Meteorite Hunter Hats

Meteorite hunting has its own word for the heartbreak. A meteorwrong, a term popularised by Randy Korotev at Washington University in St. Louis, is a rock someone believes is a meteorite and is not: slag, hematite, a melted beer can. One collector in a physics forum says 99% of the rocks shown in the Facebook groups are meteorwrongs, and the odds are real. Worldwide only eight to ten meteorites are recovered a year out of hundreds of fireballs seen falling, according to Darryl Pitt, and the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum offered $25,000 for a first kilogram of the April 2023 fireball over Calais, Maine. These meteorite hunter hats are written in the voice of the people still walking fields with a magnet on a stick. Badges name the hobby, while the sentence designs carry the in-group jokes: the magnet that raises false hope, the forum's standard reply to every black rock, the quiet 1% that keeps everyone going. Searches for meteorwrong merchandise found none, so the joke word is wide open. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Wear one to the next strewn-field walk, or give one to the friend whose pockets are full of rocks that might be from space.