https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/what-happened-to-apollo-goodwill-moon-rocks/article27957563.ece
What happened to Apollo goodwill moon rocks?
Some adorn museums, others went missing or were stolen
U.S. President Richard Nixon gave moon rocks collected by Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions to 135 countries as a token of American goodwill. While some hold pride of place in museums and scientific institutions, many others are unaccounted for — they have either gone missing, were stolen or even destroyed over the decades.
A list was compiled from research done by Joseph Gutheinz Jr, a retired NASA special agent known as the “Moon Rock Hunter,” his students, and collectSPACE, a website which specialises in space history.
Both the Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 moon rocks presented to perpetually war-wracked Afghanistan have vanished.
One of the moon rocks destined for Cyprus was never delivered.
Honduras’s Apollo 17 moon rock was recovered by Gutheinz and Bob Cregger, a U.S. Postal Service agent, in a 1998 undercover sting operation baptized “Operation Lunar Eclipse.”
It had been sold to a Florida businessman, Alan Rosen, for $50,000 by a Honduran Army Colonel. Rosen tried to sell the rock to Gutheinz for $5 million. It was seized and eventually returned to Honduras.
Ireland’s moon rock was on display in Dublin’s Dunsink Observatory, which was destroyed in a 1977 fire. Debris from the observatory — including the moon rock — ended up in landfill.
The rocks given to then Libyan leader Colonel Moamer Kadhafi have vanished.