Over four billion years ago, asteroid-like objects collected together by their mutual gravity to form liquid balls of rock that cooled to form the inner planets, of which Earth is, from our point of view, the most interesting. Most of the larger hunks were long ago swept up into the planets. A relative few survived for billions of years before they hit Earth's atmosphere. An even smaller number were large enough to survive their fiery decent to actually strike the planet and become meteorites. The large impact 65 million years ago in the region of the Yucatan Peninsula may have been responsible for sending enough dust and debris into the atmosphere to block the sun for two years, nearly wiping life from Earth and dooming some of the larger species, including the dinosaurs.
Humans are by nature acquisitive creatures.
The issue entered the news lately in the form of the controversy surrounding the Willamette meteorite, a 16-ton hunk of mostly iron that is the largest meteorite ever discovered in the United States. It probably formed about 4.5 billion years ago as part of the original cloud of gas and dust that gave the planets birth. Long ago, it landed somewhere in Canada or the Washington state and was pushed by a glacier more than 10,000 years ago to its resting place in Oregon, where it was discovered by an erstwhile miner named Ellis G. Hughes in 1902. Steel Co. Hughes dragged all 16 tons of it to his own property, where he let people take a peek for 25 cents. Of course, Oregon Iron sued Hughes.