Whatever you do, do not send your meteorite to a scientist or university researcher to verify or examine. Meteorites are valuable and desirable, the scientist will find any excuse to steal your rock. Due to their position and perceived authority, they believe they are entitled to your property; do not trust them.
Edit: Downvote me if you like, but even OPs article admits as much: "Please note that any unsolicited specimen sent to UNLV or our department will not be returned." What I say is well known in the geology hobby. There are only a handful of people who have a good reputation for verifying and returning meteorites. At the very least, do your research and try to find somebody with such a reputation first.
If a bunch of people were sending me random non-meteorites all the time, I'm not gonna pay to send them back either. A case of a solicited one - "yes, that sounds like it could be one, please bring it in" - has a paper trail, on the other hand.
This whole chart is basically a way of them saying "stop sending us shit," which isn't in line with a malicious "please send us everything so we can keep the good stuff" motive.
Ignore my advice and you'll never see your meteorite again. That's really no skin off my back, but I think most people would rather have a neat "maybe-a-meteorite" sitting on their own desk instead of having it sit on the desk of the researcher they sent it to. When these guys open your package to find what they immediately recognize to be a meteorite worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars, I can guarantee you they won't be annoyed at the inconvenience and they sure as shit won't think twice about the return postage you send with it. They'll add it to their collection.
Your advice - don't send them shit - is basically the same as their advice, though, just in your case you have a "maybe a meteorite" that you think is valuable, and in their case you probably just have a rock after following the flowchart.
Even their advice if the flowchart says its interesting is to send pictures next, not send it in.
My own behavior, if I sent pictures and they said "yes, that might be a meteorite" would be to arrange to bring it in in person, sometime.
Mailing it blindly doesn't seem like it should be anyone's first instinct, but they certainly aren't saying anyone should do that.
The advice on that page is to not send your rock to the people at geoscience.unlv.edu, because they specifically will keep your rock. My advice is to not send your rock to any researchers at any organization because virtually all of them will keep your rock.
> Mailing it blindly doesn't seem like it should be anyone's first instinct,
Mailing it blindly? If you first contacted a university researcher asking about a rock and they said "sure send it to me and I'll check it out", and then kept your rock without telling you upfront they would keep it, you would be in good company. A whole lot of people have lost neat artifacts like this. Not just meteorites of course; crystals, fossils, archeological finds. Basically anything you think a scientist might find interesting, the scientist will keep for themselves for the same reason.
I would go so far as to suggest that it is not merely behavior confined to scientists. Any potentially valuable item sent unsolicited to a stranger is unlikely to be returned.
Yup. Even if the scientist wants to give it back their employer has a high likelihood of getting involved and behaving how faceless bureaucratic entities behave.
I had a coworker who had spent time on a research station in Antarctica. He said there were people who came to hunt for meteorites, and they weren’t allowed to keep them. That seemed like a raw deal to me.
Edit: Downvote me if you like, but even OPs article admits as much: "Please note that any unsolicited specimen sent to UNLV or our department will not be returned." What I say is well known in the geology hobby. There are only a handful of people who have a good reputation for verifying and returning meteorites. At the very least, do your research and try to find somebody with such a reputation first.