This story begins not in a galaxy far away, but at a Milwaukee rummage sale a few years ago. Tom Lynch paid $10 for an odd hunk of metal he figured might be copper or bronze with potential salvage value.

He had no idea it had dropped from space into the Arizona desert some 50,000 years ago.

"For the last two years, it kept my grandson's basketball hoop from blowing over in the yard. It weighs 50 pounds," said Lynch, a retired foundry and General Motors worker who lives in South Milwaukee.

Recently, he saw a show about meteorites on the Travel Channel and realized that's probably what he had. It was curious, he thought, that the thing never oxidized in the weather. Following advice from the TV show, he held a magnet up to the object and it stuck.

He took his 4.6 billion-year-old find to the Milwaukee Public Museum and then to Chicago's Field Museum last month. The scientists got excited. Yes, they said, it's a meteorite.

He got one offer from a collector for $10,000, but soon had a sense from Internet research that a meteorite with this unique basket shape might fetch closer to $100,000.

Before he could get too excited, a call came from Jim DuFoe, a minerals expert he had consulted. Bad news, DuFoe said. The meteorite was stolen in 1968 from the Meteor Crater Visitor Center near Flagstaff. He had himself a hot rock.

DuFoe remembers Lynch's reply: "We can't sell what we don't own."

So Lynch plans to toss the meteorite in the car and personally deliver it to the visitor center on the crater's edge.

"It was going along pretty good there for a while. I've been really lucky in my life, so this doesn't faze me," he said.

"I've got mixed emotions. I'm glad it's going back and a lot of people will be able to see it. And I'm feeling sorry I didn't get $100,000 for it."

Lynch, 62, is more of a car buff than a space nut, but he's getting a kick out of his meteoric leap into the geological realm.

Conversation piece

On Tuesday, he invited me to see the meteorite at Market Place Café, a restaurant he likes in Oak Creek. The deceivingly heavy chunk of mostly iron and nickel sat on a table in the basement banquet room, and a stream of customers and employees came to see and photograph it.

DuFoe was there, and so was Peter Sheehan, curator of geology at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Sheehan said he regularly is approached by people who think they have a meteorite. It's usually slag from the foundry process.

"I think in 30-some years I've identified one other, maybe two," he said.

At the Chicago museum, where they sawed off a little piece for analysis, they were similarly thrilled by Lynch's find. "It was like a 'Tom and Jerry' moment. Eyeballs bulged and jaws hit the floor," said DuFoe, who runs a business out of Rockton, Ill., called Geoscience Collections Services.

The 10-inch-tall meteorite is brownish with knobby protrusions and little caves and dents and what looks like a handle. It traveled here as part of the massive Canyon Diablo meteor, which strayed from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and said hello to Earth with a crater not quite a mile wide and 550 feet deep. Most of the meteor vaporized on impact.

More than 250,000 people a year visit the site, which opened as an attraction in 1942, said Brad Andes, president of Meteor Crater Enterprises.

The basket meteorite now held by Tom Lynch was found by a rancher three miles from the crater and permanently lent to the Meteor Crater facility. Because of its novel shape, it was a favorite piece, and in fact was featured on a postcard the museum used to sell (which now is peddled on eBay).

On Aug. 12, 1968, someone walked away with the meteorite, according to an article in the Yuma newspaper. At the time, the value was placed at $5,000, and the Coconino County sheriff issued a nationwide bulletin for its return.

About five years ago, Andes received a phone call from a lawyer who said he represented the family who had the piece. "He wouldn't give me his name. The people were really paranoid about the legal ramifications of having that in their possession," Andes said.

The lawyer hinted at a reward, but Andes said thieves don't deserve that. The man never called back. Lynch does not remember where the rummage sale was where he made the find.

Lynch said the visitor center is rewarding him with $1,000, which he is happily accepting. Andes said Lynch is doing the honest thing and the decent thing, which is no guarantee in the world of meteorite collectors. "That says a lot about his character," Andes said.

A tribute to Lynch will be posted at the museum, and the basket meteorite will once again be displayed. Under glass this time.

Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or e-mail at jstingl@journalsentinel.com.