A NASA intern stealing lunar rocks worth $21 million to impress his love and eventually stashing some of them under his bed to have “sex on the moon” may sound like the plot of a bad sci-fi comedy, but it actually happened in real life.
Former NASA intern Thad Roberts and his accomplices, one of whom was his ex-girlfriend, rewrote security cameras, wore Neoprene bodysuits, and managed to get authentic badges of the space agency to steal 17 pounds of moon rocks in 2002, reported People.
Why did he do it?
During an interview with the LA Times in 2004, Roberts said he did it for love. “I was in love with Tiffany [His then-girlfriend],”. He added, “In my mind, I was thinking, ‘Baby, I’d give you the moon.’ It would be a romantic start to our relationship.”
“I mean, the simple answer is to say that I did it for love. I did it because I wanted to be loved. I wanted someone to know that I’d literally cared about them that much. And to have the symbol there to remind them of it,” he told CBS in a 2012 interview.
However, according to People, the FBI said that the crime was financially motivated, adding that he had been in contact with a buyer from Belgium. The buyer was willing to pay $1,000 to $5,000 per gram for the rocks. However, after becoming suspicious about the rocks’ origin, the buyer contacted the FBI, leading to an undercover operation to nab Roberts and his team.
“Sex on the moon”
On the day he was about to meet the buyer, Roberts put some rocks under the blanket in his bed.
“I take some of the moon rocks, and I put ’em underneath the blanket in the bed,” Roberts said, adding that he and Fowler had sex over it. “I never said anything, but I’m sure she could feel it. She never said anything directly, either, but it was more about the symbol of what we were doing — you know, basically having sex on the moon,” he told CBS.
“It’s more uncomfortable than not, but it wasn’t about the comfort at that point. It was about the expression. And no one had ever had sex on the moon before. I think we can safely say that,” he added.
About the heist:
Roberts, who was 24 when he joined NASA, had three degrees in physics, geology, and geophysics, reported the People. There, he met 22-year-old Tiffany Fowler, who worked at a NASA tissue culture laboratory. Soon after getting into a relationship, they decided to steal the moon rocks.
The duo roped in a third person, Shae Saur, also an intern at NASA. Together, they stole the rocks. They were arrested during the undercover operation. Though the rocks were recovered, the FBI said that they were “virtually useless to the scientific community.”
There was a fourth accomplice, Gordon McWhorter, who helped Roberts find the buyer.
Roberts pleaded guilty in 2002 and was sentenced to eight years in jail. However, he was released in 2008, two years before completing his sentence. Fowler and Saur also pleaded guilty. They were each given 150 hours of community service and kept under 180 days of house arrest. They were ordered to pay over $9,000 in restitution to NASA. McWhorter was found guilty during the trial. Following that, he was sentenced to six years in jail.
What happened to the lovers?
Reportedly, Roberts and Fowler never met again after being caught and jailed.
Where is Thad Roberts now?
According to his website, during his days in prison, he started spending time by “teaching, exercising, wrestling with the mysteries of modern physics, and exploring new axiomatic assumptions that might explain them.”
In jail, he wrote a 700-page manuscript for his book Einstein’s Intuition, which claims to explore the mysteries of modern physics. Currently, he works as a theoretical physicist for a private think tank.
