Daniel M. Barringer spent 27 years and roughly $500,000 of his own money, about $9 million today, drilling into a giant bowl in the northern Arizona desert, convinced a 10-million-ton iron meteorite worth over a billion dollars lay buried beneath it. This episode follows the successful mining engineer who challenged the scientific consensus that the crater was a volcanic steam explosion, secured a land patent signed by Theodore Roosevelt, incorporated the Standard Iron Company, and even got a post office named Meteor established to service a mining boom that never came.

The story turns on the physics that Barringer could not have known. In 1929, astronomer F.R. Moulton calculated that an object striking at roughly 29,000 miles per hour with the energy of 10 megatons of TNT would have largely vaporized on impact, leaving no ore body to mine. ...