Kansas is a leading source of meteorite discoveries in the United States, authorities said. The state is extensively farmed, has relatively little foliage and few indigenous rocks that meteorites would get confused with, said Geoffrey Notkin, an Arizona meteorite hunter who sometimes helps Arnold search in Kansas.

Another reason is that 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, the Greensburg area was pelted with meteorites from what later was named the Brenham meteorite. It was named after the township where some pieces landed.

Prehistoric Indians gathered the fragments as religious symbols, and the first documented collections occurred in the 1880s. In the 1920s, famed meteorite collector Harvey Nininger found a crater from one point of impact, and he encouraged residents to look for meteorites.

The Brenham meteorites are in collections worldwide, including ones at Harvard and Yale universities, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and in an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.