[imagesource: AP Photo/Michael Rubinkam]

When Jack Stuef found Forrest Fenn’s fabled treasure last year, it ended one of modern history’s most famous searches.

Fenn hid a treasure chest somewhere in the Rocky Mountains back in 2010, and then penned a poem containing clues to its whereabouts, which resulting in an obsessed online sleuthing community and searches that sometimes turned fatal.

It’s not just wannabe sleuths that can get roped into hunting for untold riches, as evident from recently released documents detailing the FBI’s 2018 hunt for an extremely valuable stash of fabled Civil War-era gold.

TIME reports that agents excavated a remote woodland site in Pennsylvania three years ago, labelled Dent’s Run, where it was believed an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen en route to Philadelphia.

The FBI says it came up empty-handed, but not everybody is buying that:

The FBI has long refused to confirm why exactly it went digging, saying only in written statements over the years that agents were there for a court-authorized excavation of “what evidence suggested may have been a cultural heritage site.”

…But the father-son duo who brought a small army of federal agents to the site remain convinced the FBI uncovered something there — and their lawyer, Bill Cluck, is still pressing the case, successfully suing for access to government emails about the dig.

That father-son duo is Dennis and Kem Parada (pictured above), who own a treasure-hunting company called Finders Keepers.

They claim that after spending years looking for the bounty, and having detected a hunk of metal, they approached the FBI in early 2018 for help.

An FBI agent told them the location of the mass was “one or two feet off Denny’s sweet spot,” recalled [Warren] Getler, author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver.

“Then I went to ask how big is it. And he said, ‘7 to 9 tons.’ And I literally said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”

That much gold would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today — and, assuming it was there, would almost certainly touch off a legal fight over how to divvy up the spoils.

Both the Paradas and Getler say they had an agreement that would allow them to watch the FBI excavate the site, but when the time came for the dig to take place, they were instead confined to their car.

It was only on the second day of the dig that they were allowed on-site, by which time there was an empty hole in the ground.

The FBI has categorically denied that it found anything of value during the dig, but the suspicions of the Paradas and Getler are backed up by what locals say they witnessed over those two days:

Residents have told of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight — when the excavation was supposed to have been paused — and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks…

The FBI assertion of an empty hole is “insulting all the credible people who did this kind of work,” [Dennis Parada] said. “It was a slap in the face, really, to think all these people could make that kind of mistake.”

Cluck, on behalf of the Paradas, is hard at work to get access to FBI documents from the dig, which number 2 400 pages and also includes some video clips.

He has succeeded with a Freedom of Information Act request, although other legal efforts from his side have been thwarted, with a state appeals judge recently ruling against one of his claims.

Still, in that ruling, the name of the sealed federal case was made public for the first time – ‘In the Matter of: Seizure of One or More Tons of United States Gold.’

Americans really do love a good buried treasure story, don’t they?

[source:time]