Is the Bahia emerald worth the trouble or is it just another hoax? Accidental business partners Jerry Ferrara and Kit Morrison seem to think it’s the former. The pair have been tied up in court cases for the last 10 years or so trying to prove themselves the rightful owners of the 752-pound Bahia emerald, a huge black rock “with cylinders of emerald” protruding out of it (watch, runtime 2:15). This rock “is the size of a mini fridge [and] weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers,” Elizabeth Weil writes in a piece for Wired. “Estimates of worth range from a hundred bucks to USD 925 mn.” It goes without saying then that everyone who get even a little bit close wanted in on a piece of the pie, but none got any. Since this emerald was unearthed from a mine in Bahia in East Brazil back in 2001, it appears to have brought and cost nothing but trouble for those who tried to procure it; four court cases were filed, 14 people or entities — including the government of Brazil — have tried to claim it as their own, a house reportedly burned down, a man was allegedly kidnapped, and three people filed for bankruptcy.

But has it all just been a big waste of time? What science (and life) tell us about emeralds suggest that this one particular rock may just be another MacGuffin, or in Weil’s words “an object that everyone’s chasing but doesn’t really matter.” Not only are emeralds complex in their formation, but almost all are typically full of impurities, cracks and inclusions that cause the stone to shatter if anyone tries to cut along them. The Bahia emerald, which is said to have survived Hurricane Katrina and has been sitting in a secret LA county vault since it was seized in 2008, is “huge, strange, and composed of low-quality crystals…imagine a petrified Jello mold made by Wilma Flintstone for a dinosaur.” But whether or not this stone is a hoax, it seems unlikely at this point that anything anyone says or does is capable of getting Ferrara and Morrison off its trail. The two partners had even won the case in 2015, only to be contested days later by the country of Brazil. One thing is for sure though, they are also not the first, nor will they be the last to fall in the thrall of a large and shiny rock that doesn’t live up to expectations.