The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 246: The Fenn Treasure
Episode Date: November 9, 2020Steven Rinella talks with Benjamin Wallace, Spencer Neuharth, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor. Topics discussed: Ben's article and Spencer's article; topless vs. shirtless; the world's most expens...ive bottle of wine; the Fenn cache of Clovis points and the Fenn Treasure of gold and jewels; when a Playboy Bunny is gifted a mummified baby crocodile; creating a treasure hunt that leads to your dead body; what is 10” x 10” and weighs 42lbs?; when the FBI gets involved; the searchers, the supersearchers, and the solves; the folks who died while hunting the treasure; getting rescued off the side of a cliff but then running away because you're paranoid about agents making you reveal your secrets; Hebgen Lake as The Fire Hole; where warm waters halt; eye tracking technology; calling bullshit!; a bronze-sniffing dog; the psychological profile of the Fenn chasers; kangaroo words giving latitude and longitude coordinates; Yellowstone National Park; Steve's idea about getting credit card records to figure out which gas stations Fenn's family stopped at; have we all been duped?: back to Spencer's enthusiasms around rock hounding; an invitation to go do something wild; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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We're sitting here. Keep this in the back of your mind while you listen to this episode. We're discussing why
a woman is topless, but
a man is shirtless. And why you never say a
topless man or a shirtless woman ben share your theory
if you said a shirtless woman she could still be wearing a bra yeah that's good it was killing me
uh joined by ben wallace who you just heard from there and uh ben is finally the writer ben wallace he's finally written something worthy of us hundreds of articles that just not worthy of us and finally he's done it i'm honored
is that what when you set out you wanted to land on this show i mean it took me a lot of years
like a career yeah uh to lay out for people kind of what you're you know you're uh i don't know like like how
what when people say like what do you write about it's hard because you're a generalist
long form magazine i'm mostly a magazine writer general interest write about everything from
you know neo-nazis to the media business to treasure hunts, wrote a book about wine.
Yeah. Yeah. Tell people about that real quick. I find myself telling people about that book all
the time. All right. So I wrote a book about the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold,
which was a supposedly a 1787 Bordeaux, red Bordeaux that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson
and was discovered in a bricked up cellar in Paris in the mid 80s and then sold for this record price to the
Forbes family as in Malcolm Forbes who started Forbes magazine and um but then the sort of
questions began was it really Thomas Jefferson's was it really hidden in the cellar for 200 years
and was the guy who found it it was this German collector named Hardy Rodenstock
on the up and up or was he a con man and so the book follows that mystery
uh and just to cut to it i don't give away the ending people got to buy it to find out
that one of the things i learned in that book that was most interesting to me uh was that
i mean besides the story about the wine there's a thing i didn't realize the the book has a lot to do with, like, there's a part of the book where Ben needs to explain kind of how wine became a mainstream, like, Wall Street, dick-swinging kind of thing, right?
Yep.
And it got into this thing where people have wine tastings.
I had never heard this, that you have wine tastings, you can have a horizontal or a vertical tasting.
That's right.
Yeah, tell people like what that is.
So like a horizontal tasting would be one year, one vintage, let's say a 2020 vintage, but it would be a bunch of different wines like maybe it's like
10 or 20 or even more wines all from that year and you're comparing so you have the same sort
of weather conditions same growing conditions but you're comparing the wines against each other
or vertical tasting you're taking a single wine from a single producer and you're looking at it
over different years and it could be like a hundred years or samples from a single producer and you're looking at it over different years and it could
be like a hundred years or samples from a hundred years of a single wine and then you can see sort
of how that makes a difference in how it tastes and i don't want to give away the end of ben's
book but i'll point out that um once like wall street finance people got into the not that this
happened like definitively overnight, but as it became
fashionable to host wine tastings and people were filling out their verticals or horizontals,
there'd always be these really hard to find bottles.
Like there's sort of like the bottlenecks in the process of assembling bottles.
And there emerges a gentleman who always seems to find one.
There's some guy who wants this extremely rare 1947 Cheval Blanc,
which was one of the famous ones.
And this guy, Hardy Rodenstock, miraculously just bought a private seller
that had a dozen 1947 Cheval Blancs.
And over time, so many bottles of Cheval Blanc came on the auction market that there were more bottles of it for sale than had ever been produced.
Doing that led into – you wrote so many other things that have always been you know cranking out so much
work but doing that led into a stint for you it gave you like a temporary shtick as the person
like a person who goes and examines what's the most expensive blank one can get it's true yeah i did two articles um for gq magazine about uh i think
it was called like the one percent of the one percent just trying out super expensive or rare
things like uh um you know the bugatti veyron sports car or the most expensive bed the the
hostins it's a swedish the Hostin's Vividus bed.
Um, where I, I mean, to try it, I had to sleep in the showroom and for like insurance reasons, the company made us hire a security guard just to, while I was in there sleeping in the bed with like, you know, glaring New York city lights shining in through the plate glass windows.
And then you did, did you do the most expensive toilet?
I did.
It was Japanese Toto toilet.
Delightful experience.
The most expensive airplane, the most expensive
airplane ride.
Most expensive airplane ride going to Dubai where
you have a, you actually have a cabin instead of
a seat and you can take an in-flight shower and
you get a smoothie afterwards.
I mean, even though the smoothie was, you know,
maybe like $5 add on value, it just kind of caps
it for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you did the most expensive fishing
trip you can go on.
Most expensive fishing trip, which I think you
went on a similar trip, if not the same one down
in Patagonia.
Exactly.
I was on the exact same trip.
Fly fishing.
Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't on it with you, but I was on a
similar trip.
I think you gave me a few pointers with the fly
fishing rod before I went.
My wife was wound up being attracted to those guide dudes because they wore flight suits.
I did not know that.
I was,
I was,
we weren't even married yet.
It was an early date.
I took her on an early date,
which gave her the wrong idea about what our scene was going to be.
And then she wound up taking quite a shine to all these young whippersnappers
running around in helicopter pilot suits, which is the weird,
that's a weird ass trip.
When you have a reservation, like a hotel or a restaurant or something,
are people ever expecting Detroit Pistons defensive player of the year,
Ben Wallace?
Every now and then, every now and then I do get a little bit of a look,
like you're
not what I was expecting.
Very different.
Because you have
all your teeth
and everything
are lined up.
I don't know
anything about his dentistry.
I just,
you know,
I don't look like
a professional.
He has much more hair
than I do
and, you know,
he looks like
a professional athlete.
Burlier.
Yeah, he's about
a foot taller than this Ben Wallace.
Darker skin, bigger hair, much different.
Also, the Pistons are a basketball team, not a hockey team, if that's what you were referring to with the teeth.
Oh!
Why did I take hockey?
That was perfect, though, Steve.
Like, when you play in this not-knowing sports world.
I mean, it's very on-brand.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why did when you play in this not-knowing sport. I mean, it's very on-brand. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Why did I take hockey?
I don't know.
What was the position you said?
Maybe that felt to me like a hockey position.
Goalie?
He was a power forward.
He was a defensive player.
Yeah, I just hear that, and I feel like it must be hockey.
The thing that, Ben, all that stuff was not worthy.
All that work was not worthy. All that work was not worthy.
But what is worthy is Ben has just finished a large subject matter expertise on the Forrest Fenn treasure, surpassing, surpassing that of our own Spencer Newhart, who has, I don't know, a mild interest.
Yes.
Tell what you got we could give ben a break and spencer could explain
what he feels the fen treasure is or we just go right to ben they'll go right to ben
explain the fen treasure all right the fen treasure well you gotta understand forest
fen forest i got this all planned out so you want me to talk about i want to start with the
forest is no you could do it briefly but i want to get into the So you want me to talk about the treasure before I talk about who Forrest is?
No, you can do it briefly,
but I want to get into the guy.
Okay.
I want to get into the guy,
but first I just want people to be like,
oh, that thing.
The Fenn treasure is a chest of treasure, including a lot of gold coins, gold nuggets,
gems, some ancient jewelry
that was hidden in the Rockies in 2010.
And that by a eccentric guy from Santa Fe, a wealthy art dealer.
And that set in motion a treasure hunt that has had, you know,
possibly several hundred thousand people searching for it for the last decade.
A million bucks?
About a million bucks about about a million yeah but then a
million but that's not counting its collective value as now a cultural artifact absolutely which
could make it exponentially greater exactly yeah um four people have died looking for it
five at least five have died trying to find the treasure. Yep.
Okay.
With that established, I now want to jump in and explain real quick how I became aware of Forrest Fenn.
And I feel that I was telling, I've been friends with Ben for a long, long time.
Like in excess of a decade i think 13 years and i feel
like i was probably from the start from early on i mentioned the dude forest fen to you i knew this
this this art well an art collector fighter pilot he's a vietnam pilot correct flew 328 combat missions
uh eccentric antiquities dealer
just man about town in santa fe i heard about in a long time it goes when i was when i first
got interested in clovis points so ice age projectile points spirit like spear points from the ice age um when i got interested in clovis
points you couldn't read much about clovis points without reading about a collection of clovis
points that had been dubbed the fen cache.
And I knew a number of anthropologists who were like legit academic anthropologists,
a number of anthropologists who were kind of like pot hunters,
meaning they're hobbyists who like to hunt arrowheads.
And they would often sit and argue about and speculate on the legitimacy of the FEN cash.
And it was this some hand,
I don't know,
a dozen or some handful of Clovis points.
And the one guy came to know best,
Tony Baker,
who passed away,
would explain to me that he knew for a fact,
I can say,
I think I can say this because he's dead.
He told me,
now everybody's dead.
He told me he knew for a fact that some of the Clovis points in the fan cash were phonies.
Then I became aware of the fan treasure because I had heard,
and I was not,
this is not correct.
I had heard that some of these Clovis points had made their way into the fen treasure
and last night i learned that they're not yeah i mean when i started reporting on this that was
one of the first questions i asked because you had mentioned that to me and i learned that he
had sold the fen cash before he hid the treasure.
So what, uh, give us a rundown of, I mean, I just touched on a little bit, but give a
rundown of like this guy's background and why he would have emerged as a person to like
set off a treasure hunt.
Like what is, you know, what, what motivated him anyways?
I mean, he, he, uh, grew up in Texas.
His dad was a schoolteacher.
And growing up, I think really young, he started collecting arrowheads.
And that ignited a lifelong obsession with collecting things and with, you know, in particular
Native American antiquities.
And when he became a pilot, he joined the Air Force and then was in Vietnam, you know,
flew all these missions, was shot down and rescued twice. But even as a pilot, he would, you know, use his flights to kind of survey the landscape
and occasionally like put down and, you know, scour ruins for collectibles. And so he was just
a real kind of obsessive collector. And after he got out of the Air Force, he moved to Santa Fe from Texas and became an art dealer.
And so then he had a kind of professional way to pursue his passion of collecting and owning things.
And his house in Santa Fe was full of, you know, things like Sitting Bull's peace pipe and all kinds of, you know, kind of fabled relics.
And he was just a lifelong collector.
And then eventually in the mid to late 80s,
he sold his art gallery
after being a big part of the Santa Fe art boom.
And he bought a huge Indian Pueblo,
the San Lazaro Pueblo,
basically as his personal archaeological hunting ground.
And then he spent the next 10 years there
kind of excavating it himself.
Courting no shortage of controversy in the process.
Courting no shortage of controversy.
There were accusations that he had found human bones.
There were, you know, various mediations with tribes
over, you know, certain things he found in the Pueblo.
How much did he buy that thing for?
I don't know.
I don't think that that number has been published.
Okay.
Yeah.
But it was, I mean, I think it was over a thousand acres.
It was, it was a huge thing.
Like bought an old Pueblo, like an old village site.
Yep.
To dig it up.
Yep.
You mentioned the Santa Fe art boom as if it was like an event.
What was that?
It was, I guess, in the 70s and early 80s, Santa Fe became a popular place for art collectors to go to buy cowboy art, Indian artifacts, sort of new Western art.
And Fenn was at the center of that.
I think a lot of kind of Hollywood celebrities got into the Southwestern look.
So, you know, Michael Douglas, Suzanne Somers, Ralph Lauren, people like that became enamored of this art boom.
Suzanne Somers.
Three's Company, the Regal Beagle.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Dude, that was a very suggestive television show.
I remember one episode where someone's overhearing two people in the bathroom trying to make a shower curtain fit.
And it's not long enough. And someone overhearing the conversation
coming to a conclusion about something else going on.
Very suggestive for its time.
I missed that episode.
Yeah.
I've often brought up that I think Shakespeare
stole most of his material from Three's Company
because that's where he developed his love
for like misheard conversations
you know but uh that's the premise for a novel like shakespeare traveled traveled back in time
from three's company to it started right in his comments like this is gonna blow up in the
elizabethan era yeah it's like they're gonna people are gonna love this when i get back to
where i came from this idea that you hear a conversation miss only hear a part of it get a walk come to a
wild conclusion it's all textbook threes come done done not should be it should have been in
more shakespeare adaptations what you're saying i agree breaches yeah uh okay so walk through as best you can to how this, you know, art dealer, kind of a little bit of a fablist.
I mean, he himself said.
A raconteur.
A raconteur.
I mean, he himself said, you know, 85% of what I say is true.
You know, and he said that.
He said, it's not what you are.
It's what people think you are.
So there was a little bit of the kind of roguish storyteller to him always.
Can you quickly tell the story you talk about in your article, at least an early draft of your article, where he has a thing on display in his gallery but someone that works for him knows more than he knows about
what's on display or not yeah so he had an intern this is in i think the early 80s or late 70s
and he had an intern named linda durham who would later go on to found like a pretty major santa fe
art gallery and she was a playboy bunny she had been a playboy bunny which i think in those days
meant you would like actually worked at like a playboy bunny. She had been a Playboy bunny, which I think in those days meant you actually worked
at a Playboy club.
Oh, I see.
This was in New York City.
And she was really interested
in Egyptology.
Go figure.
And a customer of hers
at the Playboy club
made a gift to her
of a small,
like something small and mummified.
And she had it x-rayed by a doctor friend
using like a medical x-ray device.
And it was a baby crocodile that had been mummified.
But for real, mummified by Egyptians.
It was a real Egyptian mummified baby crocodile.
Man, those guys were interesting stuff, man.
And.
Like a Nile crocodile.
I mean, I don't know which river it came from.
But –
My guess.
That's – my guess is that species.
And they wrapped it up like a little Halloween costume and mummified it.
Yep.
Man, those guys.
So at a certain point, I think she needed money.
She sold it privately to a private collector.
And eventually,
by bizarre coincidence, it ends up in Fensands. Like, he buys it. I think he was always buying just, like, interesting objects. So he buys this for the gallery, and he displays it in a case
and says, you know, deaccession from the British Museum, you know. And it was sort of implied that
it was a human mummy.
But what's deaccession mean?
That means like sometimes museums have too much stuff and they maybe need money, so they sell the stuff.
But does that give,
is that meant to give it a path of legitimacy?
Yes.
It gives it, yeah, it gives it sort of this, you know,
aura of validation and respectability.
Okay.
Is that only in museum lingo
or is there another case
where you would say...
I think private collectors
who have sort of collections
deaccession things.
I learned this working
on the wine book
because the Forbes family
collected all kinds of stuff
and they would deaccession
things from their collection.
Yeah.
A lot of other people do that.
They call it selling something.
I'm going to start switching all the shit I get rid of.
I'm deaccessioning my old lawnmower.
Okay.
So continue about the crocodile.
All right.
So Linda Durham, young intern in Fenn's gallery, sees this thing that used to belong to her
and went to Forrest Fenn and said, you know, used to belong to her and went to,
to Forrest Fenn and said,
you know,
that's not the accession by the British museum. Like that's a little baby crocodile I got from some guy who came to the
playboy club.
And,
you know,
she said Fenn was not happy to have the story he was telling about this
object corrected.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
I think it's important to bring up the,
uh, it's important to bring up the it's important to bring up
I don't want to call him credibility actor I don't want to call credibility
problems it's important to bring up the the showmanship of Fenn or what's the
word you would use showmanship credibility gap I don't know I think he
was a you know he was a promoter.
He was a salesman.
He's not unique in the art business that way.
I think there's a fair amount of that among art dealers.
You kind of hype things.
And as you said, he was a storyteller.
You know what might be a good word for him?
A bit of a rascal.
He was rascally. I think he liked to just generate, like, ideas and create a ruckus.
He was a rascal.
And actually, I talked to this curator at the American Museum of Natural History, David Hurst Thomas, who knew and liked Fenn, unlike a lot of archaeologists who thought he was a pot hunter.
And Thomas said Forrest was a rascal.
You know, he reminded me of the,
what you see in the Native American oral literature a lot.
Oh, yeah.
That's how the word got in my head
is you use the word.
Yeah.
I was thinking my buddy, Fred,
who used to call Bill Clinton the rascal president.
That word's always stuck in my head, but yeah.
But he was like attempting to build this image
as though like the Dos Equis commercials, the most interesting man in the world.
Like it has a big that energy to it.
Totally, yeah.
Yeah, but he's got like 300 combat.
I mean, there's like a foundation there.
Right.
Absolutely.
And in fact, you know, when I went into this, I first thought, oh, am I going to have to do all this kind of verification, like get his military records?
Because this sounds like a tall story, but it actually is all true.
And there was somewhere along the way, I think,
where he had crashed a jet,
and then somebody went in to where he said he crashed it,
and they found it and verified the whole story about this crash that he had.
Do you know who did that?
I didn't know this.
I met those guys.
I have a giant thing.
It's a long story.
Do you mind if I tell this real quick?
I have a box of 1,000 meat bags,
plastic bags that butchers use to send meat home in.
Because years ago, the production company we work with
was doing a show with Pat LaFreedom. The guys I work with, the camera company we work with was doing a show with Pat LaFrieda.
The guys I work with, the camera guys I work with, had been working on that and came over to my house with these bags of lamb meat and whatnot.
And I was admiring the bags.
They passed along to the LaFriedas that I was an admirer of the bags.
They sent me a thousand of them.
I still have them.
Use them all the time so when i when the name popped up
the pat lafrida's brother the famous butcher went to vietnam to find a chunk of airplane
we was planning to but he ended up he hired local he hired some australians
expats in vietnam to do the on the ground work for him um so they actually found it but he was
you know in live remote touch with them. Why did he want it?
He's an engineer. He became electrical engineer. He became, I think, really interested in the
puzzle of seeing of sort of the historical research and, you know, could he crack this
puzzle? Could he, he was a treasure hunter.
Oh, so he was a Fenn treasure guy.
He was a Fenn treasure guy.
Oh, and that just a Fenn treasure guy. He was a Fenn treasure guy. Oh. And if you're a Fenn treasure guy. And that just was a spinoff.
Exactly.
So, like, if you're a Fenn treasure guy, job one is basically making a study of Forrest Fenn because you're trying to understand, like, places that might have been special to him where he might have hid the treasure.
So, Chris LaFrida happened to go down the rabbit hole of Fenn's Vietnam experience and thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to find this wreckage if it was still there.
Did he sell it back to Fenn? Oh, he gave gave him he gave him a couple of the pieces that he got
no shit yeah man i mean he was using like drone you know he's sending drones over the jungle and
then they sent people in on the ground after they had some evidence and they talked to
villagers who were like oh yeah there's wreckage over on that slope over there
no kidding yeah so get us into how get us into what he's thinking when he decides to, at whatever point, a decade ago, build up a little treasure box and hide it.
Well, the story of the treasure begins 32 years ago.
1988, Forrest Fenn was diagnosed with kidney cancer and told it was terminal.
His father had died of pancreatic cancer.
And his father, when he was diagnosed with cancer, had swallowed, I think, 50-plus do the same thing, but with the twist that he's going to go
to a remote place that he had already decided upon
as the place where he wanted to die,
somewhere in the Rockies.
And he was going to die there,
but he was going to bring a chest of treasure
that he was going to create with him,
and people could search for his body,
and when they got there, they could take the treasure.
So he was going to create a treasure hunt
that would accompany his,
his burial site.
And he was going to create a poem with a puzzle in it as the sort of
mystery.
The suicide note was going to be this,
this kind of,
you know,
encrypted treasure map that people would have to try to crack.
That's great.
But then that's where,
that's where, if you're an an eccentric that's how you put your
money where your mouth is man you know what i mean like when the rubber meets the road
and you keep at it like that that's like that's my that's that's great eccentricity right there
but he doesn't die but then he doesn't die and probably then he doesn't die. And probably he did not die.
He recovered fully from cancer.
But he kept sort of toying around with this idea of hiding a treasure chest.
He would talk about it.
Yeah, he talked about it to friends.
In fact, you know, when friends came to his house, he had a walk-in vault in his house where he kept some of his more valuable collectibles.
And when friends came over, he'd like bring him into the vault where he also had the bottle of pills that he had planned to take with him.
And he would show them this work in progress, which was this bronze 10 by 10 treasure chest
that he was filling with valuables.
Oh, that's how big it was?
10 by 10 inches.
Yep.
But 42 pounds, 42 pounds. Oh, that's how big it was? 10 by 10 inches, yep. But 42 pounds.
42 pounds.
That explains a lot, man.
I was thinking of a big
Remember I was asking you a lot of questions last night
about the actual stashing
of it?
10 by 10.
Yeah.
I was picturing like
in a pirate movie.
Totally. Like a steamer trunk size. Yeah. Oh, I was picturing like, like in a pirate movie. Totally.
Like a steamer trunk size.
Yeah.
Oh, 10 by 10.
Yeah.
Okay.
Go on.
Yeah.
Um, you know, I'm looking at it.
Spencer's pull a picture of it.
So he kept, you know, playing around with what was going to be in the chest and he would
take, you know, put stuff in, take it out.
And his main goal was to create a treasure that like when the finder opened the lid they would just be dazzled by it like it
wasn't just going to be a box with some valuable stuff in it it was going to actually look like
that treasure chest out of like you know a pirate story books pirate movies exactly that it's too
small a box yeah a small pirate yeah i would have found it and I would have been like, oh, I was expecting something much larger.
I would have walked away in disgust.
So one of the questions was, well, if he hides this treasure, how is he going to know if it ever gets found, if it's off in some really remote place. And so one of the things he was trying to figure out was how can I, what can I,
what can I leave in the box that will let me know it's been found? And I think at that time,
like it was kind of early for GPS and he wasn't that technically minded a guy. So I don't think
there was ever a, and also the idea was that this might be there for a thousand years. So
I don't think he was ever seriously considering a technological solution, but one of the things he considered was putting something like a bank letter
or a bearer bond worth enough money that the finder would have to go to the bank to cash it out.
So it would be like a $100,000 bearer bond.
They're not going to just sit on that.
And when they went to the bank, he would be notified.
He then, though, thought, well, what if the bank doesn't exist
anymore? So apparently he took
that out of the chest and he came up with some other
item.
He kicked around putting some thousand dollar bills
in it, which I didn't know existed.
He actually put in some thousand dollar bills, which, you know,
as was recently discovered
on the internet, features the face of
Grover Cleveland.
And then he took them out
because he thought
they would rot over time.
Huh.
So the no thousand dollar bills.
So no thousand dollar bills.
No Clovis points.
No Clovis points.
But like a lot of
like big gold nuggets,
eagle,
gold eagle coins,
double eagles,
other kind of more
esoteric jewelry.
And some projectile points
or no? I don't know. I'm not sure. I thought you mentioned jewelry. And some projectile points or no?
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
I thought you mentioned that there were some projectile points in there.
I think someone I talked to said they thought there were, but I don't know for sure.
Yeah.
Maybe he put them in and took them out.
I'm sure.
A couple of times.
Cause it looks like he's like staging the perfect scenery.
Yeah.
He might've thought, you know, the point for like impressive enough visually.
Yeah.
So he stashes it.
So he stashes it.
Well, so in the summer of 2010, he hides it, doesn't tell anybody where,
and he self-publishes a memoir called the thrill of the chase with this 24 line,
six stands,
a poem,
um,
that contained what you needed to,
what you would need to figure out where the chest was hidden.
Spencer,
uh,
can you read for us some lines?
Well,
I'll tell you when I started getting bored,
uh,
some lines from the poem that explains where the treasure is.
As I've gone alone in there and with my treasures bold, I can keep my secret where and hint of riches new and old.
Begin it where warm waters halt and take it in the canyon down.
Not far, but too far to walk, put in below the home of brown.
From there, it's no place for the meek.
The end is drawing ever 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
marveled gaze just take the chest and go in peace so why is it that i must go and leave my trove
for all to seek the answer i already know i've i've done it tired and now i'm weak 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 the title to the gold.
Hmm.
That has everything you need to know.
And then he, over the decade, makes himself available.
Intermittently. the decade makes himself available i intermittently in in terms of the rascalliness though i think before we move on we got to back up to 2009 which is a year before he hid the treasure
which is when the fbi knocks on his door and many other art dealers and diggers and uh holders of, you know, artifacts from the Four Corners area.
And it's the FBI's, I don't know what the name of the case was,
but Fenn was involved and I think they took like 10 things from his home,
some small stuff all the way up to a bison skull that they had taken.
But no charges were ever filed in this deal.
But they kept his stuff?
I don't know about that.
I think he got them back.
I mean, there were charges filed against a bunch of other people.
I think there were over 30 people were arrested, but not against him.
But here, hold on a minute now.
It's interesting to point it out, but if the FBI knocks on your door
and takes a bunch of your stuff, and there's no charges filed,
and they give you your stuff back, why is it brought up as though you did something bad?
Because it's like, I don't know.
Like guilt by, like they didn't determine that he did something bad.
Fenn appeared to be like the most minor player in what ended up happening.
It was so big that I think there were three people that committed suicide in the case.
What?
Two people that had their doors knocked down to grab stuff.
And then the informant himself killed himself.
And then Fenn never had any charges in the thing.
But let's say I said, oh, I heard the FBI kick Spencer's door down.
And then someone's like, yeah, but they had the wrong door.
They meant to go to the neighbor's place.
I'd be like, still.
One thing that happened.
One thing that happened.
Still, he must be a bad person.
One thing that happened
is the Associated Press
falsely reported
that Fenn had been indicted.
And they then had to correct that.
But so like the day of,
he was probably the most
best known person
of all the people who got
rounded up in that whole operation.
And so it was kind of hard to,
you know,
bring the horse back into the barn
after that was reported.
People just thought Fenn was, you know, more implicated than he was.
Yeah, and I don't think it's like a far leap either.
I don't mean to sound like Alan Dershowitz here, but I'm just saying it's like just a little bit of like, you know, if he didn't get in trouble and got his shit back, I don't know that that's a bad, like.
Understood.
But I don't think it's a far leap to like look at this happening in 2009.
And then a year later, he hides one or two million dollars worth of, you know, pieces of memorabilia somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and doesn't tell anybody where.
So I think there's like suspicion there.
And it's why a lot of people throughout this and like even now that it's pretty much over have suspected that there was no treasure or that like this was a ploy to sell books.
I'm sure we'll revisit this part of the story itself, but it plays into the thing of like this guy doesn't have a perfect past.
And so it could be a reason why this isn't just like an innocent treasure hunt.
Ah,
has you encountered that?
Had you encountered that little plot twist in the reporting,
Ben?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean,
but the,
but the idea that he's like,
I know what I'll do with all my illegal stuff is put in this box and buried
out in the woods.
Yeah,
but yes,
but I'm glad you remembered it.
Cause I actually had forgotten that part.
Yeah.
Hmm.
You chose not to put that
in your article.
I did.
Really? Why?
Because I forgot about it.
There's only so much
you can fit in.
It's a long-ass article.
Yeah, I was looking,
I couldn't put the fencache
in there, you know.
Yeah. The whole point was to talk about the the Fencash in there, you know. Yeah.
The whole point was to talk about the Fencash, the projected Clovis points.
That's why I wanted a big Clovis point article from Ben Wallace.
And what do I get?
Was that his only brush up with like the FBI that you know of?
Yeah, but he was, I actually, I talked to a BLM agent who was involved in that case.
And like Fen had been on everyone's radar
for years. I mean he was
like constantly kind of a figure of suspicion
he knew a lot of the people
and he was somebody who really seemed to kind of
tread close to the line a lot
and was constantly having these skirmishes
with archaeologists, with
museums, with the state government
so
I think he was kind of ripe to be under suspicion.
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Now, we're going to jump to this.
Fenn, over the decade,
or over the years,
makes himself sort of available
to the
hundreds
of emerging individuals.
Thousands.
Thousands who set out to find the treasure.
Now, I want you to talk a little bit about who these people are, how they operate, how they communicate. Fenn continues to give little like getting warmer or nope, not that, or I can assure you it's not this.
Talk about how that dialogue emerges between the treasure hunters and the treasure hider.
I mean, Fenn had always been, you know, he loved the media.
I mean, he was actually controversial.
One of the things he was controversial for in the Santa Fe art community was the degree to which he kind of courted press attention. And so
it was inevitable that when he starts this treasure hunt, like part of the appeal for him
would be all the attention it was going to bring him. And so he was very open, not only he was open
to treasure hunters, but he was also very open to the media. He went on the Today Show a bunch of
times, which in 2013, he went on the
Today Show and it kind of blew the whole thing up. I mean, that's when I think a lot more people got
into the hunt. But after he did his initial appearance on the Today Show, just talking about,
you know, this hunt he had started three years earlier, he agreed to come back on the Today
Show once a month for the next, I don't know, nine months and give a clue each time.
And he did it maybe three times.
And then I think he got, he sort of stopped liking the pressure that Today Show was putting on him to give a serious clue each time.
Because he was giving pretty minor stuff like, well, it's not in a graveyard.
You know, I think the Today Show was kind of like, we need you to give us better than that.
Yeah, they wanted something more pizz that. Yeah, they want some of them are possessed.
Yeah, more possessed.
Like, you know, so they wanted it to like they wanted to lead to a discovery, right?
They're trying to force.
I think so.
They're trying to narrow the search possibilities.
Okay, so so simultaneous with that there emerges this robust community of treasure hunters around the fen treasure.
And, you know, on the internet, they all get together in a bunch of forums that are extremely active.
And, you know, people throwing out their various theories, which they called solves,
or people talking about their, you know, boots on the ground trips, as they refer to their field trips,
to actually look for the treasure.
And like, you know, like the Internet is about everything.
I mean, it was a very varied group of people with varying levels of evidence backing up their theories.
And so, you know, there were people who would put forward serious interpretations of the poem, and then there would be other people who would say, did you notice in that interview Fenn was wearing a hat and there was a hole in the hat?
And if you look closely under a microscope, that hole is the shape of Colorado.
So I think that's telling us the treasure is in Colorado. Yeah.
Yeah.
Some of the clues he gave were substantive.
Absolutely.
I mean, he, one of the first major clues he gave was he narrowed, the initial description
of where the treasure was, was it's in the mountains north of Santa Fe.
And initially, a lot of people thought that meant it was in New Mexico.
At a certain point, it kind of broadened.
People realized he was talking about the Rocky Mountains as a whole, but he excluded Utah and Idaho.
I think he excluded Canada.
So then it was basically narrowed to the four search states were Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.
And didn't someone think if you went north long enough, you'd eventually wind up back south of his house and that must be where it was?
Exactly.
One of the like you
just circumnavigate the globe and wind up in albuquerque this was actually a woman who ran
one of the main forums her theory was that it was buried in fenn's backyard and i said but what
about it being north of santa fe and she said well if you go all the way around the world
you can be in his backyard and still be north of Santa Fe.
Then people started dying.
Then people started dying.
I mean, people were interpreting, you know, really like home of Brown,
people started interpreting as an outhouse.
So he had to eliminate, like say it's not in an outhouse.
It's not under an outhouse. That's so reductive.
Yeah, but there's, yeah.
So Homer Brown, you get into that too, because there's another interesting thing.
Everyone who's read Catcher in the Rye, which if you haven't, go read it.
It's a phenomenal book.
Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger.
J.D. Salinger's publisher was Little Brown.
The Salinger family ended up owning a property in wyoming or something
there was a salinger ranch it was in wyoming i'm not sure whether or not it was so home of brown
that must be it yeah little brown yeah um their authors family's ranch yeah crazy shit yeah so
this the search began just attracting, you know, thousands and thousands of people.
Some of those people were kind of desperados there that, you know, they quit their job, they or they went bankrupt or they, you know, they kind of had nothing to lose.
And they they went out there and a lot of them had minimal, if any, wilderness experience.
And I have a great book they should have brought with them.
I think I've heard about that.
What is it?
It's available for pre-order.
It's called The Meteor's Guide to Wilderness Skills and Survival.
It would have saved a lot of lives.
A lot of lives.
A lot of people are saying it would have saved a lot of lives. Um, so this guy named Randy bill, you, um, puts in to the Rio Grande on a inflatable raft, um, and is not heard from again.
The kids, like, wasn't it like a child is a child's inflatable raft.
Cause he's got in his head because the words put in are in there.
He's got in his head that it's like you need to do
a float you need to do a river float to find it like that he put in somewhere you know cash the
treasure and then proceeded down the river and so that must so everybody starts doing float trips
so everyone starts doing float trips so eventually his body is found he drowned uh two more guys
drowned uh one i think also in the Rio Grande,
another in the Arkansas River.
A fourth guy died in Yellowstone National Park.
He slipped on a slope and dropped 500 feet to his death.
And then another guy snowmobiled
into Dinosaur National Monument
wearing like a thin jacket and jeans and froze to death.
And that same guy.
That's the one I empathize most with.
Here's why you shouldn't.
Because a month beforehand, he had to get rescued for the same thing.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was some of these moments that inspired Fenn to like give further clues as he talked about having this dialogue.
Trying to stem the bleeding.
Yeah. to like give further clues as he talked about like having this dialogue right trying to stem the bleeding yeah so like when when this randy died in the rio grande i think uh fenn had just
said he's like not in the rio grande or uh he had said it's like it's not uh south of santa fe or
something like that basically eliminating um the rio grande and then randy's wife uh you probably
covered this banner saw it but she like came out and was very vocal that like this treasure does not exist.
This is all a hoax.
Because she wanted to sue the guy.
I mean, I'm sure she had many motives for her husband being killed looking for the treasure.
But she was like one of the very vocal people that was like, this isn't real.
And actually the head of the New Mexico State Police, Pete Casetas, publiclyored Fenn to end the hunt, you know, to stop the deaths.
Yeah, and in your article, I was surprised to read, too, that the Fenn treasure, in addition to Breaking Bad, the television show, is credited with an influx in tourism to New Mexico.
It was that substantial.
New Mexico's tourism department created a video featuring Fenn as part of like their tourism drive.
It's weird because we've had New Mexico advertise tourism.
And in the notes,
it says you can't mention Breaking Bad,
but it didn't say not to mention the fen
treasure interesting yeah i think breaking bad sent a lot of people to albuquerque and
um fen sent a lot of people to santa fe yeah you know uh he then he gave some other
he also started to give some other clues like he kept saying keep he said in terms of the put
in and river access this is all just chad learning from your he said in terms of the put in and river access this is all
just i learned from your article but in terms of the river access someone eventually a searcher
what do they call themselves chasers chasers asked him did you return like when you deposited
the treasure did you return by the exact same path?
And he said, yes, which eliminated this idea that he did a river trip.
And then he said, I guess a number of times he said, I was how old?
80?
When he buried it or hid it. It's 45 pounds.
I'm 80 years old.
I carried it from my car.
Yeah.
So keep that in mind.
Yeah.
Presumably to eliminate a lot of the people that do the crazy.
Yeah.
He eliminated said like, it's not, that was the main thing.
It's nowhere an 80 year old man couldn't have gone.
But yeah, specifically, it's not the Rio Grande.
I think he might've even said it's not in a river or beside a river.
Yeah, I think he maybe eliminated like national parks because of the Yellowstone thing.
No.
He never eliminated national parks.
Okay.
Maybe it was the Yellowstone thing.
It was like, you don't need rock climbing gear.
It was something from one of those incidents.
Nothing.
You're not.
Yeah, you don't need crampons or like you're not going to be rappelling down. Although there was a guy, another guy, who rappelled into the Grand Canyon and ran out of rope before he got to the bottom.
And then when like 11 National Park Service people came to rescue him and they got him down, he ran away because he was worried one of them was going to steal his solve.
These people.
And then there was an Indiana treasure hunter in Yellowstone that got caught in an area he wasn't supposed to be,
in Yellowstone National Park, doing something he wasn't supposed to be.
I think he was doing some rock climbing.
And when he got to the judge, he said,
you might call me a lunatic, whatever, but I feel wholeheartedly I solved that Fenn treasure thing.
I still feel it's down there, your honor.
I dare anybody to figure out a better solve.
And so his defense of being in this place he wasn't supposed to be was like, that's where the treasure was, your honor.
That's why I should be innocent.
There were hundreds of people who said, I definitely have the correct solve.
And when people would say, well, then why don't you have the treasure?
They would say either like, well, he clearly removed it or it was never there and this whole thing is a hoax.
Or there must be like a proxy item there, but the treasure itself isn't going to be there.
So instead of just saying, oh, I guess my solve was wrong.
Yeah.
Can you get into, I think we've kind of touched on,
the crazy shit is like, right?
The crazy shit's fun, but you can just kind of imagine, right?
Like the hole in his hat or whatever.
And people, and you covered how people started
getting very interested in his biography and they're kind of looking for that like rosebud
moment from citizen kane right of like what would be some place of particular resonance to him where
he would have put this thing because he established that he put it somewhere important to him so it
has to be somewhere that he's been so how do we find where all he's been?
And all this kind of like avenue, this whole avenue of approach emerges of like that you'll find additional materials within his biography.
But spend some time on some of the people who are – who were thinking about it probably in the correct way.
So a lot of the more serious searchers focused on Yellowstone because Fenn had said,
my heart is in Yellowstone.
And as a child, he had spent a lot of time with his family on fishing and camping trips in Yellowstone.
So that's where I would say most of the most serious searchers that I encountered spent most of their time.
I mean, there were still some people in New Mexico looking, not that many in Colorado, quite a lot in Montana.
But Wyoming and Yellowstone in particular was sort of the biggest focus for a lot of people.
One of the very popular spots was, you know, just like 30 miles from us, the way the crow flies Hebgen Lake,
because he had pictures in his biography, um, of him at Hebgen Lake and riding horses there and
talked about how much he loved it and stuff like that. So that became a very popular place as well,
specifically at Hebgen Lake. Do you know that, that, that, uh, Osborne Russell in his journal, this is before Hebgen Lake existed.
It's an artificial lake.
It's an impoundment.
They used to call that the fire hole as well.
They would call holes like sheltered valleys where you could spend the winter because some guy showed up there and the whole thing was on fire.
All that timber that used to be in the bottom was burning and they called the fire hole then it got like subsumed by lake hebgen um
people started to realize or started to feel that there has that that that the poem can't
do it like like a literal understanding of the words in the poem that it can't do it. Like, like a literal understanding of the words in the poem that it can't be
adequate.
Like it can't put you on a spot to find a 10 by 10 inch box.
It was just so,
it was so vague.
It could be interpreted in so many ways.
And just to take one example of the clue where warm waters halt,
you know,
could refer to like uncountable sort of
hydrothermal locations you know i mean there's so many i went down to the boiling river when i first
moved to montana looking looking for this treasure oh just stub your toe on a big box
you know i may have but i wasn't you, maybe I mistook it for a rock.
But because Fenn, but then one of these treasure hunters, the primary treasure hunter you profile,
talks about that Fenn had mentioned in some writing or some lecture or something,
he had mentioned as a kid being in a river and how he would hop around near a hot spring trying to find water.
This was Boiling River, actually. Oh, it was Boiling River.
He would hop around and talk about places that were too hot,
places that were too cold.
And so him saying, begin where warm waters end or whatever,
led some serious people to think that that's got to be kind of where you need to look.
And you get another guy that thought Sunlight Basin.
Right. That was also the same guy whose first Sunlight Basin. Right.
That was also the same guy whose first search location was Boiling River, really fixed on Sunlight Basin because that was the place where he found the Salinger Ranch and there were other sunlight he thought might refer to the warmth, Sunlight Creek. And he found there was a mining claim where his clues sort of had led him there that happened to be owned by an LLC company that was registered to an attorney in Cody who sat on
a museum board with Fenn. So he thought, you know, that was, that seemed kind of interesting.
And one of the areas these guys focused was, is it on public or private land? And one of the things they looked at was this idea
that Fenn probably did some due diligence about the legality. And so explain that little bit of
the solve. I mean, there were so many potential legal issues, right? Like what are the tax
issues depending on what kind of land it's on. Is it government property or can a finder
claim it as property? What's going to happen with this? Are the land rights stable? In 500 years,
will the land still be preserved in the same way or might it have come into private ownership or
leased out for logging or whatnot? So there was a lot of thought given to what kind of land might Fenn have most
seriously considered to avoid those issues.
And where was the good money was on what?
Public or private?
I would say public, but even that had a lot of complications.
I mean, private probably had more complications.
Because you couldn't search it. Right, you couldn't search it right you couldn't search he'd be putting it somewhere
where people wouldn't be able to look yeah yeah unless it was private land that he secretly owned
which was one possibility people looked at and they tried to search to see if yeah they were
looking through public records looking for but you know things are kind of concealed by corporate ownership and, but there was a lot of attention paid to that possibility.
Did he,
at one point in time,
I think Spencer mentioned this to me.
Did he at one point in time announce that someone had been a couple hundred
yards from it?
He said on more than one occasion that a bunch of people had been within 500
feet and one or two people had been within 200 feet
of the treasure. Like actual searchers. Actual searchers. Because they would send him emails.
He was fielding hundreds of emails, like over 100 a day. Searchers were constantly contacting him.
And he was, you know, engaging with them. And so they would say, hey, I just, you know,
here's my solve. They would want to tell him their solve. I think maybe some of them were hoping he would give him a clue or a hint and which he would not do for the most part.
And so that's how we knew where people were searching.
Yeah.
And like all this dialogue that kind of happens among Fenn and searchers and then Fenn and media and these different interviews,
it causes like some missing clues that like,
is it real?
Is it not?
One of them that I came across a lot
was that Fenn had supposedly said at some point during this
that he had made a day trip from his house
to hide the treasure,
which would hung up a lot of people like,
okay, well then it can only be this far North from his house, but you start looking for it and you can't actually
find where he said that, but there's like a huge portion of, of the searchers that think
that's like a legit clue, but it can't be traced anywhere.
And so I think there's a lot of stuff like that specific thing.
It's like when that general supposedly said that the way to beat the Plains Indians is to kill all the buffalo.
And then historians eventually realized that that was never said.
Yeah.
So like the searching community had intentionally or unintentionally created these red herrings like this, you know,
it's a day trip from his house sort of thing. There were also like these super searchers who
kind of befriended Fenn and would really focus a lot on developing that relationship. And
it created a certain amount of disharmony and politics in the chase community because
people would think that some people were secretly being given like a leg up that they didn't have that they were getting tips from fen uh
i want to bump along to more contemporary uh realizations here but i a thing that i want to
cover um two observations one was uh i'm sure there were people that were secretive, but it tended to be collaborative.
You would post yourselves.
I mean, the collaborative people would, and the secret ones you wouldn't know.
So there was a community of people who would be like, hey, how about this?
Yeah.
Hey, how about this?
Not like hoarding it for themselves, but they just wanted to like see it get, they wanted to see resolution.
Yeah.
And not so much take ownership of who.
Right.
One of the searchers that, the primary search you focus on, tell me his name again.
Justin Posey.
Who takes an extremely organized, passionate, expensive, exhaustive approach to this.
He and a friend hit on an idea they don't attempt.
They hit on an idea of this technological tool that's out there that can track someone's eyeballs.
As they're looking at a screen and get a sense like this person is purposefully program, and flash for him a map of the Rockies, they will pick up what his eyeballs don't want.
His eyeballs will betray what he doesn't want them to know.
Lie detector test, like CIA, next level stuff.
And then they would dynamically keep changing what he was seeing.
So if like his eye was going towards, let's say, first it's in Wyoming, like northwestern Wyoming, then it would immediately like zoom in on a close-up of northwestern Wyoming.
And then it would look at what's he looking at or avoiding looking at there.
And they would do it like very rapidly.
I mean, the computer could do it almost instantaneously.
And, I mean, Justin said when he was working on eye-tracking technology for a major technology company, I mean, he's a software engineer, that it's shockingly precise.
And he doesn't do it on ethical grounds.
Right.
I mean, first of all, getting Fen in a room
and looking at a screen
already begins
to tread close
to potentially
sounding like kidnapping.
But even if he's there
voluntarily,
it just seemed like
not, you know,
not fair play.
Like it's almost like,
you know.
And they're interested
in using an unconventional weapon.
Yeah, they're interested
in fair play. Yeah. All right. Now we're going. Using an unconventional weapon. Yeah, they're interested in fair play.
Yeah.
All right.
Now we're going to jump ahead to.
I want to ask Ben what his personal favorite find theory was.
Like if you had to guess where it was.
I mean, I kind of think that the solution that I might talk about in a little bit was the correct one i don't
know how about you well i yeah i don't know i enjoyed all of it they're like i biased i liked
the idea of it being in paradise valley because it's an hour from where we're sitting right now
um and there was like a lot of very obvious stuff in there that seemed to make
sense where it was like
the Warm Waters
Halt, the Boiling River, right? The Canyon Down,
Yankee Gym Canyon, the Home of Brown,
the Joe Brown Boat Launch.
The End is Drawing Ever Nigh, there's
Nye Montana. And because
I live here, I like the idea of the Paradise Valley
thing. And you're kind of a rock hound.
Yeah. Not a rock picker, Doug Barron, but a rock hound.
That's actually probably where I saw the greatest overlap in communities were people who like
to look for rocks and then people who like to look for treasure.
Way more so than people who like fishing or mushroom hunting or something like that.
Oh, dude, I need to tell you.
If you want some Yellowstone agate, holy shit.
I found the mother load.
Let's talk later. I'll tell you if you want some yellowstone agate holy shit i found the mother load let's talk later i'll tell you later hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness
do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes
law makes it that
they can't join.
Our northern brothers get irritated.
Well, if you're sick of, you know,
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Like every big news story,
I wake up one day not long ago
and I have many,
many text messages
from various friends.
The FEN cash
has been discovered.
Immediately, everyone I talk to
says, bullshit!
Because, I'll tell you why it's bullshit.
Forrest Fenn, these five people have died.
Forrest Fenn is under pressure
to stop the bleeding.
He's being sued by various participants who've devoted a decade of their life to finding the treasure.
There's an, like, not emerging.
There's always been a rumor that it's a lie.
It's becoming too burdensome for him he's of
failing health which is borne out by the fact that he died a couple days ago is of failing health
uh and he just needs to bring it to a close the fun is over so he bullshits up some
photos or whatever and and and just tries to like wind it down not a lot of
clarity the guy that found it doesn't want to be known it's all a lie and that just goes to show
you that it's all a lie that is the the initial narrative as i understood it is that fair spencer
um i don't think everybody was that pessimistic or like you and i were uh
yeah so i i feel that way a little bit by everybody i mean us right right now now looking
back now that he died in like september and it was found in i don't know what was it july june
right again like the timing is a little bit suspicious, just like with the FBI raiding him, hiding the thing.
But, yeah, I don't know.
There's like warranted suspicion still.
I'll let Ben take it from here.
Well, also just one other part of the burden was like, I mean, his family was dealing with a ton.
Like they had a guy break into their house with an axe and his daughter held the guy at gunpoint.
There was another guy who was stalking his granddaughter.
So like Fenn had a lot of reasons why he might want to, you know, he'd created a monster
and he might want to end this.
So tell us what's known about the finder and what might be known about where it was found.
All right.
So Fenn initially just says it's been found, kind of more details to come.
You know, people were, a lot of people were skeptical.
People wanted to know more.
Maybe a week later, he posts a couple photos of him
with what looks like the recovered treasure
in what looks like a lawyer's office or at a conference table.
But it's got, you know, dirt encrustment on some of it
and signs of aging.
But still, it just wasn't enough,
and people were, like, getting really angry
both at him and the finder
for not telling more about where it had been found.
And Fenn said, I have always said, and this is true,
he had always said, I'm going to leave it to the finder
to choose whether or not to identify themselves
and to choose whether or not to reveal the location.
And the speculation was it was for
the legal, potential legal implications. What if the guy doesn't want to pay taxes on it and report
it to the IRS? Fenn had always been kind of anti-government, so he might be sympathetic to
that. In any case, he had said that's what he would do, and he did it, but people were really
angry about it. Everyone wanted closure. A lot of people thought it was a hoax. I mean, I was pretty
skeptical for all the reasons you mentioned.
Anyway, there's a ton of pressure on him.
Finally, a couple weeks after the discovery, he posts online again.
He says, the finder has agreed, you know, for the benefit of the community that I can reveal another detail, and that is the state in which it was found.
It was found in Wyoming.
So some people were satisfied by that.
Some people thought it was further evidence of something not on the up and up because the three lawsuits against him concerned Colorado and New Mexico. So by saying it was in Wyoming,
he immediately kind of invalidated the premises of these lawsuits.
And like the singular details that he had given were that it was a man and he was from
back east, which when you live in New Mexico, there's a hell of a lot that's east of you.
So just like the details weren't even details, really.
No, that's not how back east is used.
For a guy who hit a treasure and used poetry.
If you're in New Mexico and you say back east, it's not some dude from Nebraska.
Okay. Sure. It's not. It's not. I mean, it's not some dude from Nebraska. Okay.
It's not.
It's not.
I mean, it doesn't narrow it.
It trims off maybe 100 million Americans, but there's still a couple hundred million left over that way.
Yeah, the Santa Fe New Mexican, which is his hometown newspaper, after it was found and it was announced and stuff um they
had they made a really good analogies they said this is like a detective solving a murder without
identifying the killer that's like the feeling that this gave everyone well if you listen to
this podcast you would be familiar with the story we had an episode with a guy, very similar to this episode, with a writer whose son went missing in Costa Rica.
The assumption was that he'd been murdered.
Okay?
And it was about his efforts to find his son's body.
It was Roman Dial, right?
Roman Dial.
Yeah.
Wrote a book about this.
It was his efforts to find his son's body, identify the murderer.
In the end, his son was killed by a tree that fell in a storm.
So he solved a murder, but did not identify a killer.
Put that in your pipe, Spencer Newhart.
It's like that same unsatisfying feeling, though.
Oh, yeah.
I'm with you.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Spencer.
No, you tell that to the Santa Fe New Mexican.
All right, Ben.
Go on.
It's found.
It's found, you know, by a shy guy back east.
He's shy.
That's what they said.
He was a shy guy back east.
Real wallflower, this guy. It's in Wyoming. He's shy. to know more they just and they weren't buying it and a lot of people including like some of the most focused um devoted you know sensible searchers thought thought like fen had ended the hunt and
and gotten the treasure retrieved the treasure or had a family member do it and the the the
searcher again that you spend the time on posey justin yeah justin posey at first he's like
depressed and kind of catatonic.
Yeah.
But then, instead of quitting searching, instead of being like, okay, I'll move on to whatever
the hell's next, like I'll get a dog and hang out at home.
He's like, he resumes just searching for the spot where it had been.
Which is insane.
Well, as a side note, as a side note, I mean, he already had a dog, a Vesla. For the spot where it had been. Which is insane.
Well, as a side note, I mean, he already had a dog, a Vizsla.
Oh, no.
Tell about the damn dog.
I forgot about the dog.
This is great. One of his super methodical tactics that he used to kind of increase his chances of finding the treasure was he had a Vizsla named Tucker, 55-pound Vesla. And he had read about how in the 1960s in Russia and Finland and Sweden,
they had geologists had trained what were called oar dogs
who had an ability to sniff out mineral deposits, you know,
that are like buried 40 feet deep.
And so he began to wonder, well, what, you know,
we know the chest is made of bronze.
We also know that searches have gotten within 500 or 200 feet of the chest.
It would really suck if I got close to the chest but not close enough.
I could at least eliminate that possibility if I train Tucker to be able to smell bronze.
So he trained Tucker to smell bronze.
Burying dog treats next to bronze chunks of medley bought on Amazon.
And then eventually just would bury the bronze and give the dog a treat.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This fellow, this gentleman, is like, well, I'll just keep searching
and just try to find a little hole where some other dude dragged a treasure out.
I mean, he was not alone.
He was not alone.
An enormous number of people I got to talk to would be like,
you know, I'd be like,
what are you going to do now that the search is over?
And they'd be like, oh, I'm going.
I'm going searching next week.
What's that song?
The search is over.
You were with me.
What's that song?
No.
You were with me.
It was like Peter's Terror or something.
The search is over. You don't know what I'm talking about? No. You were with me it was like Peter's Terror or something the search is over
you don't know
what I'm talking about
no
you were with me
it's like the last
thing he says
oh
the search is
anyhow
you guys don't know
the song I'm talking about
Phil
I don't
I was gonna say
it's like a
sunk cost
like fallacy type thing
right
where it's just like
you've dedicated
your whole life to this
it's like well I gotta keep going I thing, right? Where it's just like you've dedicated your whole life to this.
It's like, well, I got to keep going, I guess.
In the same way that there were people who were like, yeah, my solve's correct.
And the fact that the treasure's there, not there means it wasn't there or he took it.
These people would say, well, there's a second treasure.
They would have theories like there's a second treasure buried there.
Or the treasure finder probably left part of the treasure there because that's what I would have done.
So there were reasonings behind.
Hold on a minute.
Is it Peter Cetera?
Hit it, Steve.
I'll say it again.
I'll say it again.
Come on, Steve.
Dude, when they make this into a movie and Ben's in the movie and shit,
in the end they're going to have this song play.
Survivor.
So what was that, Ben, you were saying about a second treasure hunt?
No, wait, hold on.
So I have a question.
Out of all of the searchers who you interviewed,
is there a common thread?
Like, what's the typical psychological profile of these folks?
I mean, there was actually a scholarly study done by a psychologist at the University of North Dakota of the Fen Chase community.
And, you know, I mean, you read the study, which is available online, and it's like,
you know, he's using all the psychological terminology, like normative, you know, personality and like mood disorder and da-da-da-da.
But I mean, basically, it seemed like most of them were pretty normal, but there were 10% of the community who described themselves as having an addiction.
And those are the people who are most active on the forums.
Those are probably most of the people I talk to because they're the ones who kind of know about each other
and you meet at these events.
Get into...
I'm trying to lead you gently where I want you to go here, Ben.
The dude, Posey,
wants to find the spot
because if he can find the spot,
he can find what the solve was.
Or he can legitimize, like,
if he could figure out what it was,
then he could reverse engineer
whether it was real or not.
Is that fair?
He didn't doubt that it was real,
but since for him
the main goal
was always like
the cracking of the puzzle
and not the getting
of the gold,
like the fact
that someone had found
the gold
didn't end
the puzzle challenge
for him.
So he thought
he just still wanted
to solve the puzzle
and now he was even
more motivated
because he'd been found.
I mean,
there was a concern
that am I even going
to know that I'm there
if the chest
has been removed, but maybe if I do it relatively soon they'll still be at least before
this winter you know there will still be evidence of where the chest and he's got photographs to go
off now because the the finder snapped a couple cell phone pictures of the box what happened is
uh so in september someone calling himself the finder posts an article on a website called
medium saying I'm the finder and telling the story about, but a pretty vague story, but
about how they're the finder and how they've, they spent 25 days once they knew the general
area and that, you know, they were crying and getting torn by branches and they found
the treasure.
Um, and then they met with forest and all of this, and they found the treasure. And then they met with Forrest and all of this.
But they're anonymous.
And normally it would be easy to dismiss them
because tons of people throughout this whole thing
have claimed, I found the treasure.
But in this case, they included photographs
that were not among the photographs Fenn had posted,
but they were clearly outtakes from the same photo shoot,
so it had to be someone who had some connection to the situation.
Also, the Fen family posted a link to this article on their website, which gave it that validation.
So people were like, okay, this is the finder.
So then, a few weeks later, another searcher gets an email from someone who says like i know who the finder is
and i know where the treasure was found um and that finder gets justin involved and together they
they go out looking for what is supposedly the real location where the treasure was found
and it was and it was. words or kangaroo words where there would be like a number word within another word like done includes the word one right and basically if you took all of these numbers that you could
take out of the poem in sequence um they gave you latitude and longitude coordinates
and those coordinates were at a site in yellowstone park where at in yellowstone
uh near to issa lake um at the Continental Divide.
Which is kind of like looking at it, it's kind of like an auspicious sort of lake for clue given because it flows both ways.
Or like it drains, sits on a continental divide, right?
And somehow like drains one way and the other or something like that.
Apparently it's the only natural lake in the world that drains to two watersheds.
Huh.
It's right off 191, like right there.
So he could have walked with –
An old man could have carried it.
Right, from his car.
And this dude, Justin, starts trying to match up photographs.
I mean, what he's really trying to do is
verify the information that this source has provided, right?
Yeah.
And the source has provided a few photographs.
The source has provided the information of, you know,
these words in the poem lead to these coordinates.
And so he was trying to verify that what the source was saying
and where the source had taken the photos were, you know, held up, but there was still a question about like,
is the source credible? Right. And the reason they were taking the source seriously was because
it was like right after the treasure was found, everyone, like the, the, the kind of leaders of
the forums were, were being inundated with like, you know, I was the finder.
Like literally more than 30 people said I was the finder.
They were being inundated with like I know what the solve was.
Like more than 300, this is what the solve was.
So they just ignored them all.
And there was this one guy who sent an email that's, you know, and to Mike Cowlings who ran, you know, one of the sites saying like I know the finder.
I know the solve.
And he wrote back cool, bro.
And that was it.
But then in September, the guy writes him again.
He says, like, next week there's going to be some news coming out.
And then the next week this Medium article comes out from the finder,
and so he's like, oh, maybe that guy actually does know something.
So then he started talking to him, and, this, this source basically said he had met
the finder online. There'd been a group of them who were discussing these sort of coordinate based
and homophone based solves. Um, and apparently the source was like, not very happy that now that he
was not the finder. And he was like, so I'm just going to tell you everything I know. Um, and so
that's what Justin Posey was going out there with these two other searchers, Cynthia Meacham and
Christy Thor to try to verify what the source had said.
And what did they find?
So they found...
First, they go out and find nothing, okay?
They go out to what they think the GPS coordinates are,
find nothing.
They go back the next day.
I mean, it gets kind of technical, but basically,
they determine that if you wrap,
and I think they talk to the source again,
if you start the poem at begin at where warm waters halt,
you get the first of the coordinate numbers,
and then you have to wrap around
at the end of the poem
to the beginning of the poem,
and so the numbers in the first stanza come last,
and if you also use, like,
what is apparently standard decimal notation
for coordinates, you get point two, which is 12 seconds. And they had previously been
treating two as meaning two seconds.
Oh.
So 12 seconds put them exactly at a location that Justin Posey was able to his
satisfaction to match up with the source photographs based on like the angles of leaning trees, the distance between trees, the height of the sun, leaf litter, all of that.
Although obviously the more kind of the stuff that deteriorates more quickly was less reliable.
Well, but there was a thing about there was three species represented on the ground.
Right, right.
It's fairly ubiquitous in the West, but still there's like he would he was looking at overlays of these three species represented on the ground right right it's fairly ubiquitous in the west but
still there's like he would he was looking at overlays of these three species exactly like in
the original photograph one deciduous leaf that they thought was an aspen there were lodgepole
pine needles yeah there was one a cottonwood twig i think they thought so he's looking for like the
convergence of those three species which is a mighty big area but still apparently i mean he
said actually it turns out that aspen
forestation is not nearly as ubiquitous
as you might think. In Wyoming.
I don't know. You might know otherwise.
We actually
had somebody, Steve, in media or
Instagram comments that had
commented on multiple posts and they were like
my co-worker solved it. It was my co-worker
that found it. So then I
reached out to that guy and I was like, who's your coworker?
Why should I believe you?
That kind of stuff.
He's like, this is what he told me.
Here, you can talk to him.
Here's his info.
Or no, it was the other way around.
He said, well, here's my info.
Have him contact me.
So he contacted me.
And he's like, yep, I'm the guy that found it.
I was like, okay.
Can you prove it?
Can you show me a picture or
something that we can talk about this more um and he's like well here's the deal there was no treasure
and it was it was one of those people as ben had said earlier but he had like multiple days
exchanging emails and texts and stuff uh he was telling me he was the guy and that it was in
maybell uh colorado and uh and then he eventually you know told, Colorado. And then he eventually, you know, told me that like,
oh, there actually was no treasure,
but I solved his clue and here are the reasons why
and stuff like that.
But I was hot on the trail for a few days.
I was like, I got it.
Oh, that would be cool.
That would have been a little feather
in your like internet sleuth and cap.
Yeah.
So Ben, how confident are you that like that's where it was?
I mean, I'm not very confident.
I mean, I guess the question is I asked Justin Posey how confident is he.
And he, I think, put his confidence at, like, 85%.
Like, I think he thinks it is it.
But there are reasons to doubt it.
I mean, one thing that gave him confidence in it was they scooped up some dirt in a plastic bag at the site that the coordinates led them to and brought it back to the parking lot because they hadn't been able to bring Tucker
the dog into the park.
And they let Tucker out of the truck and he runs around sniffing and then he gets to the
pile of dirt and immediately sits down and his tail starts wagging, which apparently
and looks up for a treat, which was apparently the, you know, what happens when he finds
bronze.
And so they thought there might be like some sort of, you know, minute bronze residue
in the dirt. How confident? I just thought of a good idea, man. You got to get the credit card
records of everyone that Fenn knows to see where they were buying gas and see if they were buying gas up thereabouts
when they went up to retrieve the box
to end the search.
He has relatives who are pilots also, though.
Flight records.
How confident are you?
And when you answer this,
put in the input you have from people who are most obsessive about this, but who are rational individuals.
How confident are you?
Not that there was a treasure and all that, okay?
How confident are you that it was a legit find and that it wasn't a family deciding it's time to wrap it up.
I will say until the latest development with this coordinate solve, I was actually, I was pretty sure the family must have made a decision to wrap it up.
This has made me think probably there was a finder. The chances that you could find latitude and longitude coordinates in sequence in this poem that could lead you of all places on the planet out of billions of possible locations to a spot in the search area is very small.
So that carries a certain amount of weight. I also think, you know, since this coordinate
solve has been announced within the community, I mean, there's been a ton of skepticism, but people
are still trying to match the poem clues like home of Brown, where warm waters halt to this location.
And I think there's a good chance like none of that ever matters. Yeah. I was going to ask if
all of those words were only to lead to get you to figure out the numbers or if those words also pertained to clues.
I kind of think so because even if you know this location, like there's no way the words could ever lead you to a precise place.
And if you have the coordinates, you don't need vague words.
And you need a bunch of words that have numbers in them.
You need a bunch of words that have numbers in them.
And then he also is a fan of the rhyme.
So they got a rhyme.
They got a rhyme.
Yep.
Is it iambic pentameter?
I remember learning that in school.
I mean, that is a meter.
I'm not sure if this one is that.
I don't remember what it means.
I just remember needing to learn it.
I think Shakespeare used iambic pentameter.
Yeah, bringing it back to Shakespeare.
Iambic pentameter.
Yeah.
You're not going to have an answer for this, Ben.
The search is over.
But like, what will the person do with the treasure?
How can they possibly use it as a treasure would be used to, like, get all these riches and not reveal too many things or, like, have the National Park Service involved?
You've got to go back east and look for a dude with a lot of jewelry on.
Well, actually, he's also shy.
Don't expect him to be making a lot of noise.
We may have an answer.
In the Medium article posted by the, you know, capital letters, The Finder, they said, I'm a millennial and I have student loans and I cannot afford to keep the treasure.
My first attempt is going to be to have it end up in a place Forrest wanted it to, which people think was a museum probably, maybe the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody.
But basically, they're going to try to sell it at auction, where I think they can maximize
the value, not just of the actual objects, but of the whole story around it, the historical
value.
Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to liquidate it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then your guy that you spend most of your time with, your searcher that you spent, because you couldn't spend time with the finder because how he might like to get it,
but acknowledges that it's beyond, probably going to be beyond his means because it's not even going
to be sticker value. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he thinks it'll be, you know, exponential or multiple. So,
you know, let's say instead of 1 million, it's 10 million. It was worth a million bucks 10 years
ago. Yeah. I mean, it's also based on the you know fluctuating price of gold so sure and whatever
who knows yeah uh and you mentioned in the end you close by saying that this searcher chaser
is thinking about assembling his own treasure and following in the footsteps of Forrest Fenn.
That's right.
He found a meteorite, which he's confirmed is a meteorite.
And apparently there's a lot more where that came from.
And so all of them together would be very valuable.
And that would be the basis of this treasure that he would hide and set up his own treasure hunt.
Spencer's perking up over here.
Spencer reached out, grabbed his mic
and just very slowly
started. Forget about Yellowstone Agate.
I've had two instances where I thought maybe
this is a meteorite and
the dollar value on those things
is crazy.
So if this person has a meteorite
to hide, that's
great. That's a valuable treasure.
Ian Fraser did a piece about meteorites one time, or some aspect of it.
He was dealing with a meteorite that had come through a guy's roof in Montclair, New Jersey,
came through his roof and cracked his toilet.
Yeah.
I didn't know that was happening.
Just all of a sudden, bang, tink, and he goes upstairs like, what the hell is that?
It was a meteorite.
So do you think we are going to ever have like the satisfying ending, like the murder solved, but we haven't identified the killer thing?
Are we going to get all the details someday? I mean, I think the combination of the source coming forward, if they are legitimate, has kind of taken away a lot of the best part of the story that the finder has to tell.
But I can't see why they wouldn't, especially if they're concerned about how much money they have.
I mean, the easiest way in the world to make money would be for them to sell their story rights, right?
I mean, they could probably publish a nice book about it.
They could, you know, make a movie about it.
So I would think that the finder would want to come forward at some point,
especially if it's more than one person,
and apparently it might be a team of a few people.
And that's also, like, one of the big red flags for people
referring to the Forrest Fenn treasure thing,
because he self-published the book.
So he was getting all the proceeds from this treasure map hidden in the poem. And then there
was a long stretch there where the books were selling for like a hundred dollars on Amazon and
eBay. And it was like incredibly valuable. Um, and so that's, it's pretty damn good marketing to be like, here's this book I have.
And within it, you can find the details to a million dollar treasure that's hidden.
I have to say, well, that's a roundabout way to sell some books. Maybe we should try it.
No. And I mean, the one thing I'll say about that is actually the, he published three memoirs and
the first one, which was self-published and sold through this one bookstore in Santa Fe collected
works. They got all the profits. He didn't, because he wanted people to know, like, I'm not profiting
off this. I'm not sure if that's true of the later books, but that first one, he, he, he wasn't,
and he was already wealthy. He was a wealthy guy. So I'm not sure he'd, he would do that.
Can you close by, uh, talking about Forrest Fenn's death?
Nothing suspicious, right? Nothing suspicious.
I mean, and, you know,
he turned 90 in August
and then in early September
there was a kind of
last gathering
of the most devoted searchers
in Yellowstone
and at Fishing Bridge,
in West Yellowstone
and at Fishing Bridge.
Which you said
has a sign that says
you can't fish.
Which says,
no fishing allowed.
And it was the Labor Day weekend.
And then that Monday, Fenn died of what the Santa Fe police said was natural causes.
You know, there was some suspicion.
He's nine years old.
He's nine years old.
Yeah.
And his wife died a few weeks later.
His wife of 66 years, Peggy.
Oh, wow.
Oh, that's touching.
Yeah.
I like that, man. But he but he like held on and if i died i hope my wife dies like fast man
um one of the things i like the fan said was someone was saying to him uh
that he should call the search off and he said if there's a pool and people drown in the pool,
do you close the pool or do you teach people to swim?
Right.
And he had expressed,
right.
That,
that he just wanted people to get away from their devices and shit and go do
something and just be outside.
If that was true i wonder if the i if it backfired because it's hard to tell if this lives more in the device internet like
did he create an internet thing or did he create a nature thing if you had to look at him now i think he did create
a nature thing um i mean tons of people uh you know went out on searches you'd never i mean one
of the people i interviewed was like a boston cop who drove across country for three days with his
son and spent a week camping in the rockies you know which i mean he'd never been to the rockies
so i think i think there were a lot of people like that. I think it did get people, but there was definitely a very robust,
you know,
bunch of armchair,
uh,
treasure hunters who maybe never went to the Rockies.
Never went.
And just spent a lot of time,
you know,
talking on,
in the forums.
So how do people,
um,
how do people find your article?
Well,
I think if you go to nymag.com,
it'll be there on the front page.
nymag.com.
Yeah.
If you're running into other problems,
Ben Wallace, type in Ben Wallace.
Fenn.
Benjamin Wallace,
unless you want to get the Detroit business.
Not Detroit business.
Oh, sorry.
Benjamin Wallace.
Type in Benjamin Wallace,
something like Fenn,
something like-
Fenn Treasure.
New York Magazine.
New York Magazine.
Yeah, you'll get there.
Yeah.
You'll get there.
Uh, thank you for coming on.
I'm glad I finally earned a slot on Meat Eater.
Are you thinking about doing a book about this?
You know, I actually, I would like to, and I, I, um, emailed my agent about it, and he said there's already, like, a book that's been in the works for a while
by a guy who was a treasure hunter involved for years,
and, you know, it's being published
by a major publishing house.
Oh, it is.
Yeah, Knopf.
Yeah.
You're a publisher.
Random House.
Sons of bitches.
Yeah.
I'll buy yours.
I like your copy better.
All right.
Thank you, Ben.
Thank you.
Good being here.
Are you going to write more stuff to come and talk to us about?
I mean, it's hard to get a meat eater relevant material into New York magazine.
I got to admit.
I don't think New York is where a lot of like hunting and fishing is happening.
Yeah, but this has nothing to do with hunting.
It's true.
I mean, I hope I will.
I hope I will.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This may, what makes it relevant is what wasn't in there, which is Clovis points, which were used for hunting.
That's a tenuous connection.
And I had to twist Steve's arm to talk about this.
He's like, oh, Forrest Fenn.
Oh, I never said such things.
Yeah.
I wrote about Forrest Fenn when you still had your mama's milk hanging off your chin, man.
I wrote about Forrest Fenn in 2008.
But you were very cool on the idea of having this be a thing on our website
and getting Ben more involved and having him on the podcast.
You were not very hot on this idea.
It was my idea to have Ben on the podcast.
I think after some text messages where I'm like,
people are going to want to hear this.
Oh, dude. Interesting to hear that. I do not, people are going to want to hear this. Oh, dude.
Interesting to hear that.
I do not.
I'd have to revisit some of this.
I could picture me being a little dismissive of the find.
Spencer, he's just holding a grudge because you proved him wrong about the squirrels.
Oh, no.
He doesn't think that.
No.
Oh, Phil, you just opened it up.
Because, dude, I have –encer's coming back on very soon because i have developed an
overwhelming body of evidence okay we'll see we'll see did contradict spencer's finding including
including a book by the author the same author who wrote light in the forest
put that in your... To be continued.
You got me.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
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