Back in 1930, a farmer named Tilmon Brooks found a 33-pound rock in his cow pasture in Tazewell, Tennessee.  (--Tazewell is about 45 miles northeast of Knoxville.)

He decided to keep it . . . and for the next 60 years, his family used it as a doorstop in the house.  When Tilmon died, his granddaughter, Donna Lewis, took it and used it as a decoration in her flower garden.  

One day, her husband George ran a metal detector over it and got a strange reading . . . so they took it to researchers at Eastern Kentucky University to analyze it.  It turns out . . . it was a METEORITE estimated to be four BILLION years old. 

And even though they could probably auction it off for a lot of money, Donna and her family sold it to the Eastern Kentucky museum on Thursday for an undisclosed amount.  That way, people could see it and kids could touch it.