Curse of Oak Island Flames Out Or I Just Don't Care Anymore

Okay, I give up. I just don’t care if there is a treasure on Oak Island or not, but I suspect there is not. I have been watching this show since it began but my interest in the subject started much earlier, as I have said before. I learned about Oak Island in a book, This Baffling World, that I bought in the early 1970s. It told of many strange things such as UFOs, which is why I bought it in the first place, but it also contained some of the more terrestrial mysteries such as Oak Island.

It told the traditional story, but it was interesting enough that I looked for other

One of the many attempts to get at the Money
Pit treasure.

information about that buried treasure. I found some magazine articles and when I found D’Arcy O’Connor’s The Big Dig: The $10 Million Search for Oak Island’s Legendary Treasure, I had to buy it. Of course, the book ended with the failure to find the treasure for a variety of reasons. Just the hints that something was there, but no real evidence of anything like millions of dollars in treasure.

In 1968, Dan Blankenship and David Tobias formed the Triton Alliance Ltd. with the purpose of recovering the alleged treasure. In 1971, Borehole 10X was enlarged and lined with steel. They wanted to put a video camera down, into a void they had discovered. According to the story, they saw a floating hand suspended in the dirty water. Another such probe picked up what looked like three chests, various tools, spikes and logs and finally what looked to be a human body. On The Curse of Oak Island, in the first seasons, they repeatedly showed this poor-quality video.

They enlarged the borehole to the point that someone could get down it and look around. Blankenship showing great courage, made a number of dives in his attempt to locate and recover the treasure. During a dive in November 1976, Blankenship heard a rumbling and demanded to be pulled up immediately. As he looked back down, he saw that some of the casing had collapsed. Access to the bottom was now blocked. They tried to reopen the borehole, but mechanical issues and other troubles finally forced them to abandon the attempt. Much later those problems would be resolved.

After this, they planned a “Big Dig” with a new shaft large enough to encompass the earlier attempts, to be lined with steel to defeat the alleged boobytraps and to protect any divers brave enough to go down there. The stock market crash in 1987 ended those plans as investors pulled out and other sources of capital dried up. You might say the money dried up with the stock market.

There is another major problem with all this. There is no real evidence that any treasure is buried on the island. There might have been, but it might have been removed by those who buried it or, more likely, there might never have been any treasure buried there at all. Interestingly, now that we have the Laginas trying to get to the treasure we learn that the things they are finding today are the same sorts of things found during all those earlier attempts. These include wood and coconut husks and iron spikes. Those spikes, according to the analysis, had been forged prior to 1790 and the wood was carbon dated to 1575 plus or minus 85 years. All that suggested someone on the island long before the boys found the Money Pit in 1795, but again, that doesn’t prove there was ever a treasure hidden there.

I’m not going to go into all the items found in those earlier years and what was extrapolated from them. I wrote about it in a book, Lost Gold and Buried Treasure that was published in 1995, which, of course demonstrates my interest going back a couple of decades, if that is necessary. Back then I wrote, “Oak Island is unique in the field of treasure hunting. Everyone knows where the treasure is. At the bottom of the pit. Modern technology should be able to defeat the booby traps…”

This was before the Laginas showed up and used that modern technology to defeat the booby traps, if there were, in fact, any booby traps to defeat. Instead it seems that the high-water table of the island, and a series of natural underground chambers and caves might have given the impression of an elaborate maze of pits and booby traps. The question that no one seemed to ask, but I will now, “Who had the technology prior to 1795 to create the Money Pit as it is described today… and even if they did, would they have been able to recover the treasure?”

The real point is that I don’t believe there is a treasure there and I don’t think there ever was. We have been treated to breathless finds that turn out to be nothing extraordinary. A coin dated 1695 that proves nothing other than someone with a coin with that date on it had been on the island… not that it was dropped in 1695 or 1795 or even 1985… it could have been dropped two days before it was found.

We have iron artifacts, which are not gold, but iron, and these sorts of things have also been found on the island a half century ago. They prove nothing and worse yet, they were found close to the surface. Little has been pulled up to suggest any

Marty Lagina

hidden treasure. You might say that it just the trash left by human occupation.

I could go on, but I’ve written about this in the past on this blog. They have nothing to prove a treasure is there. But the real clue might have been in the last episode on April 2. Marty Lagina, in talking about the treasure and the history, seemed to be less than candid. His body language suggested, at least to me, that he was discouraged and might not even believe there is a treasure here anymore. Oh, I’m sure he did at one point, but he seems to have lost his enthusiasm for the search.

After six seasons of this, I’m tired. I can’t take more excitement over wood structures that were built by those looking for the treasure over the last two centuries. I’m tired of things found on the surface that prove human occupation but do not prove a treasure is buried there. I’m tired of guesses that have no real basis in fact and leaps of logic that tell us nothing but lead off on tangents. If the ratings remain high, I’m sure we’ll be treated to a seventh season, but those of us who pay attention know that the answer has already been found. If there ever was any treasure on Oak Island, it is long gone… and the more likely answer is that there never was any treasure to begin with.