Stephen F. Austin State University

Terry Corbett Jr. and his teams worked 12- to 16-hour days, combing fields and forests – locating, reporting positions and mapping thousands of space shuttle remains.

Working near Nacogdoches, his finds included computer circuit boards, hatch bolts and explosives. A tire lying in a pasture and landing gear embedded in soil gave him pause, as did shreds of a uniform, a piece of boot and a manual for emergency landings.

"We kind of took that one in for a bit," he said. "They had to know what was going on for that to be out."

Mr. Corbett, 31, was in the field documenting disaster about two hours after Columbia rained onto East Texas. Working with a global-positioning device and a list of addresses, he recorded where parts and pieces of the spacecraft had landed in Nacogdoches.

"When I got there, an awful lot of debris had been stolen," he said.

Six people were convicted of debris theft early on. But Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss said he hasn't heard of similar activity in recent years.

By establishing the path of ground debris, the searchers and mappers sharpened Columbia investigators' search for answers.

Mr. Corbett, a research forester at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, respectfully recalls the volunteers who joined the shuttle hunt and fed the hunters.

He talks of the politics and competition among local, state and national authorities that he says slowed the search early on. He remembers how many volunteers weren't prepared for the challenge and the thick East Texas woods – how many quickly played out.

"It was raining. It was cold, and a lot of them weren't used to it," Mr. Corbett says.

And too many people, he says, were along for the ride, for the publicity. "If we could have done more searching and less talking, we could have recovered a lot more stuff."

But some reported stuff was gone before Mr. Corbett could arrive to record its location. Locals told of five men in a black Suburban showing up, flashing credentials and taking objects off their land.

The group "had some type of acronym I'd never heard of," Mr. Corbett said. "I have no idea who they were."