Welcome to Tnet and congrats for your forthcoming anniversary.
Most meteorites are found ‘by eye’ from searching in areas which are generally naturally free from terrestrial rocks such as sandy deserts, ancient dry lake beds and ice fields or frozen lakes. Glaciers also carry rocks with them, so glacial moraines can be a good place to look (as in Antarctica).
In America, Southern California's Mojave Desert might be a good place to try. The desert also has dry lake beds (Rosamond, Muroc, and others) which have yielded many specimens. This will be random searching just because the terrain is suitable for making finds. Those areas don’t naturally contain more meteorites than other locations, but they’re more easily spotted because the areas are generally poor in terrestrial rocks.
Your chances can also be better in large expanses of farmland that have seen the soil depleted of rocks by continual cultivation. Wheat fields in the Great Plains for example, where anything that has fallen recently will stand out (at the right time of year), but you would of course need landowner permission.
The other option to improve your chances is to target large known strewn fields which have a history of finds. I wouldn’t bother with, say, the areas around the Barringer Crater (Meteor Crater) in Arizona. It was a huge impact but: most of the impactor is believed to have vaporised; the area has been well picked over, leaving only tiny pieces of debris; and in any case the site is privately owned. It is however well worth a visit for anyone interested in meteorites:
https://www.barringercrater.com/for-visitors
Other well-known strewn fields that hold more promise include those near Holbrook and Franconia in Arizona, and Glorieta Mountain in New Mexico. Since 1995, thousands of stony meteorites have also been found in what appear to be two overlapping strewn fields around Gold Basin in Arizona.
In most cases, a metal detector (even a finely tuned one) doesn’t necessarily improve your chances and will increase the number of false positives. It won’t hurt, but I wouldn’t rely on it to the exclusion of keen visual observation. I wouldn’t be prepared to put a rating on your likelihood of finding something, except that it would be low, rising to moderate at best.
Hope that helps a bit. Good luck and have fun.
Wisconsin
