Den sagnomsuste skatten på Oak Island

For alle skeptikere med sans for gode skrøner, er Sean Mungers artikkel absolutt lesverdig:

Fool’s Gold: why there’s no treasure in the Oak Island “Money Pit.” [Part I]

For a long time now, I’ve wanted to do a series of articles about one of the greatest and most fun historical mysteries of all time: the famed “Money Pit” on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. This is a subject that has fascinated me for over 25 years, but I’ve never written about it, largely because I know that the response to my thoughts on the mystery will very likely be quite negative. It’s fun to believe in buried treasure, and fantasies on this order strike chords in all of us that go back to our childhoods and are parts of our deep identities. Explaining why there is no buried treasure on Oak Island—despite alleged searches for such a cache going back more than 200 years—is, in one sense, a fool’s errand: no one wants to believe there’s nothing down there. But it is 2017, and we’re being daily bombarded with falsehoods, spin and “fake history.” If truth is something we still value, it’s worth telling it about Oak Island, and in any event it’s still a thrilling story as well as a fascinating puzzle of logic and historical analysis.

First, let me cut to the chase, especially as this is going to be a lengthy article in a series of lengthy articles. There is no treasure buried on Oak Island. If there ever was—and I have serious doubts about this—it’s certainly not there now. Despite at least a century and a half of expeditions to recover the “treasure,” and despite a History Channel reality TV show (which I have not seen) that squeezed 44 episodes’ worth of blood from the stone of this rather crude 19th century scam, there is nothing of particular value buried under Oak Island to find.

Here is how we know that there is no treasure on Oak Island. I’ll be dealing with all of these factors in-depth in this article and the three additional ones that follow, but here are the highlights:

  1. The “flood tunnels” believed to be blocking the recovery of the treasure have never been found.
  2. There is no physical evidence of an elaborate treasure hoard infrastructure on Oak Island.
  3. Reliable documentary evidence of the early treasure searches, where much of the proffered “evidence” for treasure was supposedly discovered, does not exist.
  4. Even if the legends are true, it’s not logical that whoever buried the treasure would have abandoned it. (In other words, if there ever was treasure there, it’s illogical to assume it’s still there now).

Before I get to these reasons, it’s worth sketching out what the legend is, because it’s invariably where believers in Oak Island treasure start—and they often don’t make it any farther than that.