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.
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 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 member of the International Meteorite Collectors Association and Global Meteorite Association.
I’m 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