Moon Rock Heists, Part Two: The Romantic Misadventures of Thad Roberts

Ridiculous History

iHeartPodcasts

History, Society & Culture

4.3 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Let's say you're a love-struck NASA intern -- your professional career holds a lot of promise, but your family life back home is in shambles... and you fall in love with a fellow intern. How can you impress your new paramour? Forget flowers, chocolates and all those other silly earth-bound romantic gestures: this is the story of Thad Roberts. From his account, he was carried away by mad love, which led him and a few collaborators -- including his fellow interns, one of whom was his lover -- to pull a heist on NASA's moon rock collection. In the second part of this two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max explore the real-life story of Moon Crime. (Please be aware this episode also contains a description of two people in a hotel room getting intimate atop a pile of stolen lunar rocks.)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Ridiculous History is a production of IHeart Radio. Welcome back to the show fellow ridiculous historians.
0:29.8	Thank you, as always so much for joining us.
0:33.4	Let's give a shout out to our fellow moon man, a positive lunatic, super producer, Mr. Max Williams. A lunatic? Get it? Like, lunar? A lunar? Yeah, it's good. It's good. Remember that band? I think they were like a riot girl band called the lunatics. That's fun. I do. That's fun. I do. I'm Noel. You're Ben. We're having fun. Talking about moon rocks, talking about people stealing them, misbehaving.
0:57.9	Episode one was pretty much all about the history of moon rocks and their place in American culture and tricky Dicky Nixon messing things up, you know, causing some of them to go missing.
1:09.5	But that wasn't exactly a heist.
1:11.1	That was more a case of incompetence.
1:13.0	And people just kind of having some oopsies and losing the moon rocks.
1:17.6	What were they called, Ben?
1:19.0	Goodwill moon rocks?
1:20.8	Previously on ridiculous history.
1:23.6	We discussed everything that you've excellently recap there, Noll, the goodwill moon rocks given out during the Tricky Dick administration.
1:34.9	There were 270 of these very small samples of lunar material taken by the Apollo missions, given out, often unilaterally,
1:49.7	by the president of the time, Richard Nixon.
1:54.0	However, as we learned previously, not only were a bunch of those mislaid, stolen, or simply lost,
2:01.9	there was a guy who's a real hero, a real Indiana Jones,
2:06.7	who has been hunting these down for the good grace of the United States.
2:13.7	That's the ex-U.S. military intelligence officer, NASA investigator, Joseph Gutines.
2:20.7	And now in part two, we're getting to something we and our pal Jordan like to call sex on the moon.
2:28.2	Mm-hmm, which is not just a bangingly delicious cocktail that should exist if it doesn't.
2:34.0	What would be in that moon moon juice
2:36.6	that's not a thing we'll we'll workshop that one this is an iHeart podcast there's a vile
2:48.8	sickness in abbas Town.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.