Oak Island Money Pit: Unsolved Mystery

http://www.oakislandmoneypit.com/

by trevin • 12 years ago

243 116 12 years ago

It would be awesome if they finally got to the bottom and discovered a pile of "E.T." cartridges for the Atari 2600.

eitally• 12 years ago

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.

hemancuso• 12 years ago

Sounds cheap.

burkaman2• 12 years ago

I think it would be nearly impossible to keep water out of a tunnel like that.

piratebroadcast• 12 years ago

I'd give anything to know what is buried there. I've been fascinated with this since I was a kid.

wuliwong4• 12 years ago

I've only known about it for a few years but I'm fascinated.

JasonFruit• 12 years ago

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.

burkaman2• 12 years ago

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.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

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

gwern5• 12 years ago

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.

Does it now.

bunderbunder4• 12 years ago

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.

krapp• 12 years ago

Thus making the rap battle between Al Capone and Blackbeard completely plausible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf9gulYfUh4

(I accept my downvotes with dignity.)

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

The dynamite was not found in the main hole but one of the "auxiliary tunnels". It was probably left from the previous excavations.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

Didn't you know pirates have the ability to transcend space and time?

Ask Alestorm, who wrote several songs about that.

jonnathanson• 12 years ago

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.

seanp2k2• 12 years ago

Half-way through reading, I was thinking "what a fitting name" :)

Afforess• 12 years ago

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.

maaku• 12 years ago

Two million pounds sterling is a lot of money. Something like half a billion on todays markets.

jamoes• 12 years ago

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.

mcphage• 12 years ago

the presence of the stone found at 90 feet

You mean that really important stone which somehow got misplaced—or put into a fireplace—and so we have this replica "for reals you guys"?

astrobe_• 12 years ago

Indeed, As a pirate I would certainly not spend weeks digging an elaborate treasure vault that would need a full crew. Putting all of my goods at one location wouldn't look like a good idea either. I would rather bury my treasure at different locations, and not too deep so that the job can be done quickly with the help of a couple of "expandable" guys. This has the extra advantage that retrieving it is easier, and may serve as a life insurance if I get caught and tortured (or at least buy time and give chances to escape or be rescued).

This also probably requires a map. Carving it in stone is probably the best (memory fades, paper burn), but here I would use caution again and would not write everything on a single stone.

kazinator• 12 years ago

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.

bunderbunder4• 12 years ago

Another quite plausible hypothesis is that it was a not-so-elaborate prank, and many of the more elaborate details of the story are actually folklore that has built up over time.

Joe Nickell wrote a rather nice article proposing that idea for Skeptical Inquirer a while back: http://www.csicop.org/si/show/secrets_of_oak_island/

ripter• 12 years ago

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.

Because it's funny. I think you are right, the stone was probably on the surface or the tree, after someone collected the treasure they dropped the stone down there. thinking, wouldn't it be funny if someone dug up the stone and kept digging? Those idiots will waste their time while we spend all this loot on girls and booze!

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

I suspect that this might be more accurate, in that several times folks put things there and took them back. There are interesting questions about sand deposits and the history of the island, and of course if it was a "good spot" to bury treasure during a time of privateering then perhaps there are several interesting places. Some of the more elaborate underground construction though seems to be in support of prohibition[1] (well in support of smuggling in liquor during prohibition).

A couple of things are hard to dispute, square cut timbers don't just "appear" underground, so someone put them there. But it could be for much more mundane reasons (like gold mines in the Sierra Nevada Mountains)and it makes for a spicy tale to through in pirates.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=prohibition+tunnels

gwern5• 12 years ago

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.

Supposedly, the diggings were noticed as they went on. From the very start of the article:

By most accounts, the story of Oak Island's Money Pit begins in the summer of 1795 when a teenager named Daniel McGinnis saw strange lights on an island offshore from his parent's house. According to author Lee Lamb, upon investigating the island for the source of the lights, McGinnis noticed a peculiar circular depression approximately 13 feet in diameter on the island's forest floor (2006).

Personally, I find the encrypted sign pretty suspicious. There were a lot of people very desperate to find any scrap of evidence to indicate that there was buried treasure once they had committed themselves (and of course, the landowner at any time had incentive to stoke flames of speculation); how convenient that a stone with easily-deciphered crude ciphers which could have been manufactured and thrown in by anyone just happened to show up, despite the complete lack of any more concrete evidence (if you'll forgive the term) like some gold...

kerkeslager• 12 years ago

'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.

e402• 12 years ago

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.

CamperBob22• 12 years ago

Sounds to me like this was just a well that was dug by whoever was living there at the time, and later filled in. Every other aspect of the story just sounds like some kind of elaborate troll.

nixy• 12 years ago

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.

Kurtz79• 12 years ago

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.

Jun8• 12 years ago

Oh boy, this comes up every few years. I guess the words "unsolved mystery" must excite some specific neural pattern in our brains.

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.

jonny_eh• 12 years ago

There's also deciphering the ancient Greek written language "Linear A" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

It was recently added to unicode, and we don't even know what the characters mean.

thirdtruck2• 12 years ago

Sounds like a good way to accidentally summon an elder god via emoticon. Now I have a new novel plot...

parennoob• 12 years ago

..Or the Indus Valley civilization script.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script

Quite tantalizing to have a ton of artifacts belonging to that civilization, along with seals having specific imagery (like a bull); and then not being able to decipher the what the symbols next to the script mean.

dkfmn• 12 years ago

Well, if we're doing treasure we shouldn't forget about the Lost Dutchman's Mine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Dutchman%27s_Gold_Mine)

freditup• 12 years ago

Perhaps not as much of a mystery, but I do think the D. B. Cooper case is fascinating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper). The Wikipedia article reads like a popular adventure novel.

sp332• 12 years ago

Don't forget the most recent theory: http://xkcd.com/1400/

Mithaldu• 12 years ago

I don't think Kryptos counts as a mystery. It is a riddle for sure, which isn't entirely solved yet, but it is as much a mystery as the final puzzle of Fez: We know exactly who made it, for what purpose, what it contains conceptually, and that the creator is even still alive.

Voynich and the Money Pit are mysteries where none of these are true and many questions besides the solving procedure are still open.

(Though, to be honest, i strongly suspect that Voynich is the same thing as Kryptos and the last Fez puzzle: An artifact straddling a weird line between riddle and troll.)

BuildTheRobots• 12 years ago

Thanks -after loosing Friday to reading about the Money Pit, I've now lost today reading about Voynich...

Feel someone should mention the Taman Shud Case [1] as another one of those preplexing mysteries.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case

ChrisArchitect• 12 years ago

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!"

Zelphyr2• 12 years ago

I kept reading thinking, "Wow, surprised they haven't blamed the Freemasons for this!" when, suddenly, "oh, there it is..."

Disclaimer: I'm a Freemason.

Disclaimer 2: No, I don't know where any treasure is buried. It's really not that sexy.

mrbill2• 12 years ago

I am as well (Gray Lodge, Houston).

I've found that nobody likes to make fun of Freemasonry and all the conspiracy theories surrounding the organization more than us Masons ourselves. :)

kelvin0• 12 years ago

Yes, of course the lower echelons of Freemasonry are completely oblivious and makes for plausible denial for the organization as a 'hole' (pun-intended).

dredwerker• 12 years ago

Wow - I never expected to find Freemasons on HN. Don't know why but i thought it was a) dying out and b)it was for old people. Well older than my 43 years of age :)

freehunter2• 12 years ago

How do you know someone is part of a "secret society"? They'll tell you.

mrbill2• 12 years ago

We're not a secret society. We're a society with secrets.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

If they're supposed to be secret, they're doing a fairly poor job of it.

scoot• 12 years ago

I'm a Freemason.

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...)

TrainedMonkey• 12 years ago

"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.

terhechte• 12 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy• 12 years ago

That for me is the greatest tragedy of this: if there ever was treasure there, its historical value would have been far greater than the value of the supposed gold there, and the historical value has been entirely destroyed in the pursuit of the gold.

Regardless of what it actually belonged to -- even a ship's manifest -- that parchment would have been valuable, and it's destroyed forever now.

OakIslandRobot2• 12 years ago

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

theklub• 12 years ago

Did anyone mention the TV show they have out on this now? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Oak_Island

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

I actually got sucked into the show, and the two brothers seem to have a really good approach by looking at other areas, instead of the just going after 10X and continuing in the same vein so many others had.

The Shakespeare guy was actually really interesting. A little nutty, but he did turn up several more signs on the stones.

I'm hoping this comes back for another season and would love to see these guys finally solve the mystery. I think they have several good leads and have pushed closer to a solution than anybody else.

tgb• 12 years ago

Yup, the article did!

gaoshan• 12 years ago

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.

giarc3• 12 years ago

Yes, but she also gets to play softball for x years. There's value in that.

wavefunction• 12 years ago

If (and I do mean if) she actually enjoyed playing softball after all her father's pressure, she probably would have been able to play it much longer without the intense focus that eventually blew out her knew.

shuzchen• 12 years ago

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.

wuliwong4• 12 years ago

Jeez man, HN what a bunch of curmudgeons. I personally love this stuff, real or not, it is a modern day treasure hunt. How isn't that fun???

smackfu• 12 years ago

This one is SO OLD though. It was in the books I read as a kid 30 years ago.

wuliwong4• 12 years ago

Isn't it being old kind of the point? People are actively attempting to excavate it.

gwern5• 12 years ago

At some point, the story just becomes sad. I like treasure hunts, but not at the expense of peoples' life savings - and multiple lives. And there should be treasure at the end of the hunt, not a story about peoples' delusions and wishful thinking and scams.

wuliwong4• 12 years ago

But clearly you are mistaken that we have seen "the end of the hunt."

JohnnyDouglas2• 12 years ago

Thanks for posting this.

I grew up a few hours away from there, I remember hearing about the 1980s efforts on the news at the time and finding it fascinating as any pre-teen boy would. I also feel like we're due for some recent maniacs to come along and start the whole fiasco over again.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

Was the movie Goonies inspired by this?

JohnnyDouglas2• 12 years ago

I'd never seen the similarity until you mentioned it. But I don't think so.

brotoss• 12 years ago

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.

igrekel• 12 years ago

Sounds like you should raise money and launch your own expedition.

sgarman• 12 years ago

Let's kickstart it! We can feed the team with potato salad.

tmp1234519029• 12 years ago

I often wonder. It seems that our technology must suck at this or is simply too expensive to use.

yaur• 12 years ago

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.

sjtrny• 12 years ago

You're looking for ground penetrating radar http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar.

krschultz• 12 years ago

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.

blueskin_3• 12 years ago

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.

hiharryhere• 12 years ago

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.

CalvinRodo• 12 years ago

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.

poslathian• 12 years ago

Worth sharing, google led me to this interesting fellow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hUrpcxD0uo

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• 12 years ago

That's fascinating. The letters resemble Inuit writing a bit. EDIT: seems that script was created by missionaries in the 1840's.

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...

recurrie• 12 years ago

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.

rsl7• 12 years ago

And mysteries only get better with age.

sbov• 12 years ago

The similarity of the history of this island to the history of many software projects I've worked on is amazing.

ccarter84• 12 years ago

Weird this is blocked by corporate firewall...

tomelders• 12 years ago

The plot thickens....

bjcubsfan• 12 years ago

There's a treatment of this story on the great podcast Skeptoid. http://skeptoid.com/mobile/4129

billyhoffman• 12 years ago

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.

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.

jcrawfordor• 12 years ago

"The Last Great Unsolved Mystery"? Really? I've got a list of a few more and they're even restricted to the treasure-and-crime kind. http://infohost.nmt.edu/~jcrawfor/mysteries.html

hristov• 12 years ago

Hmm, sounds like the pirate Kidd played a lot of dwarf fortress in his days.

Houshalter4• 12 years ago

I found this on wikipedia which is interesting:

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]

yoodenvranx• 12 years ago

I wish some really rich person would just buy this island and pay some construction company a lot of money to excavate the whole thing. It can't be that hard to build a sufficiently large hole with modern technology.

chadmaughan• 12 years ago

Someone did (Marty Lagina) and they attempted a number of things last year. This is the premise of a reality show on the History Channel called "The Curse of Oak Island."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curse_of_Oak_Island http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3455408/

tempodox• 12 years ago

Oh my. I'm sure they also uncover the true identity of the Loch Ness monster down there.

OakIslandRobot2• 12 years ago

The (Untold) Story of The Oak Island Money Pit

The Oak Island Money Pit was constructed by the “powers that be” that were and still are to this day, the secret force that controls the course of mankind on earth. This organization is known as - The “Freemasons”.

The story of The Oak Island Money Pit begins in the 1760’s It was conceived by a number of Britain’s high ranking naval officers, who were also Masonic degree members of the Freemasons and belonging to the Masonic “Premier Grand Lodge of England”. These Masons were members of the Whig Party opposed to the next successor to the throne, the unstable King George III. These members were: Washington Shirley, 5th Earl Ferrers – Vice Admiral - Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge – Premier Grand Lodge of England George Anson, Baron Anson – Admiral of the Fleet George Keppel, 3rd Earl of Albemarle - Commander-In-Chief Augustus Keppel, 1st Viscount Keppel – Rear Admiral – Brother to George Keppel William Keppel – Lieutenant-General – Brother to George Keppel George Pocock – Admiral – Commander of the Invasion of Havana and Benjamin Franklin – First Grand Master of Pennsylvania who met in 1760 with the Grand Master of England to discuss their plan.

The Mason’s plot originated after King George III’s destruction of the Whig’s political power with his redirection of this power to the Tory Party, and the Mason’s concern of the imminent invasion of England, during the Seven Years’ War, by the joint forces of France and Spain. Spain outlawed all forms of secret organizations, including the Freemasons.

The Mason’s plan was to redirect a fortune to the “New World” (North America), to enable the transfer of the Masonic organization, if and when these fears materialized. Their plan entailed the capture of Havana in 1762. Havana’s Morro Castle was the Fort Knox of Spain, holding the South and Central America’s gold supply prior to its shipment to Spain. The invasion of Havana was under the command of George Keppel, with Admiral George Pocock and Keppel’s two brothers Augustus and William Keppel, commanding the actual attack. They were successful with the capture of Havana and Fort Morro and its unprecedented amount of treasure. They also captured a number of the Spanish Fleet, which was needed to accomplish their plan. Accordingly, Admiral Pocock returned to England with the main English fleet carrying a portion of the treasure, while Augustus and William Keppel along with their crew and Masonic engineers all sworn to secrecy, manned the 8 Spanish Galleons and the 2 British Man of War. This treasure was diverted to a small island off the coast of New England and Nova Scotia now called Oak Island.

At Oak Island the treasure was buried based on the Masonic “Royal Arch” (Enoch’s Temple) consisting of nine arches going down nine levels by way of a main shaft (The Money Pit) which was dug down to the bedrock. From the ninth level another tunnel was constructed which ran back up to a point above the known water level, roughly 20 feet underground and at this point an enormous cavern was built to hold the treasure. The treasure was carted down the main shaft and placed up into this cavern. To conceal their plot they had the 8 Spanish ships dismantled with all the wooden parts not used in the construction of the shaft, tunnels and cavern burnt and all the metal parts (canons, anchors and bolts) were placed at the bottom of the main shaft. Flood tunnels were built out to the ocean to booby trap any treasure seekers attempts to follow down the main shaft. A large stone was placed at the air lock (8th level) as bait to activate the flooding. This stone had strange engravings on it to entice any unworthy treasure seekers to pause and take the bait (stone) away for deciphering, thus allowing time for the tunnels and main shaft to fill with water and be destroyed forever. The Masons knew exactly by their calculated mark above ground where the treasure cavern below ground was located, and could access it by digging down 20 feet.

Once the treasure was secured in the cavern and all the evidence was hidden from the island, it was documented that the Keppels sailed back to England with 2 ships and a small portion of the treasure. They claimed that the remainder of the fleet had sunk in a hurricane on route.

The Masons left several markers on the island to relocate the treasure. 1 large triangle or more precisely a crude Sextant 2 drilled holed stones 1 large stone cross These combined markers along with the Star Map are used to cross triangulate and a set degree on the sextant point to the “X” where the cavern is today located.

Is the treasure still in this cavern?

I believe it was removed in 1795

One of the three original discoverers of the Money Pit was Daniel McGinnis, who stated he was drawn to the island when he noticed strange lights appearing on the island just prior to his discovery. These lights were made by the Freemasons when they returned for their treasure. This Masonic party was headed up by George Washington, President of the United States – acting Grand Master of the Washington DC Masons.

The treasure’s vast fortune was used, as planned, to further the power of the Freemasons in their new world, with them becoming “The New World Order”.

Oak Island Money Pit: Unsolved Mystery

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