[Illustration: J. OTIS WHEELOCK PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Man and boy carrying off the famous “purloined” Willamette meteorite on a homemade dolly car with wheels of tree-trunk sections. Note hole piercing this 14-ton chunk of iron.] What has been called a conspiracy of silence among the natives of the Adrar area and the inhospitable nature of the region itself have successfully preserved the secret of the location of the enormous metallic mass described by the captain. The native guide died, apparently of poison, and although many inhabitants of the region are no doubt familiar with the whereabouts of the mass (whatever it is!), those questioned have consistently denied knowledge of its very existence. All recent attempts, not only by military but even by scientific expeditions, to relocate the gigantic metallic mass have failed. The whole Adrar case remains an intriguing puzzle to be unraveled, it is hoped, by future generations of meteorite hunters. Another “lost” meteorite is one composed of stone and iron. The Port Orford, Oregon, stony-iron (as it is now named) was originally found in 1859 by a U.S. geologist who was engaged in a survey of what were then the Oregon and Washington Territories. According to him, the mass was quite irregular in shape and “4 or 5 feet [of it] projected from the surface of the mountain,” while it was “about the same number of feet in width and perhaps 3 or 4 feet in thickness.” He broke off a small fragment of it (far smaller than the one taken from Adrar) and packed this specimen away with his collection of rock and mineral samples. Years later, the geological collection was cataloged and analyzed in the East. At that time, the fragment collected in 1859 was found to be a piece of a stony-iron meteorite. After that, scientists and others made many attempts to rediscover the main mass of the large Port Orford meteorite, all of them unsuccessful. Today the sum total of material recovered from this stony-iron amounts to 25 grams in the U.S. National Museum, about 4 grams in the Natural History Museum of Vienna, and a few tiny specks in the Museum of the Geological Survey of India.