Good Job, Brain! - 109: It's Treasure-Hunting Time

Episode Date: May 8, 2014

Pick up your shovel and get ready to dig into the world of hidden and buried treasure! Uncover facts behind the fictional golden city of El Dorado, the secrets behind Al Capone's "hotel," the real inspiration behind pirate treasure maps, and what would YOU put in a time capsule representing 2014? And just how well do you know your treasure-hunting movies? Chris is back from the desert and has a first-hand report on the legendary video game mystery of the famed Atari digsite! ALSO: Exploding whale updates Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, mystery-minded muffin-munching, Mr.s and Mrs. You're listening to Good Job, Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 109, and of course, I am your humble host, Karen. And we are your pedantic posse of podcasters who pronounce puzzles through pop filters. I'm Colin. I'm Dana. And I'm Chris.

So this was just in the news over the last week or so. Have you guys read about the yet to explode whale in Newfoundland? Why are you cheering it? Well, no, because like our Facebook page is like all buzzing, buzzing with exploding whale news. The whole exploding whale community is exploding. I guess it's not that long a story made short, but there was a whale, a beached whale. A blue whale. A blue whale, right, which I guess is not that common that has beached.

And it's swelling and swelling and swelling, as discussed on these very podcast waves before. And they're kind of just waiting for it to explode, very patiently, politely, waiting for this whale to explode. It's like being in a Gallagher show. Oh, when's it going to happen? With your little poncho and the garbage bag in front of you. So I have some update. As of this morning, I read Somehow the whale has

started to lose air And it's deflating Better patch that whale up It's probably not going to explode That's the best taste scenario Yeah, naturally it's leaking air Right Kind of looks like a deflated balloon

Oh no Anyway, so exploding whale Probably not going to explode I guess good news for everybody Bad news for the internet Bad news for the internet Everybody was waiting with bated breath All right

Well let's jump into our first general trivia segment. Pop quiz, hot shot. Sorry, my voice is a low shot because I have a tonsilitis. Show must go on. Soldering on, as always. All right, I have a random trivial pursuit card from the box, and you guys have your barnyard, buzzers. Here we go. Blue Edge for Geography. Which city is at a latitude most similar to Tokyo? Multiple choice. Denver, Houston, Memphis, or Seattle. Oh, interesting. Chris. I want to say Houston.

If that's wrong, there's only one it could really be. Oh, yeah? Yeah. What is it then? Well, then it must be Memphis. It's in Memphis. Correct. It is Memphis.

Because Denver and Seattle are really far north, but Tokyo is in the southern sort of part of Japan. Good job. All right. Pink Wedge, Brangelina, and Tomcat are tabloid shorthand for what celebrity couples? Dana. It's Brad Pitt, Angelina. Elena Jolie, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Not anymore, right?

Yeah, but that's what the... When the card was written. When the card was written. Yellow Wedge, what was Bill Clinton's presidential campaign theme song? Oh, it was... Colin? Don't stop believing, right? Sorry, what is your final answer?

Don't stop by Fleetwood Mac. Yes. Not don't stop believing by journey. Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Yes, exactly. That's right. And they famously actually reunited to play that for him at his inauguration, I think. Aren't they?

They are finally since 1997. Mr. Fleetwood Mac. Let me tell you, people. Yes. So the, not the original, original Fleetwood Mac lineup, but the one that was the most famous, I'm so excited. No, you have no idea. Because so the lineup, which was Lindsay Buckingham, Stevie Nix, Christine McVee, John McVee,

McFleetwood, the rumors lineup, they reunited in 90s. seven for the dance, the live album. And then Christine McVee was like, I'm done with all this. I want to go to London forever and never get on an airplane again. She was like afraid of flying. She was just like, I've been touring my whole life. I'm done. And she was done until now.

They were able to get her out of retirement for what is probably one last tour with the rumors lineup, which is starting this year. I am pumped. I have tickets for the San Jose, California. show. I have tickets for the Oakland California show a week later. I'm surprised you're not flying to other cities. Two is probably enough. This is we'll have just had

our baby. So I kind of had to ask Regina, I'm just like, it's okay if I knew this, right? She's like I know this is very important. All right. Well, thank you for the Fleetwood Back update. Purple Wedge. Leopold Bloom is the

hero of what James Joyce novel. Colin That is Ulysses Yes That is the only James Joyce novel I know Are there other ones? Finning and Wade

Portrait of the artist as a young man Right yeah Yeah cool Good job you guys You're like hmm I got served We know trivia All right

Green Wedge Forest Science What is the only number Whose value is equal to the number of letters in its name I think I feel like you told us this one We had this at Pup trivia. Chris.

Four. Yes. You know, the thing is, even if you don't know the answer to that immediately, it doesn't take you very long to find the answer. No. No, two, no. Three. Oh, gosh, I got it.

Four. Five. Wait. Wait. Let's go back and take a second look at four. All right. Last question, Orange Wedge. Who set the record in 2001 for lowest single round tally by any female golfer in the LPGA tour play?

All right. What? There's a lot of words. Okay. With the lowest single round tally by any female golfer in LPGA. So you want a low tally. Importantly, what year is it? 2001.

All you do know is the year. Okay. Because, I mean, I can kind of, there are only so many household name famous LPGA players. So in 2001, I'm going to guess, Anika Sorenstown. Oh, my God. Wow. Yes. He watches golf.

Giving him the golf clap. He does watch golf. I don't really watch golf. She shot a 59. That's a good number. Okay. Cool. I thought it said lowest single rep.

Yeah. Lower is better. Lower is better. I got served again. Golf is the one where you try and get the ball into the cup. Yes. Yeah. Put put putt.

It's big puttut. What's the one when the ball's on a string and you try to get it into the cup? String cup ball. Yes. You want a low number for that one, too. You really do, yep. All right, and we have a lobe trotter fact. Loeb-trotters are fan club members,

and this one is from Holly Ellis, who drew an awesome picture. Her little trivia tidbit is, Nikola Tesla was a germaphobe. Things he found particularly repugnant include pearls, earrings, and hair. Love Holly. I love pizza, and I love good job brain.

Oh, thanks. What is going on? She drew a picture of a slice of pizza with a mustache. Wow. Oh, it's so cute. I'll take being second to pizza. I have no problem being second to pizza. I love pizza and I love good job, brain.

Well, thank you, Holly. It's very nice. Pearls, earrings, and hair. Okay. These are all very lady-centric. He's a germaphobe or a lady-phobe? Wasn't Nicola Tesla? He was celibate.

Yeah, yeah. He was eccentric. Okay, so this week, it's very special. It was inspired by one of Chris's recent Jonts. One of my real-life adventures. Yes. And we all kind of latched on and we've prepared a very interesting show about mystery and puzzles. But really, today we're going to talk about hidden treasure.

Buried treasure. And treasure and hunts and treasure hunts and stuff like that. Right. Stuff people have dug up out of the ground. Yeah. Yes. And I will get to this later. But as you may have known, if you were following me on Twitter, I attended the excavation of

thousands and thousands of Atari video games that were actually buried out in the New Mexico desert in 1983. There's a lot of urban myths and legends that have sort of sprung up around this, and so I will talk about later the reality versus the myth. All right. Well, enjoy this week. We're time about buried treasure. I saved a lot of money. My fortune was untold. And like a fool, I idolized my silver and my gold. My earthly treasures mounted, but when I counted through, I realized a treasure I had over Laquoise you. Well, I was thinking about buried treasure all week. I was actually really looking forward to this show.

And I got to think about time capsules. The concept of a time capsule, whatever form it takes of putting items or things in the ground to be dug up later for future generations. I remember in junior high, my school decided to bury a time capsule. So this was in 1988. And I remember... So it wasn't even like a round number year. That's what I don't remember exactly what sparked. Are they going to dig it up around now, do you think?

Well, I was trying to remember. I think it was a 50 year. Oh, okay. You know, it may have been like maybe in honor of like the 50th anniversary of my junior high or something. Who knows? Lost to history. But I remember that they pulled all the students like, what do you want to put in this time capsule? Like what represents life as a, you know, 13 or 14 year old in 1988?

I don't remember anything else that went in there. But I remember there was a pretty heated debate among two factors. of whether a CD by new kids on the block or a CD by Guns and Roses would better capture the spirit of the time. This seems to me to be a gender argument masquerading as a factional war. Without a comment on the gender wars of 1988 or 89, I think they ended up putting both CDs in there. They're not that big. They can just put both. You really can.

So the concept of time capsule is pretty old. It's hard to say exactly when the first one was. The term itself, I discovered, is fairly new. Like many, many other things we've talked about on the show, the term time capsule dates to a World's Fair. Oh, of course. Yes. Specifically, the 1939 World's Fair in New York City.

In the run-up to the World's Fair, the Westinghouse Corporation, they tasked one of their PR execs, basically, we need you to come up with some sort of splashy event that can tie in. a gentleman named George Pendray, and he settled on the idea of doing a time capsule and making a big deal out of it. It's, you know, all the world was watching. And so sort of the initial ideas that they came up with, it was a metal container. It kind of looked like a rocket, and it looks like a bullet. He wanted to call it a time bomb originally.

They later settled on time capsule, which I think is, yeah, capsule is a lot better. It was 90 inches long. It was nine inches in diameter. And this thing was really. built to last. So it was like two tubes. There was an inner, airtight glass tube. That was contained as I say on like a larger kind of bullet or torpedo shape metal container. This time capsule, I'll tip it off. The time capsule has not been opened yet. So went in the ground in 1939. Do you guys know how long it's going to be in the ground, if all goes according to plan? A hundred years? Five thousand years.

That is their grand plan. Dig it up now. Yes. Where is it? So, so this was in It's in Flushing Meadows in New York at the site of, at the World's Fair. And in fact, the Westinghouse Corporation made a second-time capsule for the 1964 World's Fair, also in New York City. So they're buried pretty close together. They're about 50 feet underground. There's like a giant granite marker above ground, sort of saying, you know, here be time capsules. And no one has tried to dig it up. No one's tried to dig it up.

Yeah, although it could be a plot for a movie, I suppose. Yeah, no one tried to dig it up. They've all agreed. We're going to leave it here until some well after the year's 16. 900. Yes, 5,000 years, both of these. So what's in these containers? You might be wondering. To get stuff. Popcorn. Yeah, you know, it's a lot of them. Random fair crafts. They tried to choose things that they thought would have some chance of lasting 5,000 years. So there is not, in fact, popcorn. They have seeds. They have some agricultural stuff in there. They have a wide variety of seeds that are, you know, as I say, kept in airtight containers.

But it's got, you know, just stuff from life in the 1930s. There's a pack of people. camel cigarettes. There's a copy of Life magazine. Oh, okay. They have a newsreel and lots of... Where are they going to play it with? That's a good question. I want you to come back to that. Okay. A newsreel and a lot of printed material that they reduced down to microfilm science, basically.

So like, almanacs, dictionaries. You hit on a really good question, Karen, is how do you future-proof these things, you know? So one of the things they did is they published a guidebook, an official guidebook, to saying, here's what we did, here's everything that we put inside, and they printed

thousands of copies. And, you know, the hope is that somewhere 5,000 years from now a copy of this guidebook might still exist and people will be interested enough to come dig it up. How do we determine the exact date? So they chose a date, but say we don't even have our modern calendar system 5,000 years now. So they figured out how to use astronomical references. So in the future, based on the position of stars in the sky or schedules of eclipses, they can figure out, okay, now is the time that we're supposed to be opening this thing. Even the location, You know, it's buried underground, and they took exact measurements of the latitude and longitude. But over 5,000 years, things could move around.

So they described, you know, a process of how you future people can find these capsules, even if it's moved. And it's basically a giant metal detector. How to view the media. Yeah. Okay. They included, I love this. It seems so simple. So along with the microfilm and the newsreels, they included instructions on how to build a newsreel projector.

Wow. They included instructions on how to build a microfilm reader. You know, what really sort of seems to inspired this whole surge of interest in time capsules was opening up the Egyptian pyramids and the tombs and the 1920s. And a lot of people were really just amazed at how well-preserved some of the things were. So you guys were kind enough to indulge me in this exercise. I asked each of you to tell me if we had to create a time capsule representing life in 2014 for future generations, what would we put in there?

What one item? So I'll go first. I thought we'd put in a pair of Google glasses or Google Glass. Oh, that's good. I thought that might be a good thing, you know, put in a Google Glass. Dana, you were sort of in the same vein. I said like an iPhone. Yeah, yeah, you said like an iPhone or smartphone.

Because everybody uses them all the time. They really are part of our life. Preloaded with some apps, yeah. Karen suggested a broken doorknob from a hotel at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Because I was thinking of like, What big events happen in 2014 so far, where the world came together? I was like, oh, you know, we have the World Cups coming soon. But the Sochi Olympics or the Winter Olympics just happened.

That was a disaster. So it wouldn't be funny. It's part of our record. Yeah. Would you put context with it? Of course. Like, this is how bad it was. This is why I put a broken door knob.

I think it would be even funnier without context, especially when they get to Chris's suggestion, which was to represent life in 2014, North America. Oh, God. A bobblehead of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones. Wow, that's good. It's about culture and about our 2014's like desire of adults to surround themselves with plastic models of toys. It hits a bunch of things at once. And in the same vein, I actually have a quiz for you guys about hidden treasure in movies.

A lot of treasure hunting and a lot of heist movies and what I will. do in this quiz is I'm going to name the item that is coveted or buried or, you know, they're on a quest to find, and you tell me what movie it is from. Okay. All right. Everybody get the great Muppet Keeper. A pad of paper. Oh, it's one of those kind of quizzes.

So I will be naming the item that is being searched for and tell me the movie. The Macduffin. First one. Curly's Gold. Oh. Please be exact in your movie titles. All right, locked in, locked in, answers up. Chris says, City Slickers 2.

Dana says, City Slickers 2, the hump for Curly's Gold. And what did you... City Slickers 2, T-L-O-C-G. The legend of Curly's Gold. You guys are all correct. It is the legend. You just find City Slickers 2 is... City Slickers 2, yeah.

And not just City Slickers 2. Specificity, yeah. Got it. All right. Next one. Fabergerie Imperial Coronation Egg. Uh, oh. Fabergerie Imperial Coronation Egg.

Answers up. Okay. Chris says Anastasia. Dana says the Great Muppet Keeper. And Colin says, Ocean's 12. Colin is correct. Oh, good job. I was like 12.

or 13, 12 or 13. Well, 13 was vague. Oh, right, right, right, of course, of course. Ocean's 12. Cool. And they had Eddie Azard make the fake one, right? The hologram. Next one.

I don't think I remember anything about that movie. It was probably not the best out of the trilogy. All right, next one. The long lost fortune of one-eyed Willie. Oh, sounds so familiar. If you think about what kind of job occupation, someone called one-eyed Willie. eyed willie would have because this person has obviously one eye no hints i'm going to get one right

okay chris is ready chris says the goonies dana says pirates of the caribbean and colin says jaws nine it is the goonies wait what is the occupation i was like pirate that's why i put pirates to the cat it was hint like

So this next one is A lot of movies have this as the thing they're looking for As the treasure, so I'm going to specify it The treasure is the Holy Grail that is made out of wood Oh, okay Okay Obviously if I just said Holy Grail it could be a lot of a lot of movies And answers up

Chris says Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Dana says Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade And Colin says, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. You guys are all correct. Wow. Bonus question. Oh. What are the three puzzles or traps Indiana Jones had to solve before successfully getting to the room where the grail is?

There's not to write it down. You guys can talk about. There's that half thing, the stone tile thing. The name of God. Right. Which is Jehovah with an I, not with a J. Yes. He has to spell out Jehovah.

Only the penitent man will pass, which is where he has to kneel. That was like my favorite. That was a great sequence. That was a favorite. Yeah. that was so good well we all love puzzles and yeah that's funny

I think they're very self-selected yeah all right next one the baseball diamond from the Mallory Gallery Baseball diamond from the Mallory which is a gallery

I don't remember answers up Chris says the great Muppet caper that says the intelligent job Colin says the great Muppet keeper I love that it backfire.

No, I was laughing because I was like, I don't know what this is from. But it sounds so familiar. And then I was like, it's the Italian job because there's nothing Italian. No, it's two puns, you know, or it's a rhyme and the baseball diamond, which is funny. Oh, I didn't get that. Baseball diamond. Baseball diamond from a mallory. I really just remember Kermit the Frog scaling a building, like walking up the side of a building with a rope and Miss Piggy wearing like a trench coat

It's all I remember from that movie And the name And the name maybe Right All right Last one And this is a more recent movie A Ferrari made of solid gold

Did it work? It did not You cannot drive it A Ferrari made of solid gold All right Answers up Chris says The Italian job

Dana says The Italian job Colin says Harold and Kumar 3 It is Tower Heist I did not see that Starring Ben Still and Eddie Murphy Actually that's a very good heist movie

Oh yeah Okay That one kind of came and went pretty quickly Because there was some bad press With the director of that time All right good job you guys That was my Hidden Treasure movie quiz So as mentioned

I was present at the digging up Of what you might consider to be a time capsule Certainly it functioned as a time capsule So let me set the stage you all the way back to 1983 with a slow jam Atari the Atari video computer system or the Atari 2600 the first you know majorly successful video game machine had come out in the 70s and was doing really really well up until the early 80s um at which point Atari started to do badly and in 1983 they had never experienced I don't think stores returning product to them in

any sort of major capacity of stores saying oh yeah we can't sell this or oh customers returned this and they don't want this game and the store is sending it back they had no formalized process for taking care of a lot of this stuff

so in one of their warehouses in El Paso Texas returned product started to pile up or product that they otherwise were not shipping out to stores and stuff that had come back and had price tags on it when it started to pile up and pile up and pile up and eventually they did not want it there anymore.

So the guy who was in charge of the warehouse, they told him, get rid of this stuff. They weren't going to liquidate it. They were going to sell it to anybody. They were pretty much just like, let's just throw it all away. Palettes and pallets and pallets

full of basically working brand new video game software. They were just going to throw it out because they're kind of crazy. The warehouse manager, who I met when I was on this Atari digs, his name is Jim Heller. They actually flew him out there

to be present for this. The first thing he did was he was like, okay, we'll put it in the landfill here in El Paso. We'll throw it out in the garbage dump. And they're like, okay, they put a bunch of games in the garbage dump. And apparently what happened was they were just like immediately beset upon by scavengers or by people who were going to the dump to find stuff that they could resell. Perfectly good items. And these were the Atari games that were still in stores at this point for like $30, $40. They're just in the garbage dump not.

Hiles of them. in a beautiful mint condition in the garbage. So, of course, people are taking them. What they ended up working out, because they didn't want these getting looted, was that they would truck these games north of El Paso, Texas, 90 miles north to the sleepy hamlet of Alamagordo, New Mexico. They would bury them, and Alamagordo, New Mexico would have essentially security guards until the games were well and buried in the earth, basically, so that nobody could loot them. And we now kind of have these numbers now because the film crew that's been making the documentary about the Atari excavation, and that's what I went to New Mexico for, they've kind of interviewed a lot of people. And so we now know it was about three quarters of a million games. Wow.

Twelve-ish trucks, big trucks, you know, hauling all these 90 miles north to New Mexico. And the way that they disposed of trash in the 80s was they dug a hole, they put the trash in. and then they covered it with dirt and then they moved on and they would dig in the next hole and they don't do this anymore you know there's more sophisticated procedures but they would just dump everything in there

so that's what they did they dug a hole in the earth they put Atari games in there and they put the rest of the day's trash you know kind of all on top of them until the trench was full and that was the last anybody really thought about it there had been there were stories in the Alamagordo

papers but the controversy was Atari, why are you sending your trash from Texas to us in New Mexico? We don't want your trash. Atari had worked out a deal that allowed him to do that. And that was September 26th or thereabouts, 1983. And again, at that point, everybody sort of forgot about it. What happened was the story became this urban legend. And it became conflated, and nobody was really sure how conflated, with the video game E.T.

Atari's version of E.T. E.T. was like Atari's second kind of big flop of a game. They had done Pac-Man for the 2600, and they believed that so many people would buy Pac-Man that they actually made more copies of Pac-Man than there were Atari systems in people's homes. And in fact, they made more because they felt that people would go and buy an Atari just to have Pac-Man. Crazy. So they had tons left over. E.T., they did somewhere along the line, the same thing. They vastly, overmanufactured and they had a lot coming back. And so the urban legend of this burial was that like Atari's hubris, you know, in making so many products people didn't want, they had to bury all these unsold copies of the game secretly in the dead of right to hide their shape. Yeah, that's exactly it. But the mundane reality of it, as we kind of now know, is that it was just, I mean,

there were ETs in there, but there were a lot more copies of the game Defender, which was considered like a good game. it wasn't considered a huge flop, right? There were space invaders. You know, there was a lot of different stuff in there. It wasn't just piles and piles and piles of ET and nothing else. It was just all of the games that had been returned or for whatever reason were sitting in their warehouse that they had to throw them away. It's more just an indictment of Atari's ability to manage their stock.

Or predict, forecast the demand. Or like figure out how to liquidate it or do something constructive with it instead of burying it in the ground. Right. Now, people for a long time, having heard this story, had always sort of entertained notions of, oh, I'll go to the desert and dig them up. But you don't know where they are. You can't. And the thing is, you couldn't have done it on your own because they dug the trench more than 20 feet deep. These games were actually at the 20 footmark under 20 feet of garbage, garbage and dirt.

They needed it. They had a whole Caterpillar, backhoe, excavator, you know, to dig down. Because we were there the day before the big remember. Reveal the big moment, you know, where they sort of brought in all the media, and all the pictures you see are from day two. Day one was digging down to get 19 and a half feet down. So they were almost there and then they could do the rest. So we were there for that. And it was just lines of dump trucks. Because the funny thing is, the place where they're buried isn't an active landfill anymore. So it's not, you can't dump garbage there anymore. Which means that once they pull the garbage up out of the ground, you have to put it somewhere else. They put it in an actual, in a landfill, and it has to be disposed up properly. So the dump truck is all the other garbage. Yep. So basically, they were taking the garbage out of the ground, putting into dump trucks.

Those dump trucks drove to another landfill, 26 miles away, and dumped the garbage there. But it required tons of trips by this whole line of trucks to get all the stuff out of the ground and just have a hole. Like, how big a hole are we talking about? It seemed like the diameter of this thing was like 15 to 20 feet. Okay. That's a good size, yeah. Right, it's, yeah, big hole. So when we came in on day two, first of all, there just so happened to be, like, really high winds on day two.

And the first place that they kind of, like, had everybody standing was directly downwind of the freshly expedited pile of trash. So they quickly moved us away from there. But, like, I was just covered in a thin film of red sand grit, dirt. A lot of us had, we had safety glasses. We went to the local Walmart. martin bought bandanas to just keep it from going into our nose and mouth we look like we look like safari bank robbers basically yeah we're like a random collection of hats and bandanas that we'd assembled from the local walmart like indiana jones yeah yeah they did dig up all these games

yeah and then what so they and i want to really say everything even the layer of garbage was like remarkably well preserved and the the guys working at the dump you know who are actually running the actual dig, we're just like, yeah, there's no oxygen, there's no moisture. With no sunlight, nothing degraded. So some of the games, the cardboard boxes that kind of come unglued and everything, but like, I mean, you wouldn't want to take any of these things home. It's garbage from a dump, but like, you know, it's by garbage standards, it's in pretty good condition. I was going to ask you if you got any games. No, so they are all the property of the city of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Maybe they might give me one, sell them. I don't

really know what they're going to do, but it's all city property. And so it is theirs to do what they want with. All of the prep work that had to be done first by the guys who actually did the project, like, they had to figure out where it was. But they actually, the guy who ran it was there when they were burying them. And they had photographs and stuff. So they were actually able to look at photographs and be like, oh, well, there's that building. Here's the hole in the picture. It's not like a GPS. So it's over here. No. And they did core samples. They would take like a library or core sort of thing and drop it, you know, down and pull up a whole core sample. And if they found newspapers that were around that date, they were like, oh, we're, you know, we're getting in the right area.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. I'm so, I'm just so tickled that there's a resolution to this. As you say, it takes on legendary status. Not only that there's a resolution, but that you were there, first person that got to see this. That was, that was the really amazing part. If you're hearing about this for like two decades, it was amazing to actually. get to go out and be part of it all

and the guys from Atari were there and the designer of ET was there and it was totally crazy as I keep saying it was the most fun I ever had spending two days in the landfill which is the second best time I ever had in the landfill and so if you go

on Wired like I wrote a whole journal all of the everything that happened and there's videos and photos so you can read more onWired.com Wired.com Cool Cool. All right, let's take a quick break.

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You're listening to Good Job Brain, and this week we're talking about buried treasure. Buried treasure. Buried treasure. Buried treasure. And pirates. Pirates and berry treasure go together, like peanut butter and berry jelly. Like a hook hand and a crocodile. So tell me, I have a question for you guys.

Answer me this. Was this a real phenomenon? No. Did pirates actually bury treasure? What do you guys think? Yes or no? They went to go find treasure. But like, you know, the whole legend of the math and the treasure chest.

I'm going to say, I'm going to say, no. No, they never actually did that. They probably took their money and spent it. I think yes. I think some did because they don't want other people to find where they amassed their... They're on a ship with a bunch of thieves. Like, don't you need to hide your stuff? So most historical experts agree that the notion of pirates burying treasure to come back for later is almost exclusively fictional.

Almost. We owe so much of our modern pirate lore and the tropes. two stories from the 1800s. Probably the most famous of all the pirate stories, Treasure Island, right, yeah, by Robert Lewis Stevenson. So that was in 1883. Like that one book is responsible for so many, like the parrot on the shoulder and the pegleg and just on and on the type of ships that they used.

And most importantly, the pirate map with the big X marks the spot to the treasure chest. Yeah. Before that, there were a couple of other famous stories that sort of helped build up this image. And Stevenson himself actually said that he was directly inspired by a lot of the details from a short story from 50 years prior called Wolfbert Weber, which was written by Washington Irving of Ritt Van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow fame. Edgar Allan Poe also wrote a very famous story called The Gold Bug. Has a lot of the same sort of details revolving around buried treasure and trying to find this hidden stash. So where did Irving and Poe, where did they get their inspiration? Like, was this entirely made up and fictional?

And it seems to be that the inspiration for the buried treasure can be traced back to the very real, very once alive, Captain Kidd, Captain William Kidd. Was he a pirate? Well, that's a good question. He was active in the late 1600s, mainly. And it depends on who you ask, Karen. It depends on your point of view, whether he was a pirate or simply a privateer. Oh. And in case you guys don't know.

I don't know what the difference is. Yeah. So a privateer, basically. basically was like a mercenary. It was someone who had a crew and a ship and either, you know, directly or tacitly was operating under the authority of a government. Government-sanctioned pirate. Yeah. Yeah. It really was. It was like government sanctioned piracy. Eventually, he fell on the wrong side of the law and got into some trouble with the authorities. And he learned that there was a warrant out for his arrest, for piracy and also for murder. So he, uh, word got out. He found out

that like, oh, if I come back, I'm going to be under arrest for piracy. And this is a no good. So he went and stashed some treasure on Gardner's Island, which is a tiny little island off the east end of Long Island in New York. He was actually a fairly important figure in the early days of New York and the colonial era. So he stashed it there thinking, if I ever get in trouble, I can kind of use this as trade or, you know, maybe- When he's in a jam. Negotiate my way out of trouble, right? Which is a pretty good idea. Unfortunately for him, he was basically sold out by one of his former associates, who was the governor of the New York area at the time. He was arrested, held in prison, eventually put on trial.

And what the governor did was he went and had kids treasure dug up, basically, and sent to England as evidence to be used in the trial against him, eventually sent back to England, stood trial before Parliament. It was a spectacle. I mean, this was just right around the turn of the century there. It was a big, big deal to have Captain Kidd on trial. He was found guilty. He was convicted.

He was executed. They hung his body over the Thames for three years as a warning, as a warning to any potential future pirates. Oh, they tarred it. Didn't they cart? Yeah, they tarred, they tarred his body. So it's not like seagulls came in, you know, and it was tarred and tied up in ropes and dangled out over the water. It grew some punishment. Yeah, this was in 1701.

But so this whole affair really contributed to his legend. It seems that the writers of the next century really took a lot of inspiration from Captain Kidd and the Barry Treasure. So, yeah, you can trace more or less a direct line from Captain Kidd all the way up through Jack Sparrow in today's Treasure Hunting Pirates. Yeah, it's funny that Edgar Allan Poe wrote a short story about Barry Treasure. He also wrote a poem about Eldorado. I'm going to talk about the lost treasure of Eldorado. In Spanish, Eldorado means the golden one or the gilded one. And it's not speaking about a city or it's not talking about a city.

You might have heard about the city of gold or the city of El Dorado. It's a person. They're talking about a person as El Dorado. In the Andes Mountains in Columbia, there were an indigenous group of people. And when their chief was ascending to that role, was taking up that role, they would coat him in gold dust. And then he'd row out to the middle of this beautiful lake, Lake Guadavita. And he would jump in the water. Covered in gold dust, jump in the water.

They'd also throw gold trinkets and gems into the water, and they would do that to kind of celebrate his ascension into being their chief. So when the Spaniards came to conquer those people, to colonize those people, they were like, very interesting. You throw gold into this lake. We would like to take the gold from the lake. What are you guys doing with it? Yeah. Oh, nothing. Apparently nothing.

I know. I was trying to scoop the pennies out of the wishing well, trying to like it. So in 1545, Lazaro Fonte and Hernan Perez de Casada, they tried to drain the lake. They had like a bunch of probably indigenous slaves. You could probably call them slaves using buckets. Oh, my God. So manual. So manual.

So manual. So after three months, they got three meters of the water down. They were able to find some gold. There was gold that washed up on the shores. You know, they were like, okay, fine, this is taking forever. We're not going to do this anymore. And then in 1580, about 40 years later, this businessman Antonio de Sopolda cut a notch in the lake trying to make the crater lake a little bigger so the water would go down. And he was able to get it down by 20 meters, but then it collapsed and killed a bunch of people.

They also found more gold doing that. So they decided to just keep going. Yeah, sure. And then in 1898, some British explorers were like, oh, there's probably a ton of gold. gold in there. And so they made a tunnel in the lake and tried to drain it all. And they were able to drain it all. It flooded some villages. Like, people were just doing, like, whatever. It was horrible. Sure. So they drained it. And then there was a ton of mud. The mud dried in the sun and then

became, like, concrete. And they couldn't get it. They found just like 500 pounds, like pounds money, London money of gold. That's it. After they did that. So there's no more lake there. No, no, it came back. Oh, okay. But the Colombian government was like, you guys can't do this anyway. Like, no, just leave it. So many are dead. Yeah.

But the legend of El Dorado really got around. It captured everybody's imagination. People thought it was like a place or a city. They're just throwing gold into a lake. It must be like nothing. They must have a city of gold somewhere around here. And so there were just a lot of assumptions that were made. Well, they're applying like their value system.

They're like, well, we need. No gold is valuable, and they're doing all these frivolous things with it. Therefore, there must be a huge stash. Yeah. But the thing, it was valuable to them, too. It was a spiritual value to them, but there was no city of gold. And El Dorado was a person, not a place. Oh, Mr. L. Stomer. The yielded one.

No frills, delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at no-frails.ca. So as I mentioned earlier, I asked our listeners what other stuff they, cool stuff they found if they ever found any hidden or buried treasure. A lot of people on our Facebook page say that they're into geo-cashing, which is kind of like a GPS scavenger hunt.

Sometimes you find little trinkets and you're not out to find gold or anything. It's just little things that people plant and it's a whole kind of activity. And it made me think of scavenger hunts and puzzle hunts. And just last week, two good job brain listeners. Ryan and Colleen invited me to join their scavenger hunt team in Disneyland. Awesome. And it's not an official Disneyland activity, but it is a very coveted or very celebrated scavenger hunt. Very, very difficult. It's called Mouse Adventure. And we did very, very well. We did not place, but we did very well. It was really fun. And in the spirit of kind of like scavenger hunts and cheese,

geocaching, you know, I realize that a lot of these types of activities are kind of made possible by the internet or by advent of the internet. Like, geocaching wouldn't be a thing if I weren't for publicly available GPS. Right. Right. And also a lot of the scavenger hunts now, puzzle hunts, you read about them from the internet, you have a whole online community dedicated to puzzle solving. But what about pre-internet? The first documented American big sensation scavenger hunt was in the 1930s in New York City. A lot of later than I would have guessed.

Yeah, but this was like written about it. There were movies made about it. It was just a big kind of upper crust activity or a fun thing that a lot of the rich New Yorkers played. So I want to tell you guys a story. And this is kind of at the cross section of all these things I'm interested in, in the puzzle aspect, in the pre kind of internet, pre-technology aspect. the puzzles and all of these things kind of coming together. And I want to introduce you to a guy called Max Valentine or Max Valentin. He's French.

It is a pseudonym. I was going to say it's a cool name. So this guy, Max, in 1978, his boss asked him to organize like a treasure hunt for some of the clients, like a fun activity or an icebreaker. However, his boss did not use the clues he made. He did write a whole game, but they ended up not using it. But then he thought, you know what, I'm on to something. So during 1978, he spent like 400, 500 hours writing, perfecting these puzzles. There are 11 puzzles or enigmas, 11 puzzles that he spent all this time.

And for 10 years, it just kind of sat in his house until 1992, where he met an artist, Michelle Becker. And so they had this plan. What they're going to do is they're going to publish his puzzles into a book. and they're actually going to have a real-life treasure. They're going to bury it somewhere, and all of these clues will lead to the location of this. So this was known as the golden owl. So Michelle Becker, his friend, Max's friend, sculpted an owl.

He actually had two owls. He had one owl that was for the digging, and one is the actual prize, which is golden. You redeem it for the actual. Yeah, exactly. Kind of tacky. It has like a lot of gemstones, vulgars. a little bit too much. So 1993, they went out to the French countryside and dug a hole and

buried this owl. And then two days later, the book was published and available for everybody. And of course, this captured the whole nation. Because they're like, oh, my God, solving these, just these 11 puzzles and I can find this golden owl. That's worth a lot of money. Like, the golden hour is worth one million French francs. So it became a best thing. seller. The book, people bought the book. Max and Michelle Becker did make some money by selling the books and people really enjoyed it. And then people really got obsessed and kind of crazy about it. So this just kind of consumed Max's life. This one guy, he wrote letters to Max and was like, I know it's in a cemetery. So I started digging up every French cemetery. And so like Max Valentine's like, you know, I'm not going to give you clues, but I'm going to tell you. tell you, it's not in a cemetery, so please stop ruining and digging cemeteries along the French countryside. One morning, there was a call from the police, and this dude firebombed a church,

like a little chapel, saying, I know the owl is underneath the chapel. And so, like, bombed the place. Oh, my God. And so this is getting really out of hand. He's getting death threats. People are like, they're not even looking for the owl anymore. They're kind of looking for him. Wow.

They're trying to get him to tell him where the owl is. Did anybody find the owl? So here's the thing. No one has found the owl yet. Whoa. No one has found the owl. What? Buried in 1993, no one has found it yet.

Wow. Max? His game design skills are suspect at this point. They were kind of worried. They thought the owl was going to be uncovered in like two days. Max Valentine died in 2009. Oh. Still somewhere.

Is there a record? Like, does any, is there any one person who knows exactly where it is now that he's died? A couple of people do. Okay. And a lot of people are like, oh, no, what if his death is a hoax? There's just, like, a really weird kind of a shroud of mystery around all of this. And this is pre-internet, you know, and now that we're kind of in the internet age, there is actually a website that's not built very well.

Of course. Well, if we have any French listeners who have gone on a Golden Owl Expedition, let us know. So we'll finish this out with a tale of digging and not finding. When I was going out to the E.T. dig, a lot of people kept making this reference of like, oh, this is going to be the Al Capone's vault of video games. The reference for some of you kids who may be too young and did not hear about this was that, so in 1986, a talk show host television personality, Geraldo Rivera, with much hype and pomp and circumstance, had a live television special. in which he was going to excavate, he was going to open after apparently many long years, a secret storage area of Al Capone, the famous mobster that was below a hotel in Chicago. Whoa, I remember those.

Yes, so there might be money, there might be dead bodies of his enemies. Just breathless speculation of what could be in there. And it was all going to be aired live on television. Luckily, you know, the ET dig did not end the same way the Al-Qaeda. Al Capone's Vault dig ended, which was that they found absolutely nothing live on television. So this is what happened with Al Capone's vault. In the late 20s, early 30s, Al Capone used the Lexington Hotel in Chicago as his primary base of operations. I think he started out by renting out two floors.

I think he had his own, he may have his own floor, customized a lot of stuff for himself. And then after his downfall, it was discovered that he had really done quite a bit to this hotel. They had in fact built networks of hidden staircases in the hotel so that they could get in and out without anybody seeing them without using the front door. There was a hidden staircase behind his medicine cabinet, but there were all over the hotel. So him and his gang could go down the staircases into the basement, into the network of hidden underground tunnels that were underneath the hotel and then use those to get to brothels and bars and other hotels. There was even, apparently, there was a shooting range in the hotel that they had secretly built in there for target practice. I love it. Yep.

So in 1985, the hotel at that point had been abandoned, and it had been declared a Chicago landmark, and it had been purchased by basically a non-profit organization that was going to convert it into apartment buildings. And at that point, a lot of, like, urban explorers had, like, you know, gone through the tunnels and stuff. and they found that there was this area, this vault, that seemed to have been deliberately closed off. Al Capone was arrested. They got him on tax evasion. They got him on famously not paying his income taxes. And he was put away for the longest that anybody had ever been put away for not paying their

taxes. You know, at that point, they figured maybe his stuff was down here. Apparently, he had had another place in Lima, Ohio. and they had found $50,000 there. Pretty substantial at the time. Yeah. So they were like, oh, maybe he did stash a bunch of his money. So the new owner was a nonprofit organization, as I said.

It did not, could not use the, essentially the public funds that it was getting to, like, do this excavation project. So they looked for partners, and they ended up getting in touch with Geraldo Rivera. It's so random. He worked with them in a TV production company to put together a documentary that would sort of culminate in this prime time. live syndicated network TV special called the mystery of Al Capone's vaults, a total of two hours of scintillating television, aired once on April 21st, 1986.

There was tremendous hype. Oh, my God. It was, I was, I was 60 years old. I don't remember this happening. I mean, I was a little bit. I would have been, I would have been, I guess, 12. 9, 10, yeah. And it was, it was Al Capone's fault.

What's in there is to be like, like, you would have thought that it was going to be, like, barrels of whiskey and piles of gold coins and like women and dead bodies yeah i mean cars yeah it was just what's going to be in there what's going to be in there join me live and we'll find out it was the most watched live tv special i think in history oh really it had higher it had higher ratings like as a percentage of homes owning televisions it it did higher ratings than the beetles on the ed sullivan show it did it did better than who shot jr like it was like it was the biggest biggest thing. So I think the most recent Super Bowl was the most watched television event ever, as far as

like total number of viewers. I think this may still have the record for like a syndicated special, you know, versus a dog sports. Right, right. Probably a lot of people were watching because they were hoping that dead bodies would come spilling it on my computer. You know, they had a medical examiner on hand. In fact, they also had the IRS on hand because as soon as they announced they were going to do the IRS was like, hey, B.T. Dubbs, he owes us $800,000 with interest. So the first $800,000 that you find is the IRS. And they were there to take it. Wow. Yeah, they blast through a concrete wall and they find a bunch of dirt and another wall. And they blast through another wall and they find dirt. And they blast through another wall and they find dirt. And basically all that they had found

were a couple of prohibition-era glass bottles. It was this colossal embarrassment for Geraldo on live television, but at the same time, it also launched his career. I mean, he was in front of 30 million people, as Homer Simpson famously sang in the Baby on Board episode of The Simpsons. There was nothing in Al Capone's vault, but it wasn't Geraldo's fault. And, I mean, he caught his talk show right after that and vaulted to national fame. Vaulted.

It works. Oh, yeah, vaulted. Well, the good news is, Because they didn't plant stuff in there. Right. Live TV, this is what happens. Sometimes there's nothing. Right.

All right. And, well, that is our show. Thank you guys for joining me and thank you guys, listeners, for listening in. Hope you learn a lot of stuff about buried treasure, about pirates, about ET, El Dorado. And you can find us on iTunes, on Stitcher, on SoundCloud, and on our website, goodjobbrain.com. And thanks to our sponsor, Squarespace. And we'll see you guys next week. Bye.

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