and the LR2000 it just doesn't fit the new Interior Department agenda.

Quote

U.S. Department of the Interior

Protecting America's Great Outdoors and Powering Our Future

I guess if it's not protecting the outdoors or it's not in the future the Interior Department isn't going to continue supporting it?

The problem is that the data for historic claims is huge. Server space costs money and development takes time. At present Land Matters is still trying to fund the mining claims program they already provide. With enough money and time the historic mining claims and much more is possible.

As they do twice a month Land Matters updated their free Mining Claims Maps. That claims map information is current as of January 1st.

The mining year is now four months along. In the last 4 months there were 6,479 mining claims closed and 14,854 new claims located as of January 1, 2018.

That's a net gain of 8,375 new mining claims in the first third of the 2018 mining year!

As of January 1, 2018 there were 391,907 active mining claims in the BLM database.

That's a big number but it represents less than 1% of all the public lands.

Google Earth has a version of the Chrome browser available through the GE program. You can go anywhere the web will take you just like any other browser.

I prefer not to use the Chrome browser for security reasons but if you like using Chrome for your web surfing there is no reason not to use the Google Earth version.

Thanks for sharing your experience Chris. I've pretty much given up on trying to use their system. Unlike other users I have a choice but from the complaints and questions I get some users have found the NEW LR2000 to be unworkable.

The LR2000 itself isn't a kludge. It's actually quite fast and efficient. I keep a mirrored copy of the entire current and past database on my work computer and speed is definitely not a problem. The kludge comes with the implementation of the interface (all those drop down menus). The contractors for the NEW LR2000 interface decided your local computer should do the computing work rather than their servers. This is done with javascript libraries that you download to your computer every time you load a page on the LR2000 website.

Javascript actually works pretty good for this type of searching if it's kept to a minimum. At Land Matters all our maps etc. run from one very small javascript library. At the BLM LR2000 they are using dozens of these libraries for every function. On the Serial Register search page alone I counted 138 javascript libraries to download and run on your computer every time you load a page or do a search. All that javascript code runs sequentially and ends up looking like the three stooges on vacation when it's running. The three stooges is not a good computing model.

I'm working on LR2000 search pages for the Land Matters website. I've been testing these and you should get results directly from the LR2000 in less than 4 seconds and there is no code to cause a slowdown when you run more than a few searches.

Unlike all the other mining claim websites and services Land Matters does live searches for you of the LR2000, General Land Office and State databases so the information returned is never stale. The Serial Register Page, Mineral Patent and Master Title Plats you can download through Land Matters are exactly the same documents you would get if you went directly through the LR2000 or GLO.

I'll put a post up here when the new search function is ready to use on Land Matters. In the meantime you can get those same current items from the maps with a couple of clicks.

Wishing You a
Happy Holiday
From the folks at Land Matters 

The USGS just released their latest Professional Paper 1802 Critical mineral resources of the United States–Economic and environmental geology and prospects for future supply.

This thing is a monster! 862 pages and a 170 Mb download.

That is a big download for a lot of people so we shrunk their bloated PDF down to 30 Mb. It's got all the stuff the bigger one does but the graphics are scaled down to web user size.
You can download the full 862 page report directly from Land Matters.

This huge report is fine in itself but to really understand what's in it we figured a map of all the locations would help.
You can load up the Critical Minerals interactive Map right in your browser and study it along with your book. We've added the mines of the world as well as some basic base layers so you can compare the report locations to known historical and current mines. We'll be adding more features to that map soon.

If you need to print out the book in it's original high resolution form you can find it at the USGS Publications Warehouse.

On 11/28/2017 at 6:38 PM, Ridge Runner said:

Clay

The drop claims may be the ones they couldn’t find a sucker to buy them.

Thanks for all you do keeping us here informed!

Chuck

That's the point of the Historical Placer Claims Report Chuck. ALL the claims listed were held for 20 years or more. There are no ACTIVE claims in the quarter section where the 20+ year claim was closed. Land Matters did the work of cleaning the Report of withdrawn areas, claims flippers and blanket claims. That produces a lot fewer potential open areas but it helps prospectors by giving them only valued, open areas to research. Still there were nearly 20,000 closed placer claims that survived the cull.

You comment does touch on an aspect of how the mining industry works. Junior exploration companies do claim up considerable area each year to secure the minerals while they carry on exploration. After 5-10 years of exploration if they don't have proof of a juicy deposit or they can't find a buyer/partner for the project they drop the claims and write off the expense as CODB. This is what accounts for the majority of claims turnover each year in my experience.

There is another much smaller group of companies that are created just to fleece paper mining investors. They look a lot like Junior exploration companies to the inexperienced. (Liberty Belle and Bre-X being examples) Those scams rarely last more than a few years. I've never known a claim flipper to keep a claim for 20 years or more. That would be a minimum of $3,100 in fees per claim in today's world. Out of the ~45,000 new claims located I doubt more than a couple of thousand could be located by flippers.

There is sometimes a fine line between legitimate mining claim locations made with the intent to prove and sell a mineral deposit and locations made to make a profit on reselling the claim. The real difference is the intent and the ability to do the exploration necessary to prove the value of a claim in the open market. All things being equal if the seller has no exploration work completed and no clearly described deposit the claim they are selling is worth just about the $500 it took to make the claim in the first place. It's still buyer beware out there.

Barry

Hi Reg,

I have no personal knowledge. I'm a bit young to remember that time. I could ask my older brother but I seem to recall he was in Mongolia around the 1800 era.

There are quite a few entries on that list that date before 1850. I have no reason to doubt your timeline but I was questioning the early dates I was seeing there. I guess I was right to doubt those early nugget entries.

In any case I was just using my skills to answer Mike's question, I was trying to save you a "bit of a task".

Thanks for pointing out the reference material Reg and thanks to Steve for finding the source. These are new to my Library so I guess I've got some more study materials.

Barry

A lot of prospectors have an interest in exploring closed claims. I'm not a big fan of spending time looking for closed claims for the simple reason that most claims made never produced any valuable minerals. The fact that a claim was previously located is not an indicator of valuable minerals. After all if the claim owners didn't bother to keep the claim active it probably wasn't worth having.

There are of course exceptions to that theory but a closed claim on it's own doesn't excite me. I need to know more before I'm going to chase after previously claimed ground. There were more than 44,200 mining claims closed last year alone, that's way to many to make it worth anyone's time to read through without trimming out the thousands of recent claims.

Twice a month I do compile all the claim closures updated during that half month. To get any value out of those thousands of closed claims I need to sort them out on some reasonable basis. With the twice monthly Claims Advantage Report it is possible to interactively sort those recently closed claims by Location (State, County, TRS), Claim Name, Claim Type, Closure Date as well as Year Located and Years Held.

Sorting the Report by Location allows me to watch certain areas of particular interest to me. Only the Claims Advantage reports allow you to see that information on a current basis, the LR2000 doesn't have that information so that feature is helpful. Once I see a claim being closed in an area of interest I can zoom to a custom map of the closed area right from a button on the Report claim listing. That allows me to see other claims in the area as well as check land status by downloading the Master Title Plat from the map. I can also load the current Serial Register report page from a link on the report. That doesn't complete my research of the area but it does give me enough information to decide if it's worth my time to search the County Recorder for Claim Records.

That's pretty cool to have all that information available with a couple of clicks. I use the reports a lot myself. The real power of these Reports starts to shine when I sort by Year Located or Years Held. Remember how I said how most claims made never produced any valuable minerals? Well that doesn't really apply when you see someone has maintained a claim for many years. It makes me sit up and take notice when I see a claim that has been held for anywhere from 20 years to 125+ years. THAT is information I can use!

Being that I keep all this information on hand I can sort this information on a much longer timeline than the half month available in the Claims Advantage Reports. By sorting for all the Closed Claims that were held for at least 20 years or more AND were located on now unclaimed land I can see the claims that people valued and kept that are now open to location. That may sound like there wouldn't be that many established closed claims on productive ground right? Well surprise surprise! There are nearly 20,000 placer claims that meet that standard!

Naturally I share this information with my favorite charity Land Matters and naturally Land Matters makes this information available to it's Claims Advantage Members.

Here's a brief look at how these claims stack up in each State:

Surprising isn't it?

Here's a quick heat map to show the general location and density of all these open areas:

Here's a link to an online interactive map so you can look a little closer.

That's a whole bunch of open ground with a HIGH potential for valuable minerals. Whether you are looking for open ground to prospect or are researching for a potential new claim looking at this closed claim information from a more organized and selective angle can really pay off. If you are looking for an edge the Historical Placer Claims Report is a good start.

15 hours ago, delnorter said:

Very interesting post and reference Reg. What is the earliest date nugget found in this report?

Thanks Reg,

Mike

I parsed the pdf and came up with this entry as the earliest:

Alluvial 300oz found in Billy Goat Gully, Kingower 6 ft deep in August of 1801
Remarks: W. Birkmyre, p. 366 R. Brough Smyth's Gold-fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria

There are several listings that just state "prior to 1808". I'm not up on Australian history but I imagine that might be about the Rum Rebellion"?

Barry

On 11/5/2017 at 7:58 PM, DolanDave said:

Your webpage Barry, is so much better. Do you know how much the BLM spends per year on their LR2000 system? Have you approached them about running/ contracting the system for them? I' sure there is a bidding system for it somewhere.. The old ALMRS system, the BLM spent over 400 million over 15 years, to a failed system before going to LR2000. 

Dave

Thanks Dave, that means a lot coming from you. Land Matters was created to make access to this type of public information easy and reliably accessible.. Pretty much any information you might want is being compiled somewhere but the government has failed to provide easy or consistent access for the public.

I have thought about tracking the LR2000 budget but that means digging through 100's of pages of funding bills or sending an email that is unlikely to answer the question. Both are frustrating time consuming processes with no real possible outcome but anger. I do know it's in the 100's of millions of dollars.

Land Matters has provided this information for just three years and a month. It's a non profit organization that has an annual operating budget of less than $10,000. That budget is going to grow as we continue  serving more people and more types of information but comparing the Land Matters budget to the BLM's LR2000 budget is a good working example of the general ineffectiveness of many government agencies. Working for those agencies might get me a good salary but it's doubtful it would result in any better service than we can provide with Land Matters. I don't think the problems with the LR2000 are related to lack of skills but rather ineffective use of the good people the agency employs.

There are a lot more information projects than just the LR2000 in the works at Land Matters. GLO Patent and Survey copies from a click on the map is an upcoming feature. You can see part of that feature is already working for mineral patents on the Arizona, California and Colorado Mining Claim maps. Better roads on the maps and a much bigger Library are all planned for the future.

Barry

On 11/4/2017 at 5:01 PM, Reno Chris said:

I'll try out the new system in the next couple days and post back here with my thoughts.

Thanks Chris. I look forward to your input.

I'm still waiting for the BLM to bring the whole search system functional. There are a lot of search functions still marked "UNDER CONSTRUCTION". I'm wondering why they shut down the old site before they finished the new site? I do see little changes and some speed gains but no real progress in functions.

I sense a disturbance in D.C. that's being felt in Denver. I suspect the whole LR2000 upgrade project is under scrutiny. This might be an "interesting" year for some agency employees.

On 10/24/2017 at 5:11 PM, DolanDave said:

I do not believe in trespassing on others claims, but someday it will be written in law on what a meteorite will be considered. I tend to think it will swade in way of the claim owner.... good info from everyone... thanks Lunk and Clay for the input. I am surprised with all the lawsuits nowadays, there hasnt been a civil case on this subject yet.

Dave

There have already been several civil cases Dave. At least one made it all the way to the Arizona Supreme Court.

Nininger himself encouraged several lawsuits challenging the Barringer claims. All of them were resolved in favor of the owners of the mining claims.

All laws in the United States agree that all valuable minerals on a mining claim belong to the mineral claimant. Meteorites are valuable and mineral so I doubt you will ever see a case where meteorite minerals are specifically segregated from the other valuable minerals. Congress could change that but Nininger was unable to convince them that was a good idea. Maybe in the future?

This does raise the question of how long meteorite material has to be on earth before it is considered just more minerals in the earth. There is pretty good evidence that the richest mineral deposit on earth, the Witwaterstrand, may be the result of a meteorite impact 2020 million years ago. Should those mines be closed in favor of preserving the potential meteorite material for study?

Considering that all the valuable minerals on earth are the direct result of space materials being attracted to earth's gravity well at what point do meteorite collectors give up on trying to differentiate one from the other? I know this question is being seriously studied in meteorology but I'm doubtful such a defining date can be established.

A review

Anyone who uses the BLM LR2000 search function knows it can be a challenge to get meaningful results. Often the service is down but you aren't notified of a problem with the system until you go through the whole complex search process to discover there was an "error". Frustrating at times.

Well it appears the BLM decided it was time to change the look and feel of the LR2000 search function. They notified users months ago that they were working on an improved version but they caught a lot of people by surprise when they introduced the NEW! IMPROVED! LR2000 on November 1 and shut down the functions of the OLD! BAD! LR2000 at the same time.

Problem was they didn't tell anyone. The old LR2000 still appears to be there and will allow you to do a search. That search returns an error, as mentioned earlier that's not unexpected or uncommon when using the LR2000. I use the LR2000 a lot when I need the most recent information on a land or claim case file. It took me nearly 24 hours after the changeover to get fed up enough with the old LR2000 not working to try the new LR2000 which has been available but not working for the last nine months. I'm hoping the BLM will set up that old LR2000 web address to redirect to the new LR2000 page so others won't have to waste their time beating a dead search system like I did.

The old LR2000 was clunky. It reminded me of an old unfamiliar broken down right hand drive truck with a Japanese language repair manual. It was really that awkward and counter intuitive. There were many blogs, manuals and videos devoted to explaining the esoteric mysteries of the BLM's version of public access to public records, I even helped write a few myself. I made good use of the old LR2000 on the days it was working and I was glad to have it when I could get results but it needed fixing.

The new LR2000 has a cleaner less intimidating interface with a slightly simpler set of options. I really don't like the "black topo" background the BLM now puts on all their web pages. If you like the black topo theme you are probably going to like the look of these new search pages better than the old ones.

The behind the scenes search function has changed a lot from the old LR2000. I tried it on several browsers and three operating systems. I had problems on every browser and system. The Search seems to hang in some circumstances, in others it returns results as quickly as the old LR2000. The actual search itself seems to be slower sometimes. Every browser I tried had problems when it had run a few searches. The searches would eventually hang and several loops would keep the browser so busy it would lock up. That's not something I'm used to experiencing. This is a new system so I'm hoping the BLM will get these glitches out soon.

The results of each search now displays in a new interface. Essentially there will be a window frame on the results page with the document displayed inside the frame as a PDF. Like the old LR2000 there are options to download the document in several formats including Excel, PDF and HTML. You can now modify or start a new search from the results page.

Land Matters has made an effort to bypass the clunky old LR2000 interface and allow you to directly access any claims BLM serial register page directly with a few clicks on a map. This turned out to be a lot quicker way to get information on claims in a specific area without having to pound through the old LR2000. Being a direct live link to the BLM the information is as current as possible unlike other mapping programs that present static information updated every month or so.

When the unannounced changeover in LR2000 search systems happened it broke Land Matters system of direct access. With more than 380,000 mining claims being actively tracked Land Matters had a problem. Claims Advantage Members also get several reports a month. In the last two days Land Matters had released two reports with a combined total of more than 20,000 maps and direct links to a broken LR2000. That's 400,000 missing documents. Sometimes life can be.... interesting.

Needless to say I have been busy. It took 24 hours but I deciphered the new LR2000 system, fixed the links to the serial register pages and corrected, compiled and uploaded new member reports. The mining claim serial register pages linked to on the maps load more quickly than the old ones did. If you have any problems with those maps or the Member Reports please let me know.

Please try out the new LR2000 and share your experiences here. Try the Mining Claims Maps at Land Matters and marvel at the new search results. If you like the way the map link system works we can add the feature for a lot more types of research.

Barry

That's sad.

2 minutes ago, DolanDave said:

How about the guys that claimed BLM land the Old Woman Meteorite was found on, and the government took it anyways, like Lunk said they basically said : meteorites are not locatable under the mining law and belong to the owner of the land they are found on.

Another mystery case with no record. The government did not take the Old Woman Meteorite. The discoverers signed a contract to have the meteorite delivered to a museum in southern California. Everything after that was about how their contract gave them no right to the meteorite - they had signed away their rights.

The BLM pointed out that since the Old Woman meteorite had been removed they could find no valuable minerals on which to base a claim. Just because a mining claim once had minerals is not evidence that it still does have minerals. You can't claim minerals that aren't there. They made the mining claim in an effort to bolster their claim that they had a right to the meteorite they had given away.

The BLM has never made a final decision that meteorites are not subject to mineral claim. If you ask why they might mumble something about BIG ELEPHANT IN ROOM.

2 hours ago, Clay Diggins said:

There are no "meteorite laws" in the United States. Which is probably why they aren't common knowledge. If you know of one I'm sure you will share it here.

OK that was a trick question Lunk. You can't share any meteorite laws with us because there are none.

Many years ago I was constantly getting different answers about what was written in the law. Seems nobody could come up with a verifiable answer. It was all like this thread, different opinions and a lot of "everybody knows". I tried looking up the laws but that turned out to be full of lawyerspeak and Not Yours! attitudes in secret libraries far away from any working man. So I did the obvious - I went to law school and learned how to find and understand the actual written laws. Back then that wasn't an easy thing. Took years to figure the system out. Try looking up Shepardizing to get a hint as to how onerous the process was.

Lucky for us now in the modern times we can look up any Federal law quick and easy. No need for years in law school. It's like Google Search for law.  Here's a link to that search function direct from the folks that keep the law records. I've even done the search for you. As you can see the word meteorite is nowhere to be found in Federal law. I think we can agree that if the word meteorite is not to be found in the law then the law has nothing to say about meteorites? Feel free to play around there it's a great resource.

Of course being curious when I first heard these theories about meteorites not being valuable minerals I had to investigate every new theory being proposed.

One of the big fantasies in the meteorite circles was there was a case called "The Old Woman Meteorite". Supposedly this was the big case that established that meteories were not subject to location and belonged to the Smithsonian. Well such a case actually exists so I got a copy and read the case and it doesn't address meteorite ownership, mining claims or the actual meteorite itself.

The Old Woman case was about the right of the Secretary of the Interior to bypass normal established administrative process in awarding study materials under the Antiquities Act. No issue was raised and no decision was made regarding meteorites, meteorite ownership, public lands, valuable minerals or mining claims. The 9th Circuit simply was carrying out their duty to review a challenge to an administrative decision under the Administrative Procedures Act. Although the decision was judicial it was strictly the final decision on a single administrative action and did not interpret or define anything in regards to meteorites, minerals or mining law.

You can read the Old Woman case HERE.

As for that BLM "Internal Memorandum" you might observe that expired a year after it was issued? It was neither law nor regulation and was not a public document. It really doesn't matter though because the woman who wrote that memo was in the archaeological resources office. Her job is to enforce the Antiquites Act. The Antiquites Act specifically exempts stone or mineral that has not been worked by men. The writer of that "Internal Memorandum" had no right to make any rules or regulations about stone or minerals. Even if the stone had been worked by a man the object and work had to be more than 100 years old and Archaeologically significant.

Quote

        (1) The term "archaeological resource" means any material
      remains of past human life or activities which are of
      archaeological interest, as determined under uniform regulations
      promulgated pursuant to this chapter. Such regulations containing
      such determination shall include, but not be limited to: pottery,
      basketry, bottles, weapons, weapon projectiles, tools, structures
      or portions of structures, pit houses, rock paintings, rock
      carvings, intaglios, graves, human skeletal materials, or any
      portion or piece of any of the foregoing items. Nonfossilized and
      fossilized paleontological specimens, or any portion or piece
      thereof, shall not be considered archaeological resources, under
      the regulations under this paragraph, unless found in
      archaeological context. No item shall be treated as an
      archaeological resource under regulations under this paragraph
      unless such item is at least 100 years of age.

Even if there were some traction under the Antiquities law mining claim locations are specifically exempt.

Quote

 

Sec. 470kk. Savings provisions

    (a) Mining, mineral leasing, reclamation, and other multiple uses
      Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to repeal, modify, or
      impose additional restrictions on the activities permitted under
      existing laws and authorities relating to mining, mineral leasing,
      reclamation, and other multiple uses of the public lands.

 

You can read the whole Antiquities Act HERE.

Now we still have the big elephant in the room. The fact that mining claims have been located, mined and patented for meteorite materials. After many court cases challenging those mining claim patents they are still as valid today as the day the claims were located. Despite all the meteorite collectors rumors and invisible "law" that big elephant is sitting right in the middle of one of the most significant falls in the world. Proof that mining claimants own all the valuable minerals within their mining claim - including the valuable meteorite materials. You can ignore that or pretend it's a one off case but several courts disagree with you. In fact the man that made those meteorite claims was the author of "The Law of Mines and Mining in the United States" - still in print today 120 years later.

8 minutes ago, Lunk said:

This is a common misperception and simply is not the case; the meteorite laws in the U.S. clearly state that since meteorites are not part of the earthly estate of minerals, they are not locatable under the mining law and belong to the owner of the land they are found on.

There are no "meteorite laws" in the United States. Which is probably why they aren't common knowledge. If you know of one I'm sure you will share it here.