A LOST TROVE OF CIVIL WAR GOLD, AN FBI EXCAVATION, AND SOME VERY ANGRY TREASURE HUNTERS

[douglas9]

The fbi was excited. That much seemed evident from the affidavit the agency lodged on March 9, 2018, asking a court for permission to dig up a Pennsylvania hillside in search of Civil War gold.

The affidavit related a story from a document titled “The Lost Gold Ingot Treasure,” which had been found in the archives at the Military History Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The tale, in its barest bones, was this: In June 1863, a caravan of Union soldiers transporting a shipment of gold through the mountains became lost. Three men were sent to get help and eventually one returned with a rescue party, which located the group’s abandoned wagons but no men, no gold. Teams from the Pinkerton detective agency scoured the hills. In 1865, two and a half buried ingots were found, and, later, the bones of three to five human skeletons. The rest of the gold remains missing.

The affidavit also laid out how this story had come to the FBI’s attention. A treasure hunter named Dennis Parada had heard folklore alluding to the lost gold “since he was a child,” and had spent “over forty years” searching for it. Now he and a team including his son, Kem, believed they had finally located it, in the inaccessible recesses of a “turtle-shaped cave” near the community of Dents Run. FBI agents had visited the site twice and ordered geophysical surveys that had detected something underground—something “with a density of 19.5g/cm³ (the density of gold) and consistent with a mass having a weight of approximately 8½ to 9 tons.”

In other words, the FBI believed it knew where an enormous hoard of gold was, and as soon as they could get their hands on a warrant, federal agents were coming to get it.


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/pennsylvania-civil-war-treasure-gold-hunt-fbi/638445/?utm_source=feed

[underpants]

1. The original story sounds like "Kelly's Heroes"

with a Tarantino twist

[Effete Snob]

2. "I'm going to find out what the hell the FBI did and I'm going to expose it to the world."

Well, it sounds as if the FBI, acting on a citizen tip, obtained a warrant to seize lost US government property found on PA state property, and then executed that warrant.

What's the mystery?

Does he think they owe him some?

A judge signed off on a warrant giving the FBI 14 days to seize “approximately one or more tons of gold belonging to, and stolen from, the United States Mint, and located on the Dents Run Site, in Elks County, Pennsylvania.”

I get that he's upset that they didn't tell him anything after he'd put all that work into it. But, quite frankly, if I tell the US government where to recover some lost US government property, then I'd pretty much expect them to go get it if they wanted it. If there was some kind of reward or finder's fee, then I'd ask about making that kind of a deal before telling them where it is.