A fireball streaks across the sky, and he’s immediately on a plane chasing it. He’s braved barren deserts and blinding blizzards, dealt with scorpions and been dropped from a helicopter into enormous craters. He’s had his hands on gems worth more than rubies or emeralds, and on minerals older than our planet itself. He’s been to the most remote locations in Siberia in search of something that came from far, far away.


Life for Geoffrey Notkin of Tucson – field scientist, television personality, adventurer, art lover, former punk rocker and photographer – could be about many things. Research. Excitement. Fame. Darn good stories.

For Geoff, though, his driving force is the discovery of connections between himself and other people, art and science, our world and the rest of the cosmos. His passion is present in everything he does. The sheer geeky, unapologetic thrill of it comes through in grins, breathless accounts of meteorite hunts, and when he dashes to his meteorite collection to show off a feature on this or that souvenir from the asteroid belt.

Geoff found his calling as a meteorite hunter, and wants everybody else to know about space rocks too. He might even forgive you for asking him to identify a “meteorite” that turns out to be a regular terrestrial rock or a mangled soda can, though he would prefer that you check out the “Found a Meteorite?” section of his website first, because, he says, seeing others excited about meteorites is a close second in Geoff’s estimation to finding a meteorite himself.

That’s not to say that the thrill of the hunt has diminished in the quarter-century that meteorites have attracted Geoff. The allure remains as strong as the magnets he often uses to detect the metal alien visitors.

Geoff is one of a few people worldwide who make their living as meteorite hunters. He runs a business selling meteorites to interested collectors. Between the precious materials sometimes found in meteorites and the overall rarity of the objects, the space rocks can be worth more than gold. Geoff, however, respects the integrity of “these aliens that have made their way to earth,” and sometimes sells a large piece to a worthy institution for less than he might have received if he broke it up and sold it to several collectors.

Geoff has made connections with several meteorite and space-science experts, including the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and Arizona State University’s Center for Meteorite Studies, which houses the largest university collection of meteorite samples in the world.

The partnership benefits both sides. Scientists get access to new meteorites, and meteorite hunters get access to experts and the sophisticated equipment they use to study meteorites.

Geoff’s most frequent meteorite-hunting partner is one of the most successful hunters of all time, Steve Arnold of Kingston, Arkansas, He’s best known for his discovery of a record-breaking 1,430-pound pallasite meteorite (meaning it contains highly valuable olivine, or peridot gemstones) in Brenham, Kansas in 2005. The duo has been featured on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, PBS and in National Geographic. In May 2009, the Science Channel began airing Meteorite Men, a chronicle of the two space-rock Indiana Joneses as they travel to remote locations to discover meteorites, or sometimes, to their dismay, meteorwrongs, such as buried metal barrels.

The two men pore over maps. They bicker about treatment of instruments. “You broke it again by driving too fast!” Geoff admonishes his partner as they repair a giant homemade metal detector. Steve rebukes him for bringing “two metal detectors and no shovels” into the field. But mostly, they get excited. They love this stuff.

They give a small slice of each meteorite they discover to science for testing and cataloguing.

Despite his own meticulous nature – Steve calls Geoff a “neat freak” and admits he can be neurotic about things running smoothly – Geoff seems to have a soft spot for the unplanned, or at least, the lightly planned. One of his favorite clips from the show is a mistake – Geoff falls backward down a crater wall, heedless to the possibility of injury but shouting “No!” and holding his precious metal detector aloft.

One would have to be flexible to lead Geoff’s life. Seizing opportunities and a love of science has been ingrained in him since he was three or four years old and his father would rouse him at midnight to view Jupiter’s moons during crisp London winters.

Remaining open to spontaneity has continued to serve Geoff well. In 1996, when the Internet was becoming popular, he received an e-mail from a man called “Meteor Hunter.” He had forgotten he was listed online as interested in meteorites, but Meteor Hunter – eventual Meteorite Men co-host Steve Arnold – found him. The two started an online dialogue, and Steve asked Geoff if he would like to accompany him on a meteorite-hunting expedition to the Atacama Desert, a famous meteorite-laden location in Chile.

The two first met in person at the airport in Santiago and, along with another team member, headed off for three weeks in the driest desert in the world, one of the most remote places on the planet. Such a journey with a near stranger could have been disastrous. Fortunately for Geoff and Steve – and eventual Meteorite Men viewers – they hit it off.

Geoff and Steve are polar opposites in many respects, but they share a boundless enthusiasm for chasing fireballs and making new finds. One glimpse of the two men plopped side-by-side in a giant hole in the ground, caked in clay and dust, pressing their feet to unearth a giant, rare space rock is all the proof needed that the partnership works.

If it was Chile that forged the Meteorite Men team, it was Tucson that solidified it. A few months after the Atacama expedition, Geoff called Steve and invited him to accompany him to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. Geoff lived in New York at the time.

“I’d heard that this was the best show in the world, great for meteorite hunters, and he said sure,” Geoff said. Later Geoff commented that, as the show coincided with his birthday, he would buy himself something nice. As it turned out, the show also coincided with Steve’s birthday – the two men share a birthday, Feb. 1.

“From then on, we were a team,” Geoff said. Steve had one of the only online meteorite-selling businesses at the time, and Geoff used his writing and arts background to develop and manage Steve’s website.

Meteorite hunting was a passion of Geoff’s long before he even knew he would be able to make a living at it.

Geoff showed an early interest in science, and his parents vigorously encouraged it. When the Apollo 11 moon landing was broadcast live, he stayed home from school to watch it.

By the time he was seven or eight, rocks and fossils from nearby quarries had all but taken over his room.

Geoff’s meteorite passion was ignited around the same time. His mother took him to the Natural History Museum in London. The museum had a meteorite display “tucked away in the back of the second-floor mineral gallery in a dark, moody room, as if to say, ‘This isn’t something that would really interest anyone.’”

If he hadn’t already been enthused about everything related to space and rocks, the presentation of this collection as something forgotten and filled with an eerie intrigue may have done the trick.

“I got to put my hands on visitors from space. It was literally otherworldly. I got to touch something that had journeyed many hundreds of millions of miles to be here. And that was it. I promised myself that one day I would own a meteorite, or even find one.”

It would be about 25 years before Geoff would fulfill that promise, but he was “bitten by the meteorite bug,” and there was no going back.

“All of these different interests – astronomy, the space program, science fiction, rock hounding, fossils – they all seem to intersect in meteorites. Meteorites are fascinating rocks from outer space, so here I got to combine all these different elements that fascinated me,” he said.

In the first episode of Meteorite Men, the men investigate the legends surrounding the Tucson Ring, the largest of three large meteorites discovered in the Tucson area. The man who actually found the meteorites dragged the fragments from the field by horse. He claimed there were many more pieces from the field where he’d gotten these, which he called the “valley of iron.”

“It’s one of the great mysteries of our field,” said Geoff. He and Steve gained access to a genuine treasure map through a prospector friend, who had found iron using the map. Geoff and Steve found a meteorite during the expedition. It was not from the Tucson Ring, but was what may be just as exciting – a new meteorite find, previously unknown to science.

“In Northern Arizona we have Meteor Crater, certainly the best-preserved large crater in the world,” Geoff added.

When he holds a piece of meteorite that contains chondrules – pieces of our proto-solar system that became spherical bits in a larger meteorite – the chill takes hold of him again.

“Just think. These are the earliest pieces of our solar system, and they’re in our hands. This is probably the oldest material you will ever touch,” he said reverently.

He’s a meteorite hunter for life. As he looked over his collection at his business and Tucson home, Geoff reiterated something he says in his show: “What could be more mysterious and exciting than looking for lost bits of the universe that have landed on Earth?”