$1M treasure in Rocky Mountains has been found, says Forrest Fenn
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
We were digging sand castles when "he found it".
Back at the house when his grandfather was having a closer look at the ship, grandad "discovered" an old map and little key inside the ship - strange we hadn't noticed it earlier.
The map had a big X marked on it - also down at the beach near a big cave. I happened to know just that area....
So we went down there and dug in the sand and found a wooden treasure box wrapped in a metal chain and padlocked. When my little boy tried the key in the lock.... it fit!
Inside the box was overflowing with jewellery and coins and weird little trinkets. He had discovered buried treasure!
In fact I had bought the wooden ship, and the wooden jewellery box from the local opportunity shop and also bought $5 worth of shiny junk jewellery and old overseas coins and trinkets and filled it up. I then bought a chain and padlock and wrapped it up and buried it.
He's 11 years old now and still doesn't know the true story. Credit is due to my friend who did this first - he buried a pouch in the sand for his kids to find - I just expanded on the idea with the ship and the map and the treasure box, chains and padlock etc.
Keep doing what you're doing and the world will be a better place.
If you like that sort of thing:
Last year for his birthday I spent several months preparing an alien treasure hunt in the park for his birthday.
The idea was an alien spacecraft had crashed in the park and eight 10 year old boys were needed to go hunting for the clues to help the aliens get home.
As we drove down there listening to the radio I had an IOT device that transmitted its own AM radio station to the car radio with an urgent announcement about a crashed alien spacecraft nearby.
I prepared all sorts of gadgets and electronic devices - sound effects and lights - gave the kids bluetooth buttons to search for things and had little IOT devices that played sounds when the buttons came in range. I made audio mission cards which played audible missions to the kids (made from audio greeting card mechanisms). I bought tiny little glow in the dark aliens and little led lights that I scattered around the park. The kids found a nest of alien eggs that they had to eat (chocolate eggs).
The finale was they had to tie the tiny aliens to helium balloons and send them into the sky to "send them home".
I spent months writing code and preparing it all. Only about half worked on the night!!
I think I had more fun making it all than the kids did doing it.
This has ruined it all for me.
I'm going to be "that guy" - don't do this. What goes up must come down, so it essentially amounts to littering bits of rubber and plastic ribbon everywhere which pose a choking threat to wildlife - particularly marine wildlife, if they make it that far.
In a society truth is less important than relationships, communication, shared "knowledge" (myths).
It may be one of the reason why the Santa Claus character (among other ones) stays "alive" in the culture.
There is an hypothesis about the origin of the "hacker" state of mind (as a strong urge to understand how things work) stating that many of them think/thought that, as youngsters, they were lied to (cannot find the reference, though).
With a pathologist father, 3rd grade biology questions digressed into two hour linked list lectures on biochemistry.
I distinctly remember the joy inspired by finding out about the-thing-behind-the-thing though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Sy6oiJbEk
Ps. Watching this scene feels like almost all the employee stock option situations I OH in the Bay Area. Thankfully Carta is there to show you how little you get as an employee if and only if you go public.
Then he should have create a relationship of honesty. it's good to know that somebody wont lie to you, even to make you happy.
Adults do it all the time as well, when we consume fiction. It feels good to escape our current reality and inhabit another, magical reality, if only for a while. It’s a healthy thing to do as long as it doesn’t lead to a breakdown in our relationships and other aspects of our lives.
Are you sure Wikipedia supports your assertion?
I'm really more and more convinced that each and every human group has such foundations ("myths"), and that the larger the group, the larger the distortion between the myth and reality.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Douglas_Holt3/publicati...
I was a grown up before it dawned to me that if it wasn't for us they could have gone somewhere else and caught real fish.
They never said anything but today I do the same: sometimes we go hiking on Sundays before or after church, "expeditions into the wilderness", tenting in the garden.
I think it would be a really amazing experience, but I would be bummed out to find that my favorite childhood memory wasn’t real.
Don't agree at all. Do you feel betrayed that Santa is not real or there is no such thing as a tooth fairy?
I really don't understand the urge to lie to your children because your parents lied to you.
Which is better, telling your child:
"yeah you will lose all your baby teeth and each one will hurt and bleed and make you look silly with big gaps in your mouth"
or
"oooh you lost a tooth, now let's put it under your pillow and the tooth fairy will exchange it for a little gift while you sleep"
You have a wide variety of choices as to what to tell your child that doesn't include lieing. You can celebrate the loss of a tooth as a positive step of growing up without telling a lie about a creepy fairy that sneeks into houses and collects teeth.
Adults may rationalize to themselves that they lie to children to protect the children, but I think it is often more motivated by the adults' desire to avoid having an uncomfortable and difficult conversation.
Memories are real, experiences are as real as one wants them to be.
We all learn critical thinking and separating fact from fiction eventually, but that doesn’t mean you can’t look back fondly on experiences you enjoyed as a kid.
I hope that we can "replicate" this adventure some day.
Without proof, it's impossible to know if Fenn is just trying to call the whole thing off to avoid future troubles (and impossible to know if the treasure ever existed).
Even if he posts pictures, I'm not sure that will be adequate proof.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Consider a more overt variation: declare a prize for an open-entry no-rules fighting tournament. Nobody's been forced to participate, but encouraging people to engage in a dangerous activity is at least morally dubious to my mind.
The analogy to this is that encouraging people to go out into the wilderness in search of treasure is going to encourage people to exceed what their comfort zone would be if there's no reward.
>treasure is going to encourage people to exceed what their comfort zone would be if there's no reward.
Any more than taking dumb selfies for "the "gram" encourages them to exceed their comfort zone?
Anyway, these people were searching for hidden treasure, not "hiking". They were led to imagine that leaving the safety of a trail made them more likely to get rich.
In an objective appraisal of risk, actual danger is negligible with: (1) water, (2) compass, (3) mylar blanket, (4) rudimentary knowledge of surrounding topography, roads, and settled areas, (5) first aid kit equipped to stop blood loss, & (6) bear spray.
Without it, even a sprained ankle can be deadly.
Here's a random example from the top of my head.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obje...
tl;dr woman who had walked the Appalachian trail multiple times leaves the trail to pee, never finds her way back to the trail.
The sad truth is, some folks ain't completely right in their head, become obsessive over these kind of things (and other aspects of their lives), and then eventually bad things start happening.
Life is supposed to be adventure, not a safe walk in the park, shying away from any potential danger. Clearly Fenn thinks this way, and I can't agree more.
If he does disclose a location, and the treasure never actually existed, then he risks someone calling BS. ("I searched in that exact spot last summer and here's the GPS history on my phone to prove it.") He would also have to make his way out to the stated location at the spry young age of 89 and dig a plausible-looking hole.
So people are really going to resent him unless the treasure was real and he discloses where it was. It's understandable if the finder remains anonymous, but the burial location had better not.
Outsourcing ain't just for IT, y'know.
I like the idea, but it's caused too much loss of life. I think it'd be better if he had spread out the 'treasure' over much more smaller packages, for example. Of course, there'd still be people that try to find everything.
If it weren't the treasure hunt, anyone that unstable would have joined the closest cult anyway.
We cannot legislate to the lowest common denominator of society.
Folks chose to follow a dream. It was their legs that took them there; their imagination that motivated them. Their responsibility for their own lives.
In grown-up terms, there was no contract between the treasure-hider and the treasure-seekers.
Whoever engages in any conduct with intent to convey false or misleading information under circumstances where such information may reasonably be believed... if death results, be fined under this title or imprisoned for any number of years up to life, or both
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2009-title18/html...
Oh! Oh! You deliberately left out (those …'s) the part about it being information about a crime! What a troll that was.
... may reasonably be believed and where such information indicates that an activity has taken, is taking, or will take place that would constitute a violation of chapter 2 [aircraft & motor vehicles], 10 [biological weapons], 11B [chemical weapons], 39 [explosives & other dangerous articles], 40 [importation, manufacture, distribution & storage of explosive materials], 44 [firearms], 111 [shipping], or 113B [terrorism] of this title, section 236 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 (42 U.S.C. 2284) [sabotage of nuclear facilities or fuel], or section 46502, the second sentence of section 46504, section 46505(b)(3) or (c), section 46506 if homicide or attempted homicide is involved, or section 60123(b) of title 49, shall...
IANAL, but these don't seem to be the "lying about treasure" types of statutes. Unless your treasure is plutonium.
If it was truly natural, undisturbed cover & dig in a specific spot... wow!
[Oops: That was meant to be a reply to why state lottery recipients sometimes have to be public.]
This is the golden post I always look back to on this subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vzgl/you_just_...
If I won a $600MM prize, a good chunk of the $30MM spending money would go to buying a large property in rural southern Utah with good water rights, quality arable land that can grow fruits/vegetables/hay, an airstrip, and a defensible position. I would stock it with lots of food, guns, ammunition, and diesel fuel.
Having that retreat is as important to me as having the $30MM in treasury notes.
Cash from drug sales is also small bills, and therefore voluminous.
If not, Bamber Gascoigne's "Quest for the Golden Hare" (1983) is a fascinating account of the puzzle, and the worldwide (!) search for Kit's treasure.
Truth is stranger than fiction? Yep. The person who unearthed the prize had not solved the puzzle. The party that solved the puzzle did not get the treasure.
A wild ride.
I wonder if people, being more connected today, would have been able to solve Masquerade very quickly.
> On 11 December 1988, The Sunday Times printed a story accusing the winner of the Masquerade contest of being a fraud. "Ken Thomas" was revealed as a pseudonym of Dugald Thompson, and Thompson's business partner, John Guard, was the boyfriend of Veronica Robertson, a former live-in girlfriend of Kit Williams. Guard had allegedly convinced Robertson to help him because both were said to be animal rights activists and Guard promised to donate any profits to the animal rights cause.[1]
> The Sunday Times alleged that while living with Williams, Robertson had learned the approximate physical location of the hare, while remaining ignorant of the proper solution to the book's master riddle.
https://www.filfre.net/2016/05/kit-williamss-golden-hare-par...
Pretty cool. I wonder how long before we see that part of the plot of Ready Player One come into being from now?
If these billionaires wanted more than just free good publicity, they could whip up actual legal paperwork.
That doesn't mean they won't give away a lot in their remaining years.
Northern New Mexico has some really great mountains.
I supposed you'd have to figure out a way to make the maps single use.
Amazing how greed fuels people.
Secondary, splitting it up would benefit more people better. 100 million could also be 10K $10K packages.
Sounds like Forrest Fenn’s bullshit will never end.
Yes, that seems like a good reason to doubt the claim.
Let's see whether he lives up to that promise.
Damn