GREENSBURG ? For Steve Arnold, money can sometimes literally fall out of the sky.

The Wichita native recently found a 1,400-pound pallasite meteorite near Greensburg in south-central Kansas. It was the largest of its type ever found in the United States and could be worth between $1 million and $3 million, experts said.

And Arnold is taking unusual steps to ensure that he and the owners of land where any other meteorites fell will cash in on the unusual “crop.”

He has signed leases with the owners of about 3,000 acres in the area to look for more meteorites. Arnold pays them for hunting rights, and they get a share of his sales if he finds a meteorite on their land.

“I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before,” said Jeffrey Grossman, a geochemist and secretary of the Meteoritical Society, an international planetary science organization.

Arnold’s partner and lawyer, Phil Mani of San Antonio, Texas, said the contracts are necessary because meteorites are otherwise the property of owners of the land where they fall.

“We are going to cover all the land where we think meteorites can be found,” Mani said.

Arnold, who lives in northern Arkansas, makes his living trading and selling meteorites, which are sought by museums, universities and collectors. His new find is being kept in Texas.

Meteorites come from the asteroid belt formed at the beginning of the solar system about 4.3 billion years ago.

“It’s from out there on the other side of Mars. How cool is that?” Arnold said. “You can own something that has not changed since the beginning of the solar system.”

The recently-discovered meteorite measures about 36 by 30 inches and has a rare bullet-like shape and smooth surface. Pallasite meteorites are made of iron nickel and olivine crystals and account for less than 1 percent of all discovered meteorites.

The size and shape of Arnold’s meteorite makes it significant, experts said.

“Unless this one has some very unusual internal structure, it probably will not advance the science significantly,” said Randy Van Schmus, geology professor and meteorite expert at the University of Kansas. “As a collector’s item, it would have extremely high value. It’s a very significant find and a very good museum specimen.”

Denton Ebel, assistant curator of earth and planetary sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, said the meteorite would probably be worth at least $1 million.

Small pieces of pallasite meteorites from Kansas have sold for about $4 to $5 a gram, said Allan Lang, a well-known meteorite dealer in upstate New York. That would make Arnold’s meteorite worth from $2.5 million to more than $3 million if it was cut up and every piece sold.

Mani and Arnold believe that the meteorite may be valuable in one piece because of its size and shape. They would like to see it on museum display.

“That’s my hope and everything is negotiable,” Arnold said. “If someone is willing to offer significantly more than someone else, it is theirs and they can do what they want with it.”

Meanwhile, Arnold, who has bought a house in Greensburg, is back in the field looking for more.

Kansas is a leading source of meteorite discoveries in the United States because it is extensively farmed and has relatively little foliage and few indigenous rocks that people may confuse with meteorites, said Geoffrey Notkin, an Arizona meteorite hunter who has sometimes helped Arnold search in Kansas.

Another reason is that 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, the Greensburg area was pelted with meteorites from what later was named the Brenham meteorite, after the township where some pieces landed.