…And she’s trying to sell pieces of it. Maria Angeles Duran, a housewife from a small town in Spain, claims she owns the Sun and even got her decision validated as a fact by Spanish courts. She had first declared that she owns the Sun in 2010, using a loophole in the Outer Space Treaty that says no country has the right to claim stars or other celestial bodies, but nothing about an individual’s rights to do so. Maria simply woke up one day, walked into a local notary’s office, and made the claim official.
“Psst… hey there… wanna buy some land on the Sun?”
Mrs. Duran first tried to sell land on her webpage for one Euro per square meter a few years ago, and has actually been quite successful since then. She is now noticeably richer than before her solar venture. If you’d like to contribute towards that, the website is still up. For one Euro, or roughly $1.12, you can still “buy” a piece of the Sun on her site. You even get a neat certificate informing others of your solar property.
Maria’s auction for solar land blocked by Ebay.
Her latest step in the get-rich scheme, though, was recently cut short by Ebay. The online auction giant blocked her Ebay ads, which were also selling solar land for one Euro per square meter. Maria subsequently decided to take legal action, and the Spanish courts actually told her she can sue Ebay for its actions. She claims that she had made over a thousand Euros in sales before her auctions were taken off the site.
Duran isn’t the first person to claim she owns the Sun.
A Romanian man named Virgiliu Pop had actually claimed ownership of the Sun before Duran in 2002. He did so on a register called the Archimedes Institute, instead of going to the courts, though. According to Duran, this gives him no actual right to the Sun, as she is still the only person who holds a legal document stating ownership. Others have tried to claim celestial bodies before, including an American named Dennis Hope. Hope was selling plots on the moon for $19.95 an acre, and even managed to sell off a massive 2.66 million-acre piece for $250,000. He still claims to own the moon, along with its multi-quadrillion dollar Helium-3 supply.
