The late Ulysses Drummond, who for 60 years held on to the 1.65-pound stone the Smithsonian Institution stores as the Enon meteorite, was his father’s 16th child and his mother’s 11th.

Although this circumstance is easily explained by his parents’ previous marriages, the parentage of the stone he toted around with him remains unclear.

“As a meteorite goes,” said Alfred Kracher, a Ph.D.who studied it while working at the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, “it is an oddball.”

The meteorite’s history on earth matches Kracher’s description just as well.

An early mention of “Enon” as it is called, appears in a 1942 article in “Popular Astronomy” by the eminent scientist H.H. Nininger, for whom a meteorite award is named at Arizona State University.

Then at the Colorado Museum of Natural History in Denver, Nininger got a look at a sample of the specimen when it was sent to to Frank Clay Cross of the American Meteorite Laboratory.

The two then traveled to the Elizabeth, Colo., home of U.G. Drummond, to have a look.

Along the way, “both of us rejoiced in the thought that we were to have the privilege of adding a new name to the list of Colorado meteorites,” Nininger wrote. “To our surprise, we learned that the specimen … had been picked up in Ohio many years ago, about 1878.”

Their surprise wasn’t nearly as great as Drummond’s.

Nininger said the specimen “had not been recognized as a meteorite until literature on how to recognize meteorites had reached its finder a few weeks previous to our visit. Our description had aroused (his) suspicion, and the sample had been forwarded to settle the question.”

After the visit, Nininger called it “strangely fortunate that, for 60 years, this homely little stone had been sufficiently cherished by its finder to escape being lost.”

It was particularly fortunate given that “he resided successively in Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming Utah and then two more locations in Colorado,” moving the rock with him each step of the way.

“When asked why he had so jealously clung to such a shapeless, rusty-looking object,” Nininger wrote, “he replied that … he had kept it as a souvenir of his father’s farm.”

That farm was in Section 17 of Mad River Township, on land east of I-675 between Haddix and Dayton-Springfield Road. Genealogical records indicate Ulysses Drummond was born there in 1864, the fifth and last of the children his parents had with one another.

The homestead was founded by Ulysses’ grandfather, George Drummond, who had immigrated from Ireland, and his mother, Rosanna Thompson, who had come from Scotland.

Nininger said that cutting and polishing Drummond’s rock “revealed a very unusual” geological lineage in that “about half of the ‘metallic grains’ (it contained) were not true metal, but sulfide.”

The same thing caught Kracher’s eye when he examined it for an article ultimately published in 2000.

“Imagine someone melting a very dirty piece of iron alloy, then loading his shotgun with bird-shot composed of very hard pieces of rock and firing it into the melt,” Kracher said in an email describing the meteorite.

Let the whole mess cool and harden, and you have the Enon meteorite.

“How something like that might happen on an asteroid is anyone’s guess,” Kracher said.

Kracher said scientists’ best guess is that combined metal-and-rock meteorites like Enon can form in a couple of ways.

“An asteroid belt can have a piece that’s mostly rock run into something that’s mostly iron. That’s a possibility. Another is you have a body that’s just big enough that it tries to become something like earth, but it doesn’t make it.”

Scientists call such bodies “earthlets” because they have both the rock needed for a planetary crust and the metal for a planetary core; they just haven’t gone through all the geological processes required to make a planet.

However they’re produced, the combined meteorites are called “stony irons” and “Enon’s a stony iron.” Kracher said. “But it doesn’t have enough close relatives” for scientists to be able tell by comparison how it was formed.

That’s led to something of a Catch-22.

“Enon is not quite odd enough to pique the interest of scientists who have the most complex equipment (needed for a detailed individual analysis) but not similar enough to other meteorites” to allow solid comparisons to be made.

Nor is there a solid answer about when Enon came to earth.

Because Ulysses Drummond just picked it up off the ground, the meteorite is considered a “find” rather than a “fall,” the latter being the term used for a meteorite people see falling from the sky.

Kracher suspects Enon hasn’t been on the planet for thousands of years because the iron on it shows little sign of rust.

In an article titled “Meteorite Evidence for the Accretion and Collisional Evolution of Asteroids,” Edward R.D. Scott of the University of Hawaii says that Enon and “other oddball meteorites” indicate “our schemes for classifying meteorites are too simple-minded.”

Now living in Minnesota, Kracher said he suspects that “if it gets studied in detail, (Enon) will probably tweak some models” of asteroids and meteorites.

“It’s often an oddball — one that in some ways doesn’t fit — that advances our knowledge,” he said.

It’s the very kind of of compliment a man who was his father’s 16th child and mother’s 11th and who moved a stone with him from place to place for 60 years just might appreciate.