A scientific analysis commissioned by the FBI shortly before officers searched for a buried treasure suggested a large amount of gold was beneath the surface, according to recently released government documents and photos that delve into the mystery of the excavation. from 2018 in the far west of Pennsylvania.
The report, from a geophysicist who conducted microgravity tests at the site, hinted at an underground object with a mass of up to 9 tons and a density consistent with gold. The FBI used the consultant’s work to obtain an order to confiscate the gold, if found.
The government has long claimed that its excavation was a failure. But a father-son couple of treasure hunters who spent years searching for the legendary gold of the Civil War era, and who drove the agents to the site of the forest, hoping for a finder’s fee, he suspects the FBI hooked them up and left with a cache. which could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The recently revealed geophysical survey was part of a court-ordered publication of government records on the FBI’s treasure hunt at Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, where the legend says that an 1863 Union gold shipment was lost or stolen. en route to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.
Dennis and Kem Parada, co-owners of the treasure hunt Finders Keepers, successfully sued the Justice Department for records after being shut down by the FBI. Finders Keepers provided FBI records to The Associated Press. The FBI later posted them on its website.
Data from the technical survey collected by geophysical consultant Enviroscan gave credence to the extensive fieldwork of treasure hunters at the site and prompted the FBI to dig into a massive, secret operation that lasted several cold days in end of winter 2018.
John Louie, a professor of geophysics at the University of Nevada, Reno, with no connection to the excavation, reviewed the Enviroscan report at the request of the PA and said the “business methods were very good.” and that “his conclusions represent a physically reasonable hypothesis” that the gold was buried at the site.
But he warned that the anomaly of subterranean gravity that Enviroscan identified did not definitively establish the presence of gold. There are other technical reasons why Enviroscan data could have come out the way it did, Louie said.
“So it’s also totally reasonable that the FBI didn’t find anything on the site, because there really wasn’t any gold,” he said in an email.
Enviroscan co-founder Tim Bechtel declined to comment on his work on Dent’s Run, saying the FBI has not given him permission to speak. The FBI would not talk about Bechtel this week, but said that after the excavation, the agents “did not take any further action to reconcile the findings of the geophysical survey with the absence of gold or any other metal.” .
Other documents in the newly released FBI case file raise even more questions.
A one-paragraph FBI report, dated March 13, 2019, exactly one year after the excavation, stated that officers found nothing at Dent’s Run. No “metals, articles and / or other relevant materials were found,” the report said. “Due to other priority work … the FBI will close the subtitled case.”
Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, questioned the credibility of the FBI report. He cited its brevity as well as its timing: it was written after Finders Keepers began pressuring the government to make the records.
“It doesn’t read as one might expect,” said Weismann, a former Justice Department lawyer. “If this is the official record in the archive of what they did and why they did it, it says almost nothing, and it’s crazy.”
He added that if the government does not produce a more complete and contemporary account of its search for gold, “it will increase my view that this is not an accurate record and that it was created as a cover-up. light”.
In response, the FBI said the one-page document “is representative of the standard summaries submitted when a FBI investigation is formally closed.”
The agency has consistently denied finding anything.
Agents acted according to information that Dent’s Run “may have been a site of cultural heritage containing gold belonging to the United States government,” the FBI said in a statement, but “this possibility was not confirmed by the United States. The FBI continues to unequivocally reject any claims or speculations to the contrary. “
Documents delivered to Finders Keepers also included about 1,000 black-and-white grainy photos that show part, but certainly not all, of what the FBI was doing at the excavation site, according to treasure hunters.
Residents have previously explained that they had heard a backhoe and a pneumatic hammer during the night between the first and second day of the excavation, when the work was supposed to have stopped, and had seen a convoy of vehicles from the FBI, including large armored trucks.
The FBI denied that work was being done on site after hours, saying that “the only nighttime activity was all-terrain vehicle patrols by FBI police personnel, who secured the site during all day during the excavation “.
Stop suspects that the FBI recovered the gold at midnight and then showed the treasure hunters an empty hole on the afternoon of the second day.
“It’s very curious why the FBI is so wrong and so obstructive in that,” said Warren Getler, who has worked closely with treasure hunters. “They worked that night under the cover of darkness to escape us, to escape our knowledge of something of which we are supposed to be partners.”
Many of the FBI’s photos are seemingly irrelevant, including hundreds of random tree images and a forest road leading to the excavation site, while others simply do not add or ask additional questions. say Parada and Getler, authors of Rebel Gold. ”, A book that explores the possibility of storing gold and silver drawers from the Civil War era.
FBI agents are shown around the hole in photos that appear earlier in the series, but are absent from almost all subsequent images at the excavation site.
Getler and Parada say the top FBI agent told them the hole was filled with water on the morning of the second day, but low-quality images released by the government show only a small puddle or maybe a bit of 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 confined to their car, not the excavation site.
The FBI said it was standard for photos to “document site conditions before, during and after FBI operations,” Parada said. it was just to show off.
“I think we were waiting for a couple of hundred photos of the night excavation, and I think we were waiting for pictures of coins or metal bars,” Parada said. “I think there were pictures, but they disappeared.”
FBI records also show that several weeks before the excavation, an agent of the agency’s arts crime team approached Wells Fargo to ask if he was sending gold in diligence to the House of the United States Currency in 1863.
Wells Fargo historians found no evidence, but said records at the time were incomplete. Wells Fargo sent gold in diligence, 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. the train “.
Getler said the gold could have been transported by wagon, not by stagecoach.
Additional FBI releases are expected in the coming months.