Treasure Hunters Say ‘Incontrovertible Photographic Evidence’ Proves FBI Filmed Legendary Gold Find
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The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been accused of hiding its 2018 discovery of a massive trove of lost gold dating to the Civil War from both treasure hunters to whom it might owe a finder’s fee and the US state of Pennsylvania, which would likely claim the gold for itself as abandoned property.
According to legend, during the US Civil War, a huge amount of gold was hijacked by Confederate sympathizers in 1863 while on its way to the US Mint in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Mint records from the era haven’t survived, so there’s no verification any gold shipment ever went missing, but if it did exist, it would be worth millions of dollars today.
According to a group of treasure hunters, the FBI has lied about not having film footage of its hunt for the final resting place of the massive gold stash in Pennsylvania’s mountainous Elk County. Now the group is suing the federal government to get the hidden videos.
Finders Keepers says in a new court filing that the FBI originally told them it had 17 relevant video files related to the dig at Dent’s Run, but later reduced that number to just four videos, which turned out to be the same videos originally supplied to the bureau by Finders Keepers when it tipped them off about the find, hoping to collect a finder’s fee for the goods.
In other words, the FBI says it shot zero footage of the dig site, which it says turned up no evidence of gold. This, despite a report by a commissioned geophysicist who used a microgravity test to determine that an object of some 9 tons in mass and with a density consistent with gold was located underground at Dent’s Run.
Included in the filing is a photo that Finders Keepers co-owner Dennis Parada says came from a hidden trail camera he posted in the forest at Dent’s Run in March 2018 and which reportedly shows an FBI agent with a video camera at the site.
The photo “suggests either the FBI has falsely claimed to have no other responsive videotapes or the FBI illegally destroyed responsive videotapes in an effort to circumvent the FOIA’s disclosure requirements," Anne Weismann, Parada’s lawyer, wrote in the filing.
The filing asks a federal judge to order the US Department of Justice to pay a portion of Finders Keepers’ legal fees associated with the fight to get the videos, and to hold the FBI accountable for “covering up the results of its excavation ... that highly advanced scientific technology indicated contained multiple tons of gold."
“For the FBI to now say it has no videotapes of the dig strains credulity and takes this whole affair to the next level,” Warren Getler, who has worked closely with Finders Keepers, told the Associated Press. “We have incontrovertible photographic evidence of them videotaping the dig and interviewing their operational leader at the site. It raises a lot of serious questions.”
The FBI has good reason to want to hide the find if indeed it found gold at Dent’s Run. Not only could it potentially owe Finders Keepers a finder’s fee, but the gold could actually belong to the Pennsylvania state government. Indeed, one FBI agent in Philadelphia who was in pursuit of the gold wrote just that in an affidavit obtained by the Associated Press last year.
“I am concerned that, even if DCNR [Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources] gave initial consent for the FBI to excavate the cache of gold secreted at the Dent’s Run Site, that consent could be revoked before the FBI recovered the United States property, with the result of DCNR unlawfully claiming that that cache of gold is abandoned property and, thus, belongs to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Jacob Archer, a member of the FBI art crime team in Philadelphia, wrote in the 2018 filing.
Instead, after it commissioned the geophysicist’s report, the FBI used it to obtain a warrant to seize any gold at the site.
