Daniel M. Barringer spent 27 years and roughly $500,000 of his own money, about $9 million today, drilling into a giant bowl in the northern Arizona desert, convinced a 10-million-ton iron meteorite worth over a billion dollars lay buried beneath it. This episode follows the successful mining engineer who challenged the scientific consensus that the crater was a volcanic steam explosion, secured a land patent signed by Theodore Roosevelt, incorporated the Standard Iron Company, and even got a post office named Meteor established to service a mining boom that never came.

The story turns on the physics that Barringer could not have known. In 1929, astronomer F.R. Moulton calculated that an object striking at roughly 29,000 miles per hour with the energy of 10 megatons of TNT would have largely vaporized on impact, leaving no ore body to mine. Barringer died of a heart attack just 10 days after reading that report. The episode then follows the scientists who vindicated him after his death, from Harvey Nininger’s discovery of iron-nickel spherules and impactite to Eugene Shoemaker’s 1960 identification of shocked quartz minerals coesite and stishovite, and explains how the still privately owned crater became a training ground for Apollo astronauts.

• Why USGS chief geologist Grove Karl Gilbert concluded in 1891 that the crater was volcanic after finding no magnetic anomaly
• How Barringer’s mining math turned a scientific debate into a billion-dollar obsession
• Why a 300,000-ton iron meteorite could leave a 4,000-foot-wide hole and then simply disappear
• The family feud that got Nininger kicked off the land after he tried to nationalize the crater
• How shocked quartz became the definitive fingerprint of cosmic impacts