Emily Brown
A NASA intern who was caught after stealing $21,000,000 worth of rocks from the moon admitted he and his accomplice later used them to get down and dirty.
If you're looking for a romantic place to get intimate with your partner, chances are your mind wouldn't immediately go to a big pile of rocks.
But for former NASA college intern Thad Roberts, that idea of that setting was, literally, out of this world.
I should clarify, we're not talking about some regular old boulders here, but rather a collection of rocks carefully plucked from the Moon and brought back to Earth following a mission carried out by NASA in 1969 and the early 1970s.
Advert
The rock samples collected by Apollo astronauts were stored in a safe at a Johnson Space Center lab in Houston, Texas, and remained there until Roberts and his accomplices carried out their plan in 2002.
It all started after Roberts began working as an intern along with two others, Tiffany Fowler and Shae Saur.
Knowing where the rocks were kept, the trio slipped into the Johnson Space Center at night using their NASA IDs and stole the entire safe, which contained lunar samples worth as much as $21 million.
The trio planned to sell the rocks - but Roberts had another use for them in mind, too. In an interview with CBS News in 2011, Roberts explained how he and Fowler had sex on the rocks in a hotel room.
"I take some of the moon rocks and I put them underneath the blanket on the bed... I never said anything but I'm sure she could feel it," he said.
"It was more about the symbol of what we were doing, basically having sex on the moon."
In a release about the incident, the FBI explained: "The young thieves did more than just try to sell off a collection of lunar samples... In the process, they also contaminated them, making them virtually useless to the scientific community.
"They also destroyed three decades worth of handwritten research notes by a NASA scientist that had been locked in the safe."
After Roberts and Fowler had sex on the moon rocks, they set their plan of selling them into motion.
With the help of another associate, those involved in the theft had already set up a website to try and sell the rocks - but the FBI was one step ahead.
The agency had a collector email the trio to say he was interested in buying the moon rocks, urging them to 'contact [their] brother and sister-in-law in Pennsylvania to set up a meeting'.
Little did the thieves know, the family members were actually undercover FBI agents.
The interns were ultimately arrested, and the moon rocks were successfully recovered from their nearby hotel room. Roberts, Fowler and Saur all pled guilty to conspiracy to commit theft and interstate transportation of stolen property.
Roberts ended up serving 10 years in prison following the heist, while Fowler and Saur were sentenced to 180 days of house arrest and 150 hours of community service.