A Brief History of the Meteorite Mailing List

by Michael Blood Art, who was then the purchasing agent for the store at the Planetarium, across from the Natural History Museum in Balboa Park had been offering meteorites for sale, which for several years Had been purchased from me. However, Art's real passion was Web design and he thought it would be cool to have a weekly Meteorite Forum and asked me to host it. This format later became Known as "chat rooms" - but Art envisioned it more as a "radio Show" with me as the host. I was confident even before the first Send off that once people started "talking" a host would not be Relevant, but I certainly felt honored and wanted to support Art in this endeavor and bolster his confidence in initiating this Forum, so, happily agreed. Our first Meteorite Forum was held just days after the ALH 84001 announcement on August 6, 1996. As I recall, there Were only 5 or 6 of us on the first chat which included Paul Harris And Jim Tobin of Meteorite Exchange and current editors of METEORITE TIMES, Rick Kujawa, me and a few others who escape My memory for now. Please do forgive me for my feeble memory - and do feel free to chime in and announce your having been there. Of course, that first session was filled with the excitement of Martian life revealed in a meteorite - it wasn't until later the Findings came under question. In any event, within weeks or a few months at most Art decided a Live list would be a better forum and I agreed (not that I had a real Say in it, though he did bounce ideas off of me when it came to meteorites). So, that was the birth of the list. My guess would be October (perhaps November) of 1996 saw the launching of the list as it is known today. Other than increased numbers of participants, the list has remained the same since day one.