AN OUT OF THIS WORLD DISCOVER

By Dr. Francisco Guajardo, MOSTHistory CEO

At 5:25 in the afternoon of Feb. 15, 2023, 24-year-old Ricky González Jr. of El Sauz, Texas, stood outside his home on the ranch where he has lived since childhood.

“I was wearing shorts, no shirt, and Crocs,” he said. “Then I heard this sound, kind of like the sound of a truck coming to the house, but the sound continued for about a minute.”

Ricky didn’t think much of the sound other than it was probably his parents driving in from Mission, where they had traveled to get tamales for an event the following day. He didn’t think anything extraordinary had occurred until that evening when he saw on CNN that a meteorite had landed somewhere in South Texas.

“Even then, I didn’t put the sound and the meteorite together,” he recalled. “Not until later that night when my dad got a call from the owner of the ranch.”

The ranch owner called ranch foreman Ricky González Sr. to tell him he had received notice from a meteorite hunter who NASA had notified that a meteorite may have landed on his ranch. That’s when Ricky Jr. began to process the event as something extraordinary. But even in his understated manner, Ricky Jr. was not particularly fazed. As a long-time musician, he spent the spring back at the ranch, waiting for graduate school to start.

When meteorite hunters and a few others arrived at the ranch a couple of days later, things began to get serious for Ricky Jr. On day one, they planned out methods to search for the meteorites.

“They interviewed me and asked, ‘OK, where were you when you heard it, and where did the sound come from,’” he recalled.

So, they began the search in the direction he pointed to. Robert Ward, who they call the Space Cowboy, found the first meteorite on Saturday, Feb. 18. Then Marc Fries found the second.

“And then I found mine,” Ricky said.

Ricky continues to understate his experience, but that’s mostly his personality. He nevertheless tells a riveting story, which is now featured in “The Shooting Star of Starr County: An Out of this World Discovery” exhibit at the Museum of South Texas History.

The El Sauz meteorite was exhibited at the Witte Museum in San Antonio in 2023 and early 2024. Currently, the meteorites found at El Sauz Ranch are at the Museum of South Texas History, closer to home, just a few miles away from where Ricky Jr. heard it that fateful day in February 2023.

“The Shooting of Starr County: An Out of this World Discovery” exhibit is funded in part by a grant from The Betty Stieren Kelso Foundation.