The Bondoc meteorite was found in 1956 on the Bondoc Peninsula, Luzon, Philippines. A single very large mass weighing 890 kilograms was found in the jungle. Bondoc is a mesosiderite, stony-iron, and is known for it's very large metallic nodules set in a silicate and olivine rich matrix. The Bondoc meteorite was cut into very large slices and distributed worldwide. The problem was that once cut, all of these slices have fallen apart due to oxidation in the jungle. These days, pretty much all Bondoc is in small pieces, and large metal nodules, some as large as softballs and weighing several kilos each. The good thing is that whatever damage was going to be done by oxidation has already been done, the pieces now left show great stability.

Harvey Nininger was in the Philippines in 1959 and saw a small piece in a government office and arranged to have the meteorite recovered from the deep jungle, a major task at that time. The following is an account of the dangerous recovery from Nininger's book, "Find a Falling Star":

  "The last phase of the recovery was rather risky and gave us some worries moments. The day we got it on the bamboo raft for the trip down the rover and across the stretch of sea, a typhoon showed up. The water got so turbulent that we had to hire two motorized fishing boats to stabilize the raft. Night came and one of the boats started to founder so we steered close to the shore as I was afraid to lose about $3000 worth of recovery gear that I had borrowed from the office  -besides the meteor. As we got near the coast of Mulanay one boat sank and we almost lost four men trying to keep the raft from collapsing as the waves were unusually big".

It took three years from the time Nininger heard about the meteorite until it was recovered and shipped to Arizona.

Last year I made a large exchange with the US Nation Museum (Smithsonian) and I exchanged out some kilos of Bondoc material, all from one large slice which fell apart in the museum, and was divided up into many pieces. All of these pieces are part of USNM Collection # 2578 and come with a photocopy of the original museum label which I received in the exchange. Bondoc is a very nice and very historic meteorite.