“To me, this is true buried treasure right here in our state,” says John Sinclair of his thousand-piece rock collection, which began with North Carolina gems and minerals and has grown to include meteorites and fossils that line the shelves of his office at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, a former NASA satellite-tracking station. PARI, with its two huge, 350-ton radio telescopes, is tucked into the Pisgah National Forest near Rosman.
Sinclair, who also collects Libyan desert glass (which he notes has been found in the yellow scarab of King Tut’s breast plate) and Arizona petrified wood, has been a rock hound and treasure hunter most of his life. He is also trained as a jeweler. He’s been collecting since the early 1980s and has been recently buying a lot of equipment to process rocks and minerals and polish the petrified wood by himself, increasing the wood’s value by five times, he says.
In a corner of his office is a souvenir from a dig: a 75-pound greenschist rock with garnets. “I dug that out,” Sinclair says. “I can’t even lift the thing. I dragged it with a rope through the woods, pushed it and loaded it onto my truck.”
Sinclair says he does not know the market value of his personal collection. “I’ve got some inexpensive things and some fairly valuable things. I do sell them from time to time because it gives me money to hunt more rocks,” he admits.
Though Sinclair, 59, has been working with PARI founder and president Don Cline to collect minerals and meteorites since the 1990s, he began full-time work as mineral and meteorite curator with the institute in February, moving from Morehead City to Balsam Grove in Transylvania County to set up PARI’s mineral and meteorite gallery, which opened in May.
“When I moved from the coast, I had my collection at my house,” Sinclair says. “People would see it and say, ‘John, it looks like a museum in here.’ Now my collection is mainly at PARI. Part of it is stored. Part of it is here in the office, and part of it is in the gallery.”
“The thrill of the hunt” is Sinclair’s explanation for his passion for rocks of all kinds.
His roots are in Swansboro, a little port town on the N.C. coast, where he searched for Blackbeard’s treasure. He got within 25 miles of where the wrecked ship The Queen Anne’s Revenge was eventually found. At age six, he moved with his family to Charlotte, and his first rock was purchased from a gem shop during a vacation to the mountains: “I saw all these wonderful rocks, and then I discovered North Carolina has buried treasure in the earth in minerals and gemstones.”
Sinclair reveals that he is mostly self-taught; he reads and trades at gem and mineral shows and works with other rock hounds, miners, and geologists. In August 1996, when NASA announced that life forms had been found inside a Martian meteorite in Antarctica, Sinclair decided, at a Raleigh gem and mineral show, to try to get money for some meteorites he’d bought from Mexican and African dealers.
His supply sold out.
“It gave me the indication in 1996 that meteorites might be a good thing to get into,” he says. “They’ve since disputed that NASA found life in a Martian meteorite from Antarctica, but it’s what got me into it, and it’s what got me here today.”
Sinclair met Don Cline, PARI’s president, while studying web programming at Guilford Technical Community College to sell meteorites online. Cline, a successful Greensboro businessman, had given an observatory and telescope to the college.
“I went to school for IT for computers, although my passion was rocks and minerals,” explains Sinclair. “But everything changed over the 15 years Don and I spent putting this [mineral and meteorite] collection together, because I am still doing it. We’re building this collection for here.”
Sinclair’s personal trove of earthly and heavenly bounty was collected from as near as North Carolina emerald mines in Little Switzerland and Hiddenite and from as far away as Siberia, where he got a woolly mammoth’s ivory-tusk fossil. He also has a dinosaur egg from Mongolia. A particularly treasured North Carolina emerald from the Crabtree mine was a gift from brothers Terry and Gary Ledford, who have both since passed away. (Terry died last year in a mining accident.)
“To me, it’s priceless, because it’s two brothers and friends that gave it to me, and I’ll probably end up donating it to the museum,” says Sinclair. “Cut into stones, it would be worth a lot.”
Sinclair also had a hand in PARI acquiring property from Mars: he sourced and negotiated the purchase of a 120-gram Martian meteorite specimen that fell in Morocco in July 2011.
“I am so lucky, because I get to go out and buy some of the rarest rocks in the world,” Sinclair says (including from Munich and China).
He also got a meteorite from the moon for PARI, through Cline. And he has personally hunted and found 40 meteorites in his life. “It’s all treasure hunting,” he says. “Trust me, it’s difficult to find meteorites.”
He pulls out the lunar and Martian rocks out of the gallery’s cases and puts them on the table in his office. “This is some of the rarest material that you can hold. To me, that blows my mind. They’re not the most beautiful rocks, but this could hold some of the secrets of the universe. I’m not smart enough to unlock those secrets — but there are people here on Earth who are.
“Earth rocks,” he acknowledges, “are stunningly beautiful. We’ve got rubies, emeralds, sapphires, aquamarines, amethysts, citrines, all the birthstones, opals, tourmalines.
“But this is delivered from the heavens. This is alien material, from other worlds.”
See the gem and mineral collection at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute in Rosman. 828-862-5554. www.pari.edu.