A scientific analysis commissioned by the FBI shortly before agents dug up buried treasure suggests that huge amounts of gold are below the surface, according to recently published government documents and photos that deepen the mystery of 2018 excavations in remote western Pennsylvania.
The report of a geophysicist who performed tests on the object’s microgravity hints at an underground object with a mass of up to 9 tons and a density corresponding to gold. The FBI uses the consultant’s work to obtain an order to seize the gold – if there is one that can be found.
The government has long claimed that its excavations were a failure. But a couple of father and son treasure hunters who spent years searching for legendary Civil War-era gold – and who brought agents to the woods hoping for royalties – suspect the FBI double-crossed them and fled with hiding it can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
A newly discovered geophysical survey was part of a court-ordered publication of government records of the FBI’s treasure hunt in Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, where legend has it that a 1863 Union gold shipment was lost or stolen on the way to the US Mint in Philadelphia.
Dennis and Kem Parada, co-owners of the Finders Keepers treasure hunt team, successfully sued the Department of Justice for the records after being blocked by the FBI. Finders Keepers provided the FBI records to the Associated Press. The FBI later published them on its website.
Data from technical surveys collected by geophysical consultancy Enviroscan gave credence to the site’s own extensive fieldwork – and prompted the FBI to excavate a large-scale, covert operation that lasted several cold days in late winter 2018. .
John Louis, a non-excavation professor of geophysics at the University of Nevada, Reno, reviewed the Enviroscan report at the request of the AP and said “the company’s methods are very good” and “their findings are a physically reasonable hypothesis.” that the gold is buried in place.
But he warned that the underground gravity anomaly that Enviroscan had identified did not definitively establish the presence of gold. There are other technical reasons why the Enviroscan data could turn out the way it did, Louis said.
“In this way, it is also perfectly reasonable for the FBI not to find anything on the site, because there was actually no gold there,” he said in an email.
Enviroscan co-founder Tim Bechtel declined to comment on his work at Dent’s Run, saying the FBI had not given him permission to speak. The FBI will not discuss Bechtel this week, but said that after the excavations, agents “have not taken any further steps to reconcile geophysical findings with the absence of gold or other metal.”
Other documents in the just-released FBI case raise even more questions.
An FBI report from a paragraph from March 13, 2019 – exactly one year after the excavations – claims that the agents did not find anything in Dent’s Run. No “metals, objects and / or other suitable materials” were found, the report said. “Due to other priority work … the FBI will close the inscription case.”
Ann Weissman, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, questioned the credibility of the FBI report. She cites its brevity as well as its timing – it was written after Finders Keepers began pressuring the government for records.
“It doesn’t read the way you’d expect,” said Weissman, a former lawyer with the Justice Department. “If this is the official record in the file of what they did and why they did it, it says almost nothing and it’s crazy.”
She added that if the government did not provide a more complete, more up-to-date account of its demand for gold, it “would reinforce my view that this is not an accurate record and that it was created as a cover-up.” And I’m not saying it lightly. “
In response, the FBI said the one-page document “is representative of the standard summaries submitted at the official conclusion of the FBI investigation.”
The agency has consistently denied finding anything.
The agents acted on the basis of information that Dent’s Run “may be a cultural heritage site containing gold belonging to the United States government,” the FBI said in a statement, but this possibility was not confirmed by excavations. The FBI continues to unequivocally reject any allegations or speculation to the contrary. “
The collection of documents handed over to Finders Keepers included nearly 1,000 photos, in grainy black and white, showing some – but certainly not all – of what the FBI was doing at the excavation site, according to treasure hunters.
Earlier, residents said they heard an excavator and hammer during the night between the first and second day of the excavations – when work was believed to have stopped – and saw a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks.
The FBI denied that any work was carried out on the site after hours, saying “the only night activity was ATV patrols by FBI police officers guarding the site around the clock during the excavations.”
Parade suspects the FBI pulled out the gold in the middle of the night and then showed treasure hunters an empty hole on the afternoon of the second day.
“It’s very curious why the FBI gets so misdirected and so obstructive,” said Warren Getler, who works closely with treasure hunters. “They worked that night under cover of darkness to escape, to escape our knowledge of something in which we are supposed to be partners.”
Many FBI photos seem irrelevant, including hundreds of images of random trees and a forest road leading to the excavation site, while others simply do not gather and raise additional issues, say Parade and Getler, author of Rebel Gold, a book. exploring the possibility of buried secrets of gold and silver from the Civil War era.
FBI agents have been shown standing around the hole in photos that appeared earlier in the series, but they are missing from almost all later images at the excavation site.
Getler and Parade say the FBI chief agent told them the hole was full of water on the morning of the second day, but low-quality photos released by the government showed only a small puddle or maybe some snow. They said the same agent spent most of the second day at base camp – where Getler and the treasure hunters say they were largely locked in their car – not at the excavation site.
The FBI said it was standard for the photos to “document the site’s conditions before, during and after FBI operations”.
“I think we were expecting several hundred photos from the night digging, and I think we were expecting photos of metal coins or bars,” Parada said. “I think there were pictures, but they disappeared.”
FBI records also show that a few weeks before the excavations, an agent from the Art Crimes Agency team approached Wells Fargo to ask if he was carrying gold with the stagecoach to the US Mint in 1863.
Wells Fargo historians have found no evidence of this, but said the records of the era are incomplete. Wells Fargo delivers gold by stagecoach, a corporate archivist wrote in an email to the FBI, but large quantities of the precious metal, as well as gold that had to be transported long distances, were “better transported by ship or train.”
Hitler said the gold may have been transported by wagon, not by stagecoach.
Additional FBI releases are expected in the coming months.
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