Stuff You Should Know - Finding the Fenn Treasure

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

In 2010 an eccentric art dealer hid a treasure chest with $2 million in valuables somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and published a poem with clues on where to find it. Hence began the most famous treasure hunt in modern times. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there. What did you say the first time? I pronounced it with a real hard T.

Bryant? Yeah. You only do that when you're mad at me. Yeah, when I'm like hissing through my clenched teeth. Kind of like I say Josh Clark. Right, Marge Simpson. Even though the one where that guy came in and introduced Marge's substitute teacher? Oh yeah, yeah. So wait, what did you say? Boy, this is great podcasting right now. I'm clearing my throat and asking you what you said 10 seconds ago. Well, I do have a couple of weird announcements if that's okay. Oh yeah, let's do that. Before we actively get going. One is just a quick listener shoutout. And you remember in the hell, hell, hell episode when I couldn't think of the Pixar

movie where if you were forgotten you'd go away? Yeah. It's Coco. Yeah, I saw somebody write that in. Is that a good movie? I've seen nothing but good things, but I've never watched it. Dude, Coco is easily the best looking animated film I've ever seen. Wow. It's amazing. It is striking. And that's from Joe Brown. He's a movie crusher. I felt so dumb because the main song from that movie is called Remember Me. The whole thing is about being remembered. The title of the song is Remember Me Chuck. And also, we wanted to announce that we are edging close to 100,000 books sold. Yeah, that's pretty good, huh? It is. And we would really like to hit that number. Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean like we... I mean, you don't? Yeah, I don't. I

totally do. No, I totally do. It's just usually we coordinate with stuff like this so I can prepare some remarks. Come on. Let's hear what you got to say right off the hip. Selling book good. Buy book good, you. 100,000 big number. That's what I have to say off the cuff. Yeah, we'd like to hit 100,000 because that would please a lot of people. It's a good round number. And just because the holidays have come and gone, you still can go out and get that thing, the stuff you should know, a book of interesting facts and figures. What's it called? It's close. Stuff you should know, invisible colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. We took some grief for not actually putting a colon on there. Oh, really? Yeah. After our colon-heavy speak over

the past few years? Yeah, my response is that it's invisible and silent. Invisible and silent, much like us. Yeah. Not at all. But the thing is, I wonder if we shot ourselves in the foot by making the thing bright red so people are confused and think it's only a Christmas present. Because you're right, it's not. Just because Christmas is over doesn't mean you can't get it. So it's available everywhere still and you can get it from indie booksellers to giant global monopolies. Everywhere has it. Anywhere you can buy books. That's right. And then my final little quick shout out because this is an episode on the Fen Treasure. I actually know a guy who looked for this thing and it's my old pal from my film industry days, Kimbrough. And I remember

when this, well, we don't want to ruin anything, but I remember him posting on Facebook about it some that he had looked for it. He didn't quit his job like some people. But he was a casual to moderately intense explorer for the Fen Treasure. So that's really neat, man. Big shout out to Kimbrough. Yeah. Way to go, Kimbrough. I think he listens, actually. Yeah. Oh, even better. You won't have to email him and be like, you should really listen to the Fen Treasure episode. I probably will anyway. So you just kind of let the cat out of the bag, you and the title of the episode. We're talking about the Fen Treasure and it's probably familiar to a lot of people. It made the news pretty widely over the decade that it was ongoing. But for those of you who

aren't aware of it, it was a treasure hunt, like a real live treasure hunt. There was a chest of treasures, literally treasures of gold and jewels and gems and like archaeological artifacts hidden somewhere by a very eccentric art dealer named Forest Fen, hence the name Fen Treasure. And he published something in his book, which is basically a puzzle map full of clues, I think nine clues, and said, here you go, everybody. Go find it and kick back and watched for by the highest count I've seen about 350,000 different people search for this treasure, some of whom, like you mentioned, quit their jobs, moved out to the Rockies so that they could search more frequently. Most people, though, just kind of were casually involved or maybe followed it on the message

boards, that kind of thing. But the people who actually did go out and look for it were kind of fulfilling this vision that Forest Fen had, which was, you know, we're also just kind of stuck on our couches in front of multiple screens all the time. And there's so much natural beauty out there that's just passing people's lives by. And he said, well, you know, if you put a chest of treasure worth a couple of million dollars out there, tell people it's somewhere out there, it might actually get some people to go look for it. And that was the definite result of that whole thing. Yeah, I mean, it's a very cool thing. I did not know about it until the end. And I'm still trying to sort of dance around a spoiler. Okay. But, you know, anything could have happened. It

could have exploded. Yep. Could have never been found and been a hoax. Right. Don't forget Martians. Could have been Martians. It could have been found. You'll have to listen to find out. But eventually when things came to a conclusion is when I learned about it. And I was kind of mad that I didn't know about it before. I definitely would not have gone and looked for it. But I would have done a lot of online sleuthing just to sort of poke around because it's kind of fun. Treasure hunts are neat. Well, yeah, that was the cool thing about this too is like, you could do a lot of it through online sleuthing. And you could just kick back and join the forums and help out like that. But if you had your own solves, is what they're called, where you figure

out different solutions to the clues and you put them all together, that's a solve. And, you know, different people have multiple solves to prove whether it was correct or not or try to find the treasure. You had to actually get out there and look, follow the solve that you had come up with. A lot of people did do that. And I think that's really cool because it drew a lot of people out to the Rockies. And the Rockies are indeed quite beautiful. They are. Should we talk about the man himself? I think we should, man. Yeah. So Forest Fan, F-E-N-N-F-O-R-R as well, was born in Texas in 1930. And he was always into the great outdoors. Apparently, when he was a kid, they used to vacation at Yellowstone National Park. And it really made a pretty big impact on him.

He went through high school and then joined the Air Force and became a pilot. Served in Vietnam. And after about 20 years of service in the military, got out, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and got into the art dealer business, which is something he really didn't know anything about at first. No, but he, I guess, had started collecting art, even though he wasn't like a particularly enthused by art itself, but he liked the business of art and art collecting. I think he liked the art world. And I get the impression also that it brushed up against celebrities and you could, you know, get rich people to part with their money pretty easily. Sure, that had something to do with it. Yeah. I think he really liked that a lot.

One thing I do want to say that I saw about his time in Vietnam was that he said that he had flown 328 combat missions in 348 days while he was there, which is just astounding. And then apparently that drove him to become a pacifist because he, after he left the military, he became a certified self-proclaimed pacifist from for the rest of his life, from what I understand. Yeah, which quite a few Vietnam vets went down that path. That's interesting. I've heard a lot of those stories. So he moved to Santa Fe in 1972. And like you said, by that time, he had already collected some art. What he would do is go out and buy art from little-known artists and then upsell it, which is, I guess,

the whole not racket, but that's the business of art collecting, is you buy low, hopefully, and sell high. And he specialized in Native American art and also artifacts and opened the Erasmith Fen Gallery with his partner Rex Erasmith. Eventually, he just became the Fen galleries with his wife Peggy. And he sold art for about eight or nine years. Well, he kept selling art, but in eight or nine years, he started selling it to really famous people and was making a lot of money doing it. Yeah. And he would actually, he had a pretty cool tactic, actually, where if you were of some certain level of rich or famous, he would put you up at his gallery, which is a compound, which had lots of guest houses that were filled with art and

everything was for sale. And he would just kind of like bathe you in luxuriousness while also simultaneously trying to sell you art. So he seemed to have been living a pretty push lifestyle in Santa Fe for a while. And he was making like, I think grossing back in the 80s, six million a year, in 80s money too, which is, you know, that's a lot of cheese for somebody who just came into the art world because he said, I guess I'll go try this next, you know? The dirtiest money too. It's pretty dirty. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, that guy is no hero. He's very widely celebrated, but a lot of Native American communities, including, I believe the Pueblo,

say, you know, this guy is a plunderer. And archeologists too are not a big fan of him either because he would excavate, you know, archeological sites, but without any documentation whatsoever. He just wanted to get to the artifacts and then he would take it and sell it. He would ruin an archeological site to get to the art and then make some money off of it. So he didn't have, he wasn't beloved universally in that sense for sure. It's worth pointing out. Yeah. I mean, the FBI actually investigated him. They did an undercover operation where an informant, a wired informant, just like you see in the movies, went over to his house, I assume, sort of posing as some kind of a rich art collector. And he was like, here, like, look at all this cool stuff.

Like, here's some eagle feathers, which I'm not supposed to have. And here's some human hair from antiquity. And here's some chain mail and some prehistoric sandals and a basket. And don't tell anyone, but I'm not supposed to have any of this stuff. And after the raid, in 2009, apparently no charges were brought. It says in our article that people assume that the artifacts were hidden or sold, but he had stuff confiscated. So there was definitely some of it there. And I'm just not sure why no charges were ever levied against him. He was a part of a bigger investigation with a lot of people, but that might have something to do with it. I have no idea. Well, he seems to have been slick and rascally in the way that those kind of people

attract admirers far and wide and tend to get off the hook in situations that other people necessarily wouldn't. So who knows? I have no idea exactly why he wasn't prosecuted if he was caught with that kind of stuff, but it would kind of be in step with his larger personality, which is, you know, I saw him compared to the Native American coyote archetype, you know, the kind of the trickster, the slick one you can ever quite pin down. He definitely had a threat of that going through him, if not that being like, you know, his main trait. Yeah. I mean, he was definitely eccentric. He kind of flouted the rules of the art world. He thought they were kind of stodgy and he was going to do his own thing.

Apparently in his galleries, he had signs that said, please touch the art. We are responsible. He sold master forgeries like as master forgeries and basically said, hey, if you like the painting by the painting, the real fakes are those people who just buy it because of the real signature of the real artist, which is interesting. And he said he had a roster full of celebrities, Jessica Lange, Michael Douglas, Steve Martin, Robert Redford, and as everyone knows, the largest art collector on the planet, Suzanne Summers. Yeah, who he was trying to help find a Georgia O'Keeffe. And I don't, from a 1988 profile of him in People Magazine that hadn't been successful yet,

but who knows what the 90s brought, you know? Well, she had that thymaster money, so. Yeah. She was rolling in the thymaster money. She wasn't hurting. No. So Forest Fen has kind of gone along living his life, just being Forest Fen, from what I can tell. And he was diagnosed with cancer. His father had developed cancer. And when Forest was younger, and his father decided that rather than undergo a potentially losing battle with cancer, he would take his own life. So he took a bunch of sleeping pills and he

died. And Forest decided he wanted to do the same. But rather than like his father dying at home, he knew of a spot that he wanted to die in, in the Rockies. And so his idea was he was going to put together a chest of treasure. And when the time came, he was going to walk out to this spot, take a bunch of sleeping pills himself, and lay there and die. And then at some point, somewhere, sometime, somebody was going to come along, probably, and find this treasure chest being clutched by an old skeleton. That was his idea. But the whole idea kind of took a left turn, Chuck, because he actually got better. He didn't, he didn't die from cancer. He actually beat it. And I think that came as a bit of a surprise to him. Yes. I imagine pretty pleasant

surprise. So he wrote a self-published memoir called The Thrill of the Chase, published in 2010. And he, in it, contained a poem with six rhyming stanzas printed on the map of the Rockies. And I think we should take a break and read this poem right after this. Okay. What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Finn has written a poem and I think we should just read it. You want to take turns?

Oh, sure. Are we going to do our voices like the Halloween episode? Okay. You can do whatever you want. No, I agree. We'll skip that one. I'm not going to read it to Sammy Davis Jr. You want to go first or me? Dealers' choice. Okay. I'm going to go. You ready? All right. As I have gone alone in there and with my treasures bold, I can keep my secret wear and hint of riches new and old. My turn? Yeah. Begin it where warm waters halt. That's the first clue of where to start, by the way. Yeah. And take it in the canyon down, not far, but too far to walk. Put in below the home of Brown, capital B. Yeah. That's a big one. From there,

it's no place for the meek. The end is ever drawing nigh. There'll be no paddle up your creek. Just heavy loads and water high. If you've been wise and found the blaze, look quickly down your quest to cease, but Terry scant with Marvel gaze, just take the chest and go in peace. Okay. So why is it that I must go and leave my trove for all to seek? The answers, I already know. I've done it tired and now I'm weak. And finally, so hear me all and listen good. Your effort will be worth the cold. If you are brave and in the wood, I give you title to the gold. This is really exciting, I gotta say. Sure, especially the back and forth. I'm really appreciative of us doing

that. It was a really amazing literary device. So what this was was a very cryptic poem about this treasure that he's hidden. And it was a real treasure. Like you said, it was, I mean, some people say, possibly up to $3 million worth of gold in loot. I imagine just being a part of the Fen treasure makes it even more valuable at auction. So who knows what it would fetch, you know? Yeah, I think from what I've seen that there's a pretty wide belief that the treasure sold intact as the Fen treasure would be worth way more than its estimated market value of the combined parts. Oh, totally. There's some rich person that's just like, I want to have this in my house. I'll pay 10 million bucks for it. We should say the box itself was actually a treasure

as well, right? Yeah, it was a 12th century bronze treasure chest, basically. I think a 10 inch by 10 inch treasure chest or chest, the fact that it contained treasure made it a treasure chest by definition. But I don't know if that's what it was originally built for, but yeah, it's a remarkable looking box just on its own. It's the kind of heft and size and just shape that you would imagine opening and being like, wow, there's hundreds of rare gold coins among other things in here. Yeah, so rare gold coins, two gold nuggets supposedly as big as a hen's egg. That's pretty neat to look at, I imagine. And then artifacts like pre-Columbian figurines, some Jade carvings from China, antique jewelry, emeralds, rubies, like the kind of thing that you would open up in,

I think he wanted a bit of a wow factor and not just like a stack of cash. Yeah, well, apparently he was originally going to put $1,000 bills in there, but he was like, I don't know when this thing's going to be found and who knows what kind of shape that paper currency is going to be in. And also, he's like, who knows if there'll be banks accepting that kind of currency any longer. So he decided to put in more everlasting treasures like gold and things like that. So he takes this box, Chuck, and this treasure chest. He goes to the spot somewhere in the Rockies where he was going to go lay down and die, but rather than lay down and die, he just leaves the chest there, comes back, publishes this book, and then lets everybody

know about it. And it takes a few years to catch on because I believe he self-published the book. So he didn't have a lot of marketing behind it, but word of mouth started to spread that there was a man from Santa Fe who claimed to have put a $2 million treasure chest out in the woods somewhere and had published a poem that contained all the clues you needed to it. And so people started really getting into this, right? Yeah, I mean, he didn't. He gave away a few extra little clues, but basically he said, the clues are in this poem. There are nine of them. They are listed in consecutive order, and they are, you know, there are a series of steps that you have to take starting with that

second stanza. He did also say it's somewhere in the Rocky Mountains between Santa Fe and Canada. Another big clue was that it's an elevation of about 5,000 feet. So that's a big one. That rules a lot of stuff out. And then this last extra clue is also pretty big. He said it's not in a mine or in a graveyard or near any man-made structure. And he said that last part from what I saw because people were starting to do really dumb things and going really far afield. And he kept reminding people because so this is something that kind of emerged from reading about this stuff. He became part of this community. People would call him up. They'd text him. They'd email him. Like he became friends with a lot of the most hardcore searchers. And, you know, sometimes

they would ask him for clues or hints, and he would just ghost them. But others just were kind of like, you know, I'm sitting in this one spot and thinking of you right now because you sent me here through this treasure hunt. Just wanted to thank you. Like he became a friend to a lot of these people. But the one thing he kept saying to this crowd was, I was 80 years old carrying a 40-pound treasure chest when I went out to this place. Like this is not a place where you have to climb up any sort of precipice or go down a precipice. It's not that hard to get to. Just remember like it's the kind of place that an 80-year-old man carrying a treasure chest weighing 40 pounds can get to by himself because there was no one there. There were no witnesses.

And it was just his word that this was actually there that people had to take it for, you know, on face value. Yeah, one of his friends supposedly saw what he claimed was the treasure chest in his walk-in closet once. But that's kind of the only verification that this wasn't some big hoax. I think people took him at his word. And, you know, if you're going to figure something like this out, you have to start. If you don't get that first clue right, then you might as well not even bother. So it really comes down to begin it where warm waters halt and take it in the canyon down. You got to find that place. And people are like, what does that mean? Are the rivers converging? Is it a hot springs going into a river? The first thing I thought was like,

maybe he's being cheeky. Maybe it's like some primitive national park bathhouse that doesn't have hot water, right? Yeah, you know, like don't look in nature. It's a bathroom. Some people actually took below the home of Brown to mean an outhouse. I'm not kidding. I saw that in a couple of places. But Brown is capitalized. Yeah, I know. I know. But that's like your idea about, you know, it being like a place without hot water. That's pretty, pretty mainstream thinking, actually. Like there were people who really got into this and started seeing things that just were not there. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So the whole thing is, there was a lot of question about how you should interpret this. And like, I didn't see that like the whole thing actually

did start with begin it where warm waters halt. A lot of people suspected that the real first clue was in the first stanza. But apparently that's not the case. What was that stanza? As I have gone alone in there and with my treasure's bold, I can keep my secret wear in hint of Richa's new and old. People were looking at things like, so in that first line, as I have gone alone in there, they're like, well, if you look at the word gone and the word alone, the number one is spelled out in those two words. Maybe these are some sort of coordinates that start with one one. Like this is the level of thought that people were putting way too much. And I think he even kind of tried to help guide people away from that. Like,

you don't need to be a cryptologist to get this. Right. This is, you know, it's not that kind of a puzzle. Like it's different than that. Yeah. I mean, he said there were no codes, no anagrams. It was just like warm waters, dummy. Right. But that didn't stop anybody from saying like, no, no, you're a liar. And that's clearly one one or the first two numbers in whatever coordinates you're giving us. Interesting. So he did accomplish his goal as far as getting people out there. Like you said, like he got emails where people talked about these amazing places they never would have seen otherwise. And I imagine that brought him a lot of joy because that was the whole point for him was to, was to get people out there. And I think he had the idea initially

during the financial crisis when everyone was feeling down about stuff. And he said, this is really going to, if people find out about it, this is going to spice up a lot of people's lives and get them out into nature. Yeah. Because again, like you could sit there and be like, okay, this is, you know, this is where I think the starting point is. And I'm going to go onto Google Earth and start here and try to find the next clue and put together a solve. But again, if you had thought that your, your solve was onto something, you had to go out to the Rockies and go see for yourself. So it really did get all those people out to nature. And, you know, there, there are so many like thanks and messages and, you know, just kind of a,

what's the word I'm looking for where you honor somebody with thanks or something like that? Accolades. Well, accolades. Yeah, yeah, there were accolades for a forest fan for doing this because, you know, it helped change a lot of people's lives. But there were definitely cases where things went far enough off the rails that some of these treasure hunters did not come back from, you know, going to verify their solves in the woods in real life. Yeah. I mean, sadly, it looks like there were five people that died, certainly others that were rescued that could have died. One man named Jeff Murphy, I think died from a fall. A man named Eric Ashby was found in the Arkansas River. There was a man named Randy Bill Yu, who he was one of these full timers.

He moved from Florida to Colorado and he died and was found near the Rio Grande River. There was a preacher named Paris Waller. I'm sorry, Wallace, a priest who was, he died. And then just before this thing came to its conclusion in March of 2020, there were two men found. One of them was alive and one of them named Michael Sexton was actually dead. They went out as a pair, which is what he always recommended, like go out with a buddy, don't be dangerous. But one of these guys died near a dinosaur national monument in Utah. Yeah. And the other guy, like you said, was rescued. That was the second time that pair had had to be rescued in the area in a month. Yeah. So you can imagine that law enforcement in some of these places around Colorado and New Mexico, where people were

getting lost or dying, called on Fen to say, like, just stop this. Just call this off. Like, tell everybody where it is. Like, this has gotten dangerous. People are losing their lives now because of this. Like, people have died and Forest Fen had a fairly libertarian response to that. He said there's not, he said, life is too short to wear both a belt and suspenders. If someone drowns in the swimming pool, we shouldn't drain the pool. We should teach people to swim, which has a certain homespun Wild West folksy sensibility to it for sure. It makes sense. Like, he wasn't, it's not like he was the original Tom Fool who was sending people to their death in the quicksand that he knew was going to, you know, catch them on their way to find this treasure.

Like, he was trying to get people out of doors and he was trying to guide them as best he could in a safe manner without giving anything away. And you can make a case one way or the other that he was responsible or not responsible for those people's deaths. I think it just comes down to your philosophy on personal responsibility or, you know, indirect responsibility. Yeah. And he also after that quote said, why do I have to pay school taxes when I don't have kids? Right. I don't care about your kids. And now I'm going to get emails from libertarians. Yeah. I don't think libertarians listen to this anymore. We discuss them.

Oh, who knows? No, I'm sure there's some out there. I'm just kidding. Of course, we have libertarian listeners. So there was some other, you know, aside from the deaths, there's some other darker sort of aspects to this story. When you have hundreds of thousands of people looking for something in national parks and in wildlife, you're going to get some people that are not accustomed to being in these places and treating them with the respect they deserve and damaging protected spaces and species. There was one person charged with a misdemeanor for digging under a memorial cross owned by the New Mexico State Game Commission. They had to actually backfill the space to

stabilize the monument. There was other people. There were other people arrested over the years for digging in national parks, digging in cemeteries, people being indicted on federal charges. You know, this is what you're going to get when you sort of have a Wild West treasure hunt in very kind of sacred areas. Yeah, especially, yeah, you're going to attract some nuts and coops for sure who don't listen and who just stop thinking you're using their brains. One guy was, I believe, got a restraining order taken out against him by Fen and his family because he had decided that the real treasure was Fen's granddaughter and that that was the key to everything and had started stalking Fen's home,

which is kind of scary. Yeah, did you see anything else about that guy? About the stalker? No, I hadn't. His name was Francisco Paco Chavez. Paco is his nickname and he was just clearly had issues. I don't want to like diagnose him or anything, but it wasn't just about this treasure hunt. He, at one point, has sent pictures of hearts, the treasure chest, and a shoe with a message that said, one shoe can change your life, Cinderella, me. He said he wanted to marry his granddaughter. He eventually was put on three years probation in 2016 and then in 2019 showed up at his house again on the like, he had a gated home and was trying to get buzzed in. They saw who it was and he just sort of disappeared before the cops could

show up, but that got pretty scary. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, that's super duper scary to have somebody zeroed in on you like that under any circumstance. Yeah. I think there was another guy who tried to gain entry into the house with an ax and had to be held at gunpoint by Fen's daughter, but he was the kind of guy who inspired love and support by his family. I saw a quote from his grandson whose name is Shiloh Old, which is a pretty wild west name, and he said, this has been really hard on the family, but we fully support our grandfather. I thought that was kind of neat, and it says a lot about his family that they were willing to endure all this without being like, just tell him where the treasure is. This has

gotten out of hand. Should we take another break and then talk about this mysterious conclusion I've been talking about? Totally. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help, this I promise you. Seriously, I swear, and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. And so my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week

to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention.

Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So people are still looking for this thing. It's, I believe 2020, right? June of 2020?

Yeah, you're speaking in a past tense, right? Well, no, actually, I think there are people still looking for this as we'll see, but they're not necessarily looking for the treasure anymore. Because in June of 2020, there was an announcement made by Forrest Fenn that said it's been found. It's over. Somebody found it fair and square. And thus began this frustrating, maddening, slow trickle of vague confirmations that this had been found and it had been found legitimately, that actually encouraged conspiracy theories about whether the treasure had even existed at all, or had ever been out there in the wilderness at all, that still kind of persisted among some people of this day. But from what I saw, most of the people who were involved in the treasure hunt

are satisfied that it was found and that it was found fair and square. Are you saying there are people in this country that in the face of hard facts and truth still believe in the conspiracy? Chuck, believe it or not, that may be true. I think the jury's still out. So I think it's kind of interesting what he said. When they did find it, he said, it has been found under a canopy of stars and the lush forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than 10 years ago. I do not know the person who found it. That would change. But the poem in my book led him to the precise spot. And like he said, because of the conspiracy individuals, he said he posted a

picture of it and he's like, here it is. Here are some of the objects. They have weathered. It's darker than it was 10 years ago when I left it in the ground and walked away. Here's like a bracelet that's been tarnished. And yet some people still were like, nope, I don't believe the facts in front of my face. This is a hoax. Yeah. I mean, the fact is that the guy who found it didn't want to be named. So now you had an anonymous person named The Finder who said that he had found it. He wouldn't reveal how he found it because he was saying that he had been to this place, obviously, to get the treasure. And it was so beautiful and pristine that he said it was not an appropriate place to become

a tourist destination. He didn't want people going out there and looking for maybe treasure that was dropped along the way or just trying to see for themselves this place. It was a sacred place in his opinion and he wanted to defend it. So to this day, the second part has still held true. People don't know where he found this thing, which is why I said some people are still looking for this. They're not looking for the treasure anymore. They're looking for the spot. Like the spot has become the treasure. And there was something that we left out before that I think is worth mentioning because Forrest Fenn was in correspondence with a lot of these people who are searching for this hard core, they would tell him like where they'd been or whatever and he wouldn't give them anything

in response. He'd just take the information, but then later in interviews, he said that multiple people had been within a couple hundred feet of the treasure and just hadn't been able to find it. And apparently one of the reasons why is this anonymous finder said that somebody had gone out that way and put a misleading blaze. A blaze was one of the clues, but it's also something that marks trail. And it was the penultimate clue, I believe. If you found the blaze, you were very close to the treasure and somebody had put some other misleading blaze out there to be a jerk, I guess, or throw other people off the trail. But there are a lot of people who had come really, really close and just walked right past it, basically.

Yeah. And apparently the original blaze had been damaged over the decade. So I don't think it was even visible to begin with. Then you had the misleading blaze. And this mystery person would eventually be out of though because of a lawsuit. There was a woman, a real estate attorney from Chicago named Barbara Anderson, who said, that treasure's mine. I solved it and somebody hacked into my email and my cell phone and stole my solve. And it's this person, whoever it is. And so because of this lawsuit, Jack Stoof, a 32-year-old medical student, had to be revealed and go to court. And we are one degree removed from Jack Stoof. I was wondering if Randazzo knew him or not. They worked there around the same time, I would guess, right?

Yeah. So he was a writer for The Onion and we knew folks from The Onion. And I didn't text our buddy Joe Randazzo, but I did text Joe Garden, former Onion writer. And he knew him. And he said after and asked him if I could quote him on all this. And he said, after he found it, he said, we had a nice little onion alumni chat about him. And he said, he's a decent enough guy. And he said, but as my friend John Harris for The Onion put it, I did not expect him to find buried treasure. So he said that he was the kind of guy and I read a little bit more about him. He was apparently into this kind of thing when he was a kid. He was obsessed with the show Pushnavada, which was a TV show where viewers could solve a real million-dollar mystery. Joe said he admired

his pluck. He had gained some notoriety before, I'm sorry, after The Onion when he wrote for something called The Wonket. And he was the person who in 2008 made a derogatory term about Sarah Palin's special needs son and kind of got a lot of grief for that. Got out of journalism, went to medical school, and then started searching for this treasure. Yeah, I guess he liked only meeting with patients. Everything else he hated about medical school from what I read. But yeah, he just kind of dedicated his life to this from what I saw. He didn't really share how into it he was with friends and family because he didn't know if he was ever going to find it. And it was just a weird thing to be into this deep as far as he was concerned.

So he seemed to have some perspective. But I saw some of the other treasure hunters were like, this guy, Jack Stoof, he was kind of a lone wolf. But at some points, he went on and joined some groups that were trying to solve the treasure hunt as a group. And there were questions at first about whether he had basically taken a solve from one of the groups that he participated in and solved it himself and wasn't sharing the treasure. But that group was involved in basically looking at like, alone has the number one and they were just totally off. What Stoof apparently did was apply his degree in English and literature and did a close reading and studied Forrest Fenn and watched all the interviews with him, read every interview he could find

to see if he slipped up or just to kind of understand who he was more and then apply that to it and treated it less like a cryptogram and more like a poem that was symbolic. And that apparently is how we cracked the code. Yeah, I mean, he said that he did notice a couple of slip ups and interviews that Forrest Fenn had made and that he said, I just guess no one else noticed these. And he said his like, he obviously used the poem to follow the steps. But in his mind, it seemed like, and there's that great outside magazine article that if you want to read more about it, it's pretty in depth about him. But he said what he really wanted to figure out was where he thought he might want to die. And he thought that was sort of the biggest clue of all in that

it would probably be some really beautiful place and not like a rocky dusty hillside or something like that. And it turns out that he was right. And he said that one blaze had worn away over the years. But he went to the spot where he said, I think this is the spot where he wants to die. He went there about 25 times over a couple of years. And I just, you know, finally found it. Pretty neat story. Yeah, that that that outside magazine article on him is pretty interesting. I found one that I think is even better. It was in New York Magazine by Benjamin Wallace, called the Great 21st Century Treasure Hunt, I believe. It provided a lot of extra details in different ways of looking at it that I hadn't seen elsewhere. And it also profiled a different

hunter who didn't find it by the last name of Posey, but is a pretty interesting cat himself, too. Yeah. So, Steve ended up, he said he became friends like legit friends with Finn before he died in September, September 7th, 2020. He was 90 years old. And he said, you know, I'm hanging on to this for now. I may split it up. I may display some of it. I may sell some of it. He's really not sure what he's going to do. I think I'm with you. Like if he really wants to bring in the windfall, he should sell it all as one big package to some super rich person who wants to display this thing. But right now, he's kind of hanging on to it and was really seemed like genuinely broken up when Finn died. Oh, yeah. That guy was very much beloved in the community,

for sure. Like there was one of those guys who went missing, one of the searchers who went missing, I believe. Oh, I don't remember which one it was, but he was missing for seven months. And after the initial official search and rescue was called off, Forest Fen paid for a chartered helicopter to continue the search. And a lot of the treasure hunters searched for him too. So it was a very tight knit community. And this guy was like this kind of homespun God figure to them that they could text and say hi to. He was super approachable. And yet he wouldn't give you anything. He wouldn't give you any hint as to where the treasure was. So it must have been really interesting for him too to kind of put himself in that kind of jeopardy or put the treasure in that kind of

jeopardy by interacting with people who were spending tons of their waking hours looking for this treasure and not giving them anything, not a single clue. It must have been pretty fun for him to that. That's how he spent his last days, you know? Oh, totally. And if you're thinking in terms of movies, like I always think, there is a documentary which I wasn't able to watch called The Lure from 2016 that obviously before it was found, they made this documentary about people who were searching. And you cannot stream it online, but I think you can actually buy it from the website. And they are making supposedly a movie about it. Director Jake Zimanski has been hired to make a movie based on journalist Hudson Morgan's Misadventures looking for the thing

himself. And it's about a group of millennials who set out to find it and get in wacky misadventures. And it's described as an action comedy. Goonies meets the hangover. Oh boy. I'd never thought I would hear those words put together in a sentence. So who knows? Maybe we'll see that one day. Wow. Okay. Well, let's see. You got anything else? I got nothing else. That's the Fen Treasury, buddy. If you want to know more about it, go check out that outside article, the New York Magazine article, and then just prepare to dive in. And you can still join it and figure out where the spot is. Just be safe and, you know, be smart. And since I said be safe and be smart, that means it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this layoff Cisco, guys. So in our buffets episode, I think you specifically sort of bagged on Cisco the restaurant delivery service. I was bagging on restaurants that used Cisco's pre-made ingredients and try to pass it off as if it's just, you know, their own stuff. All right. So take that, Brandon. But Brandon says this, greetings, guys. Have listened to many years and rarely needed it right in. But on the buffet episode, there was a massive misconception of the role of Cisco at restaurants. I have worked for Cisco for 13 years, delivery for 10, and now a shuttle driver hauling food from Salt Lake City to Grand Junction, Colorado, every day. I love my job. Cisco was portrayed on the show as a pre-packaged frozen microwave

food company. While we do have select items that are ready to eat and frozen, the vast majority of our food supply are fresh foods, fresh foods and vegetables. We supply restaurants, hospitals, schools, etc. with everything needed for kitchens to become successful. Our trucks are dual zone refrigerators for frozen and fresh items. I hope you can do an episode on food delivery and how semi-trucks are used to keep the cold chain supply in action. Hope this didn't go on for too long. Didn't. And I hope your perception of Cisco will change for the better. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I love Cisco now. Let's all go to Cisco. Lots of love. That's from Brandon Ryder in Colorado. And he said, PS, can you plug my very

small gaming channel on YouTube? Sure. It is Brandon Dude Gaming. And that is D-O-O-D. All one word, Brandon Dude Gaming on YouTube. Yes. I haven't seen his gaming channel, so let's just go ahead and hope that it's all above boards. That's a good point. We should probably do that. Yeah, we should. We'll get busy on that. You go and click on it in the first video as Hail Satan! Right, yeah. That would be the least of my worries, actually. Yeah, actually, that'd be fun. Well, thanks a lot, Brandon. Sorry for really kind of, I guess, indirectly talking smack about Cisco. That wasn't my intent. So thank you for calling me out. And if you want to be like Brandon and call me out or call Chuck out too, you can do that too once in a while if you like.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. And my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.