the antiquities act to remove antiquities from united states lands without the permission of the united states. the federal government doesn t show up with the national guard and an assistant, or pardon me, an acting united states attorney in pancake make-up with the intention of working things out somewhere down the road. after we got over the initial shock, those of us who were packing the dinosaur kind of went into our packing mode, but towards the end of the day, it became obvious that something was going on with the town. people around town noticed. they noticed all the cop cars. they noticed the police tape. all a sudden, there were people with signs out in front of our building it was clear that people were not happy with what was going on. the protest developed very quickly, so there were a lot of people on the street. i was working for national geographic, and we were gonna take the skull of sue and put it into a cat scan of what they use for the space shuttles t
warehouse and still no charge have been filed against the institute. allow us some rights. charge us with something. let s go to court. let 12 people decide. i couldn t give them any information to help incriminate people at black hills institute. they thought i was going to be able to tell them all sorts of terrible things the institute did. well, they didn t do anything wrong. they talked to my attorney about, you better get your guy in, or bring him on in, or last chance happening pretty soon, and my attorney says, he just doesn t have anything to tell you. for three years, i had no contact with the institute. that s horrible. i mean, i considered them best friends and i couldn t call them up. sue was probably the impetus for the government following up with a criminal prosecution. sue wasn t a part of what we
we did. and it s still unbelievable to me. it was time for sue s unveiling, finally, which, of course, you can imagine, pete s most exciting moment to be able to be reunited with sue. he wasn t invited. four, three, two, one [ cheers and applause ] we go through what happened and the negative of that, but there s another negative. it s the negative of what never happened and what could have
was also still in prison. and there were rumors that sue was going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. it really was obvious to me by that time that the only way to get her away from maurice williams was through sotheby s. all of us was aware that the auction was taking place. it would probably sell for $1 million or $2 million. the big fear was that it was going to be sold to some private individual. i know there were a lot of people concerned that it might be bought by an institution in a foreign country. that was a big concern with the media, that it was going to be sold and lost to science and sold and put in a private room someplace. we always felt an extraordinary obligation to get this fossil to the right home. clearly, there were a lot of really interested parties that were hoping and praying they had a shot. we had dreams after the auction started developing that perhaps we could buy her back. a wonderful philanthropist from our area, stan adelstein,
all a sudden, there were people with signs out in front of our building. it was clear that people were not happy with what was going on. the protests developed very quickly, so there were a lot of people on the street. i was working for national geographic, and we were gonna take the skull of sue and put it into a cat scan of what they use for the space shuttles to see if we could see inside the skull of sue. and terry wentz answered the phone, and he said, well, i don t think so, so i got on the next plane i could, and the place was surrounded by cops. i mean, you thought that there was like a real t-rex loose on the property. the next day in they brought reinforcements, a lot more people. the idea was that we were going to load this stuff up and haul it somewhere. and when the director of military support, one of the colonels got down there, he called and said, hey, general, this is not what we expected. this is a media event. we got schoolkids out here. we got parents o