Port Orford meteorite hoax

The Port Orford meteorite hoax concerns a 19th-century claimed meteorite discovery near Port Orford, Oregon in 1856.

[4] Dr. John Evans, a medical doctor and government-appointed geologist working for the United States Department of the Interior, claimed to have found a 10-ton (10,000 kg) pallasite meteorite in coastal Oregon (then Oregon Territory) on a "bald mountain" above Port Orford in 1856.

Evans returned a sample to the East Coast, but he died of pneumonia in 1861 before the discovery could be corroborated.

[5][4] It has been reported as a hoax, with modern metallurgical and other analysis showing that a 28 gram specimen[2] collected by Evans was actually part of the Imilac Chilean meteorite of 1822 and probably acquired by him in Panama on his return to the United States East Coast.

[5][6] The mountain of Evans' claimed find has been tentatively identified as Johnson Mountain from Evans' reports and field notes; surveys of the area with sensitive proton magnetometers in the 1980s failed to show evidence of a nickel-rich meteorite there.