It's hard not to read the whole thing and think the people involved were very foolish, and it's an example of the lengths to which people can push wishful thinking and confirmation bias and ignore basic arguments like 'how could someone bury treasure in such a difficult to excavate way without anyone noticing them constructing it all, and how did they ever expect to retrieve it?' For example, we're repeatedly told about the scanty traces of things dug up like coconut, and then later this bombshell is dropped:
> In 1937, Hedden and his contractors returned to Oak Island. This time the company would encounter intriguing findings. Burrowing down one of the many auxiliary tunnels pock marking the island, the team stumbled upon a number of fascinating items including a miner's oil lamp with whale oil and unexploded dynamite at 65 feet.
Where on earth did those come from? Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before? This suggests to me that (1) all the previous expeditions and drillings have littered the island with all sorts of equipment and junk, and hence nothing found after the first expedition means much of anything or (2) the flood tunnels and other geological oddities move debris around and that is responsible for the dynamite, in which case there may never have been anything to explain in the first place.
> It appears far too simple to dismiss the efforts of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors and even an esteemed president.
I had a similar read on things. While I love a good mystery, and I'll indulge a good conspiracy theory (if only for the entertainment value), I feel this writeup takes the mystery too much at face value. In doing so, it misses a golden opportunity to mine the irony of the situation.
There's money buried in that pit, alright, and it's the money, time, and effort of dozens of fruitless and unintentionally self-replicating expeditions. The zeal to uncover a money pit has become, in and of itself, a money pit. That this zeal ensnared the imaginations of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors, and a future president speaks volumes about human nature.
> 'how could someone bury treasure in such a difficult to excavate way without anyone noticing them constructing it all, and how did they ever expect to retrieve it?'
That's a simple enough argument to reason around: when pirates buried the treasure there was no flooding. Remember, flooding didn't start until partway through one of the expeditions: this could be explained by shifting geological patterns in the rock in the island. All it would take would be for a crack to form in or current to erode a protective stone barrier which was previously keeping water out. Pirates unencumbered by water might have had a much easier time burying (and, they thought, retrieving) treasure.
The fact is, regardless of difficulty, someone did dig down that deep, and it seems like a lot of work, even without the water, to do as a prank or diversion. So I do think there is probably treasure there, or at least there was at one time.
However, as the many attempts show, the excavation is a very risky endeavor to undertake for treasure that May or may not still be there.
EDIT: And for the record, I think the treasure theory is the only plausible part. Kidd makes some sense, as do Vikings or naval treasure, but that's all speculation unless some real evidence is found. The "vi" bit is completely useless, and the Templars/masons/Shakespeare ideas are an embarrassment to the people who came up with the ideas.
To me, the presence of the stone found at 90 feet makes me think the whole thing was just a fake treasure pit designed to waste your adversary's time. If you were truly trying to hide a treasure, why would you intentionally leave semi-cryptic clues about what lay below?
It's kinda like a reverse-proof-of-work. It takes you a constant amount of time (probably a few weeks of work for a crew working on digging the ~100 foot pit and leaving a few fake clues). Then, once you tell someone else about it, it has the potential to occupy years of their life attempting to discover the "treasure" you told them about.
Nostalgia trip. I remember reading about it as a kid in an illustrated book about lost treasures and being enthralled by it.
It´s not difficult to see the fascination that a "mystery" like this can have on men, to the point of fueling the actual belief themselves, for opportunistic reasons or simply for not being seen as fools (another famous example, Rennes Le Chateau).
People ended up investing tons on money in the project, I wouldn´t be suprised if many of these reports of "coconut fibers", "timber platforms" were actually made up by the people making a living out of it, and not wanting the financing money to dry up.
The "undecipherable" tablet that perfectly translates to current English with a basic substitution cipher is particularly laughable.
To me the most interesting part is the equally spaced wood platforms. They went pretty deep and if it's true they were there before the digging began, I can find no real explanation for them.
> Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before?
Yup. Didn't you know pirates have the ability to transcend space and time? Captain Kidd regularly traveled to the late 19th century in his tricked-out DeLorean to score all sorts of goodies for his crew. Not just dynamite, but also souvenir coconut monkeys (they make great gifts) and clean-tasting pasteurized lager beer.
How someone could bury the treasure without anyone noticing them? Well, the same way they dug the hole without putting the treasure into it, I would think.
Why nobody would notice you is that it's 1600- or 1700-something and you're somewhere in the woods of what will be Canada one day.
What I don't get is why someone would play an elaborate prank, knowing that they probably won't be around to watch people's faces who try to find the treasure. No, it was no prank: this was a real pirate cache site.
I think that treasure had been there before, but it had been removed by the time those boys discovered the site. The encrypted sign was left behind, that's all.
I believe the encrypted sign was originally at the surface, perhaps not buried at all. Heck, maybe that sign had been put up in a nearby tree or whatever. The pirates used that sign so they can return to the site and recover the treasure. The treasure was 40 feet below that. When the pirates (or whoever) removed the treasure, they just threw the sign deep into the hole and buried it. So then the idiots who came later thought that the sign pointed down another 40 feet from there. (Why would anyone do that, doh!)
Pirates often left themselves clues to find their caches, like encrypted signs and such. Think about it: thousands of miles of ocean and coast-line (all of it self-similar) in a world without GPS navigation.
> Where on earth did those come from? Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before?
This is an obvious point which the OP does not entertain at all. Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in the mid 19th century, so pirates in the 17th century would not have been able to bring dynamite to the site. It must have been left by excavators from the The Oak Island Association or by other excavators trailing them.
Even assuming that there is treasure (in the form of gold, gems, etc) the money spent attempting to recover them must be nearly equal or exceed the monetary value of the treasure by now.
I've spent summers at my family cottage, looking across the water at Oak Island for 40 years, and am always interested when it comes up. I've been on Oak Island and the myth is 100x more interesting than what is there now, the rusting remains of recent exploration efforts.
So if a crew of pirates|Incas|freemasons|French Royalty spent the effort to dig elaborate tunnels and traps, where are the remains of their campsites? The middens? The cooking fires? All infrastructure to support a huge constriction project, all with hand tools?
Everywhere else from that era you find the garbage that gets left behind - ashes, clay pipes, lost tools, buttons.
These particular mysterious builders were not just super skilled, they were also the tidiest contractors known to history.
Sadly, the whole story is a mishmash of charlatans, myth, and a lot of basic geology. There's no mystery.
"According to authors Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, Borehole 10X terminated in a cavity carved out of bedrock. Within the stone chamber were what appeared to be a severed hand, a corpse and several treasure chests (2005). Prompted by the video images, the Triton Alliance initiated approximately 10 diving excursions into the subterranean cavern. No treasure was extracted as a result of the divers' investigations."
Any chance of recovering that video?
Personally I thought of something like Nemo's underground/underwater base. Unfortunately by simply smashing through layers of timber treasure hunters most likely flooded/collapsed entire tunnel system.
I remember seeing pictures from that video in a book that I once owned. Calling it "treasure chests" is a bit overly optimistic. I'd say "square shadow". I concur though that, whatever was there (if there even was anything to begin with) has long been destroyed now by all the treasure hunters.
I do not believe that Borehole 10X was the location where the Masons buried this treasure.
It would not have been logical for these educated Masons to have left the treasure below the water table where the destruction and deterioration of it could occur from salt water.
I believe what was located at Borehole 10X was a cavern created by the Masons off of the main treasure tunnel to locate an underground ``Burial Site``.
After their return from Havana and losing thousands of their comrades to sickness, it was inevitable that deaths would occur on the island and In order to keep their location secret, they could not bury them in the ground or at sea, but placed the bodies in caskets made from the ship's wood and put them in the cavern.
What was seen from the camera lowered into Borehole 10X were the remnants of this.
I believe the parchment material found with the letters VI was a piece of the King James VI Bible, placed within a casket.
The printing of this bible was done by a John Baskerville a printer, Freemason, and good associate of both Grand Masters – Benjamin Franklin and Washington Shirley.
In 1757 John Baskerville had invented a woven cloth paper which he used to print his Bibles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville
The article is interesting but painful to read; it's as though it was written by a near-illiterate who painstakingly reviewed every letter over and over to eliminate obvious mistakes. Then, when you've survived the pain, you meet the usual suspects: "Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?" "Look, the Knights Templar!" "It's a Freemason conspiracy!" I wasted my time here.
I didn't notice any spelling or grammar mistakes and it pulled me in enough to make me read the whole thing. It's very, very thorough; someone did their research and spent a lot of time writing this.
He was only explaining popular theories that have been proposed. Not claiming there is any truth to them. This is like saying wikipedia isn't reliable because they list the exact same crazy theories and even some other ones in their documentation of the site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island#Treasure_theories
Near-illiterate seems like an unnecessarily harsh insult. I had no issues reading it, and the author doesn't seem to believe the Shakespeare and Freemason theories, they're just cataloguing the most common explanations.
Pardon my ignorance but how do we not have the technology to just like ground scan 300ft below the surface around the island and map it out? Like Sonar or something, idk.
I don't think it would really be that hard to solve this from an engineering perspective (see for instance how the Brooklyn bridge was built) its just that anyone with enough money and sense to solve the problem properly is probably to smart to get involved with what IMO is likely a hoax that got out of hand.
Not really. Not to get into politics, but the Israeli army is currently trying to find the tunnels from Gaza and haven't figured out a great technical option - and those are hollow spaces. In this case you are trying to pick out solid objects from other solid objects, that is tough.
IIRC, ground penetrating radar has poor performance in clay or generally wet soil, otherwise it would probably have been done already as the technology has been somewhat widely accessible since at least the 1980s.
That pit and the various efforts to "find the treasure" remind me of a father that was spending $15,000 per year on his young daughter's softball efforts (coaching, training, traveling) in order to help earn her a scholarship to college. She eventually blew out a knee and her softball career ended before she even finished high school. If only he had instead invested that $15,000 a year himself he would have had her scholarship all taken care of.
This pit is like that only with less light at the end of the tunnel.
A softball scholarship could be more useful than a personal fund of equivalent value: sad fact is sports scholarships can get you into a school you might not otherwise be accepted to.
>The appearance of a man-made pit has been attributed partly to the texture of sinkholes: "this filling would be softer than the surrounding ground, and give the impression that it had been dug up before",[38] and the appearance of "platforms" of rotten logs has been attributed to trees or "blowdowns" falling or washing into the depression.[39] An undetermined pit similar to the description of the early Money Pit had been discovered in the area. In 1949, workmen digging a well on the shore of Mahone Bay, at a point where the earth was soft, found a pit of the following description: "At about two feet down a layer of fieldstone was struck. Then logs of spruce and oak were unearthed at irregular intervals, and some of the wood was charred. The immediate suspicion was that another Money Pit had been found."[40]
If you enjoy mystery or thriller books, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's fictional novel Riptide is very enjoyable, and is based in large part on the Oak Island Money Pit legend.
uggh. I thought money pit was a reference to the scam tourist trap businesses that operate 'tours' to this thing. The worst lamest thing on a family trip to Nova Scotia years ago that we still laugh about. "It was just a hole and a sign!"
while reading this, I kept thinking to myself that while excavation seems an insurmountable task at this time, if things started via a tunnel excavation from the coast that was already 150' below the surface, then building up from there wouldn't necessarily have been a major endeavor at all.
All the contemporary excavators seem to have missed the real treasure. It's now a site that has huge tourism potential...Something worth far more in $$ than a few pieces of eight.
It's actually located in a beautiful location my wife and I got married at Oak Island Resort which is just on the mainland across the water from the island.
Its a touristy area already its close to Peggy's cove and Lunenburg.
[+] [-] gwern|11 years ago|reply
> In 1937, Hedden and his contractors returned to Oak Island. This time the company would encounter intriguing findings. Burrowing down one of the many auxiliary tunnels pock marking the island, the team stumbled upon a number of fascinating items including a miner's oil lamp with whale oil and unexploded dynamite at 65 feet.
Where on earth did those come from? Are the pirates supposed to have brought dynamite with them a century or two before? This suggests to me that (1) all the previous expeditions and drillings have littered the island with all sorts of equipment and junk, and hence nothing found after the first expedition means much of anything or (2) the flood tunnels and other geological oddities move debris around and that is responsible for the dynamite, in which case there may never have been anything to explain in the first place.
> It appears far too simple to dismiss the efforts of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors and even an esteemed president.
Does it now.
[+] [-] jonnathanson|11 years ago|reply
There's money buried in that pit, alright, and it's the money, time, and effort of dozens of fruitless and unintentionally self-replicating expeditions. The zeal to uncover a money pit has become, in and of itself, a money pit. That this zeal ensnared the imaginations of respected lawyers, businessmen, doctors, actors, and a future president speaks volumes about human nature.
[+] [-] kerkeslager|11 years ago|reply
That's a simple enough argument to reason around: when pirates buried the treasure there was no flooding. Remember, flooding didn't start until partway through one of the expeditions: this could be explained by shifting geological patterns in the rock in the island. All it would take would be for a crack to form in or current to erode a protective stone barrier which was previously keeping water out. Pirates unencumbered by water might have had a much easier time burying (and, they thought, retrieving) treasure.
The fact is, regardless of difficulty, someone did dig down that deep, and it seems like a lot of work, even without the water, to do as a prank or diversion. So I do think there is probably treasure there, or at least there was at one time.
However, as the many attempts show, the excavation is a very risky endeavor to undertake for treasure that May or may not still be there.
EDIT: And for the record, I think the treasure theory is the only plausible part. Kidd makes some sense, as do Vikings or naval treasure, but that's all speculation unless some real evidence is found. The "vi" bit is completely useless, and the Templars/masons/Shakespeare ideas are an embarrassment to the people who came up with the ideas.
[+] [-] jamoes|11 years ago|reply
It's kinda like a reverse-proof-of-work. It takes you a constant amount of time (probably a few weeks of work for a crew working on digging the ~100 foot pit and leaving a few fake clues). Then, once you tell someone else about it, it has the potential to occupy years of their life attempting to discover the "treasure" you told them about.
[+] [-] Kurtz79|11 years ago|reply
It´s not difficult to see the fascination that a "mystery" like this can have on men, to the point of fueling the actual belief themselves, for opportunistic reasons or simply for not being seen as fools (another famous example, Rennes Le Chateau).
People ended up investing tons on money in the project, I wouldn´t be suprised if many of these reports of "coconut fibers", "timber platforms" were actually made up by the people making a living out of it, and not wanting the financing money to dry up.
The "undecipherable" tablet that perfectly translates to current English with a basic substitution cipher is particularly laughable.
[+] [-] e40|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bunderbunder|11 years ago|reply
Yup. Didn't you know pirates have the ability to transcend space and time? Captain Kidd regularly traveled to the late 19th century in his tricked-out DeLorean to score all sorts of goodies for his crew. Not just dynamite, but also souvenir coconut monkeys (they make great gifts) and clean-tasting pasteurized lager beer.
[+] [-] kazinator|11 years ago|reply
Why nobody would notice you is that it's 1600- or 1700-something and you're somewhere in the woods of what will be Canada one day.
What I don't get is why someone would play an elaborate prank, knowing that they probably won't be around to watch people's faces who try to find the treasure. No, it was no prank: this was a real pirate cache site.
I think that treasure had been there before, but it had been removed by the time those boys discovered the site. The encrypted sign was left behind, that's all.
I believe the encrypted sign was originally at the surface, perhaps not buried at all. Heck, maybe that sign had been put up in a nearby tree or whatever. The pirates used that sign so they can return to the site and recover the treasure. The treasure was 40 feet below that. When the pirates (or whoever) removed the treasure, they just threw the sign deep into the hole and buried it. So then the idiots who came later thought that the sign pointed down another 40 feet from there. (Why would anyone do that, doh!)
Pirates often left themselves clues to find their caches, like encrypted signs and such. Think about it: thousands of miles of ocean and coast-line (all of it self-similar) in a world without GPS navigation.
[+] [-] nixy|11 years ago|reply
This is an obvious point which the OP does not entertain at all. Dynamite was invented by Alfred Nobel in the mid 19th century, so pirates in the 17th century would not have been able to bring dynamite to the site. It must have been left by excavators from the The Oak Island Association or by other excavators trailing them.
[+] [-] Afforess|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] recurrie|11 years ago|reply
So if a crew of pirates|Incas|freemasons|French Royalty spent the effort to dig elaborate tunnels and traps, where are the remains of their campsites? The middens? The cooking fires? All infrastructure to support a huge constriction project, all with hand tools?
Everywhere else from that era you find the garbage that gets left behind - ashes, clay pipes, lost tools, buttons.
These particular mysterious builders were not just super skilled, they were also the tidiest contractors known to history.
Sadly, the whole story is a mishmash of charlatans, myth, and a lot of basic geology. There's no mystery.
[+] [-] rsl7|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smacktoward|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jun8|11 years ago|reply
It's far from the last great unsolved mystery, though, as claimed in the title: I would definitely put (i) deciphering the last part of Kryptos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos), (ii) deciphering the Voynich Manuscript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript), and, if you insist on adding treasure to the equation (iii) the Beale Ciphers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers) on any list of unsolved mysteries that fuel the imagination.
[+] [-] sbov|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poslathian|11 years ago|reply
He has a surprisingly interesting idea that the shaft of periodic wooden panels may be an ancient viking ship buried vertically.
My own vote is for sinkhole + telephone game/hype machine.
[+] [-] Gravityloss|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuktitut_syllabics
Here are some pictures of Viking longships. It looks like they are not strongly longitudinally segmented, which is against the theory.
http://www.pinterest.com/judah55/viking-gokstad-and-tune-lon...
[+] [-] TrainedMonkey|11 years ago|reply
Any chance of recovering that video?
Personally I thought of something like Nemo's underground/underwater base. Unfortunately by simply smashing through layers of timber treasure hunters most likely flooded/collapsed entire tunnel system.
[+] [-] terhechte|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OakIslandRobot|11 years ago|reply
It would not have been logical for these educated Masons to have left the treasure below the water table where the destruction and deterioration of it could occur from salt water.
I believe what was located at Borehole 10X was a cavern created by the Masons off of the main treasure tunnel to locate an underground ``Burial Site``.
After their return from Havana and losing thousands of their comrades to sickness, it was inevitable that deaths would occur on the island and In order to keep their location secret, they could not bury them in the ground or at sea, but placed the bodies in caskets made from the ship's wood and put them in the cavern.
What was seen from the camera lowered into Borehole 10X were the remnants of this.
I believe the parchment material found with the letters VI was a piece of the King James VI Bible, placed within a casket.
The printing of this bible was done by a John Baskerville a printer, Freemason, and good associate of both Grand Masters – Benjamin Franklin and Washington Shirley. In 1757 John Baskerville had invented a woven cloth paper which he used to print his Bibles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville
[+] [-] JasonFruit|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|11 years ago|reply
He was only explaining popular theories that have been proposed. Not claiming there is any truth to them. This is like saying wikipedia isn't reliable because they list the exact same crazy theories and even some other ones in their documentation of the site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island#Treasure_theories
[+] [-] burkaman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] brotoss|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gaoshan|11 years ago|reply
This pit is like that only with less light at the end of the tunnel.
[+] [-] giarc|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shuzchen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Houshalter|11 years ago|reply
>The appearance of a man-made pit has been attributed partly to the texture of sinkholes: "this filling would be softer than the surrounding ground, and give the impression that it had been dug up before",[38] and the appearance of "platforms" of rotten logs has been attributed to trees or "blowdowns" falling or washing into the depression.[39] An undetermined pit similar to the description of the early Money Pit had been discovered in the area. In 1949, workmen digging a well on the shore of Mahone Bay, at a point where the earth was soft, found a pit of the following description: "At about two feet down a layer of fieldstone was struck. Then logs of spruce and oak were unearthed at irregular intervals, and some of the wood was charred. The immediate suspicion was that another Money Pit had been found."[40]
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zelphyr|11 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I'm a Freemason.
Disclaimer 2: No, I don't know where any treasure is buried. It's really not that sexy.
[+] [-] freehunter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrbill|11 years ago|reply
I've found that nobody likes to make fun of Freemasonry and all the conspiracy theories surrounding the organization more than us Masons ourselves. :)
[+] [-] scoot|11 years ago|reply
Then you ought to know the difference between a disclaimer and a disclosure. (But don't feel bad, almost no-one else here does either...)
[+] [-] billyhoffman|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riptide_(novel)
No fringe conspiracy theories, just good adventure fiction. It's one of their non-Pendergast books that worth the read.
Oh, and at the bottom of the pit in the book? (rot13)
n fjbeq bs qnzbpyrf-yvxr eryvp, znqr bs enqvbnpgvir vevqvhz sebz n pbzrg. Vg jnf ohevrq gb orpnhfr ybbxvat ng vg rkcbfrf lbh gb rabhtu enqf gb xvyy lbh.
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wuliwong|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piratebroadcast|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wuliwong|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theklub|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eitally|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiharryhere|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalvinRodo|11 years ago|reply
Its a touristy area already its close to Peggy's cove and Lunenburg.