Pierre-Marie Pelé, owner of Meteor-Center
Since I was five or six years old, and it was in the 70s, I was interested in rocks and especially in fossils ; I took advantage of every family trip or a forest walk to scrape the ground. Then I was proudly presenting my findings to my elementary school teacher – also a good paleontologist – who helped me to determine the species.
In 1993, as I went like every year to a mineral and fossil show in Paris to see the latest discoveries, I fell face to face with an amazing looking guy : the legendary Robert Haag. I did not know who he was, nor suspected of his fame in the field of meteorite hunting. I actually saw and touched my first rocks from space, but I still knew nothing about these. I went out of the show delighted with the catalog of Robert Haag under the arm.
After a long period I couldn’t search minerals and fossils because of my studies, so only in 2001 I could buy my first meteorite : a Sikhote-Alin iron meteorite, a classic and a must-have for any meteorite collector.
And it was only two years later that I did my first meteorite hunting ! In 2003, not knowing where to go on vacation, I thought that Spain should offer beautiful desert landscapes where to look for meteorites. So I drove to the desert of the Bardenas, north of Spain, to stay for a week. There, I discovered my first meteorite: an ordinary chondrite. An extraordinary stroke of luck, the beginner’s luck as they say …
Since then I never stopped: Spain again in 2004 where I found the main mass of the meteorite of Villalbeto, Egypt, Libya, Mongolia, Tunisia, Morocco, the Arabian peninsula, France, Czech Republic, the United States…
I was the finder of many meteorites, including the main mass of Villalbeto de la Peña (Spain – fall on january 4, 2004), NWA 846 (unique ungrouped chondrite), NWA 11750 (the most primitive meteorite) and more than 300 other nice meteorites.
helping excavating a nice iron meteorite.
Now, I’m happy to offer one of the biggest catalog of meteorites through this website. I have over 1000 customers, including meteorite collectors – beginners or experts – and some of the most important museums and laboratories in the world (eg. National history Museum of Paris, British Museum, University of Washington (Seattle), CEREGE (Aix-en-Provence).
I’m a member of the International Meteorite Collectors Association and also a member of the Meteoritical Society.
And I’m also the lucky “owner” of an asteroid with my name : https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=218268