00:00:09 Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten in my case, underwear listening Hunt podcast, you can't predict anything presented by on X. Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on X. We're we're sitting here to keep this in the back of your mind while you listen to this episode. We're discussing why, ah, 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 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, Uh, to lay off people kind of what you're you know, you're I don't know like, like, how when people say, like, what do you write about? It's hard because you're a generalist long form magazine and I'm mostly a magazine writer, general interest right about everything from you know, you know Nazis to the media business to treasure hunts. Wrote a book about wine. Yeah, it's yeah, I tell people about that real quick. I found myself telling people about that book all the time. So I wrote a book about the most expensive bottle of I ever sold, which was a supposedly a seven Bordeaux red Bordeaux that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson and was discovered in a bricked up seller in Paris in the mid eighties 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 seller for two hundred years? And was the guy who found 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 cut to it. I don't give away the ending. People gotta buy it to find out that one of the things I learned in that book that was most interesting to me U was that, I mean, besides the story about the wine was the thing I didn't realize that 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 uh mainstream like Wall Street dick swinging kind of thing, right, and it got into this thing where people have wine tastings. I had never heard this, that that you have wine tastings. You can have a horizontal or a vertical tasting. That's right, So tell people, like what that is. So, like a horizontal tasting would be one year one vintage, let's say two thousand and twenty vintage, but it would be a bunch of different wines, like maybe it's like ten or twenty or even more wines all from that year and you're comparing so so you have the same sort of weather conditions, same growing conditions, but you're comparing the wines against each other. A 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 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 has happened like definitively overnight, but as it became fashionable to host wine tastings and people were filling out their verticals or horizontals, there would 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 is always seems to find one. But there's some guy who wants this extremely rare you know, cheval Blanc, which was one of one of the famous ones. And uh, and this guy, Hardy Rodenstock, you know, miraculously just bought a private seller that had a dozen 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 it's ever been produced. Uh. Doing that led into like you did, 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 stick as the person, like a person who goes and examines what's the most expensive blank one can get? That's true? Yeah, I did two articles, um for GP magazine about I think it's called like the and the one percent, just trying out super expensive or rare things like, um, you know, the Bugatti vey Round sports car, or the most expensive bed the Hostins is the Swedish bed called the Hostins vividous bed um where I mean to try it, I had to sleep in the showroom and for like insurance reasons that the company made us higher 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. Um. The most expensive airplane, the most tends of 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 is you know, maybe like five dollars out on value, it just kind of caps it for me. Yeah, and then you did the most expensive fishing trip you can go on, the most expensive fishing trip, which I think you went on a similar trip. It's not the same one down in Patagonia exactly. I was on the exact same trip fly fishing. I mean I wasn't on up with you, but I was on a similar trip. I think you give me a few pointers with the fly fishing ride. Before I went, my wife was 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 wand up taking quite a shine to all these young whipper snappers run around the helicopter pilot suits, which is the weird. That's a weird as true when you have a reservation like a hotel or a restaurant or something, or people ever expecting Detroit Pistons defensive Player of the Year Ben Wallace. You know 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. So you have all all your teeth and everything were lined up. I don't know anything about his dentistry. I just uh, you know, he just yeah, he has he has much more hair than I do. And you know he looks like a professional athlete earlier. Yeah, he's about a foot taller than this Ben Wallace. Um, darker skin, bigger hair, Um much different. Also, the Pistons are basketball team, not a hockey team. The teeth, Oh why did that hockey? That was perfect st like when you play into its very very on brand. Why did that thig hockey? I don't know what was the position you said? Maybe it felt to me like a hockey position. And he was a powerfulward, he was a defensive that I feel like it must be hockey. Uh. The reason the thing that Ben, all that stuff was not worthy, All that all that work was not worthy. But what is worthy is Ben is just finished a large piece of reporting on the forest fen treasure. Um. You probably have a tained now, I would say, like a high level of subject matter expertise on the Forest Fin Treasure, surpassing, surpassing that of our own Spencer new Heart, who has no a mild interest. Yes, uh, 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. Go right to Ben. Explain the Fen Treasure. All right, the Fen Treasure. We gotta understand Forest Fan, Forest Fu. I got this all planned out to talk about. No, you could 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 Fen Treasure is a chest of treasure, including a lot of gold coins, gold nuggets, gems, some ancient jewelry um that was hidden in the Rockies in two thousand ten um and that by an eccentric guy from Santa Fe or wealthy art collects, art 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 about a million year, but then a million. But that's not counting its collective value as now a cultural artifact, absolutely, which can make it exponentially greater. Exactly, Um, four people have died looking for it. Five at least five have died trying to find the treasure. Okay, with that established, uh, and I want to jump and explain real quick how I became aware of Forrest Fent. 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 thirteen years. And I feel like I was probably from the start, from early on, I mentioned the dude Forrest Fen to you. I knew this this this art well, an art collector, fighter pilot. He's a Vietnam pilot, correct for combat missions. Uh, eccentric antiquities dealer, just man about town in Santa Fe. I heard about them a long time ago when I was when I first got interested in Clovis points, so ice age projectile points, spear 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 Cash and anthropolo. I knew a number of anthropologists who were like legit academic and the apologists a number of anthropologists who were kind of like pot hunters, meaning they're there are hobbyists who liked to hunt arrowheads, and they would often sit and argue about and speculate on the legitimacy of the Fen cash. And it was just 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 knew for a fact that some of the Clovis points in the Fen Cash we're phonies. Then I became aware of the Fenn 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 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 he had the treasure. So what 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 at treasure hunt, Like what is you know what what motivated him? Anyways? I mean he grew up in Texas. His dad was a school teacher, 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. UM. 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. UM. But even as a pilot, he would you know, use his flights to kind of survey the landscape and occasionally like put down own 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 UM 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 um, you know, things like sitting bowls, peace pipe and all kinds of you know, kind of fabled relics and um. And he was just a lifeline collector. And then eventually in in the mid to late eighties, 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 ten years, they're kind of excavating it himself, courting no shortage of controversy in the process. According 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. Um, well, how much did he buy that thing for? I don't know. I don't think that that number has been published. Yeah, but it was, I mean, I think it was over a thousand acres. It was. It was a huge like bought an old pueblo. It's like like an old village site. Yep, to dig it up. You mentioned the Santa Fe ar boom as if it was like an event, what what was that it was? So, I guess in the seventies and early eighties Santa Fe became UM a popular place for art collectors to go to buy cowboy art, Indian artifacts, UM sort of new Western art UM 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 Summers, Ralph Lauren, people like that. UM three Company, The Regal Beagle 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 it. Yeah. I I've often brought up that I think Shakespeare stole most of his material from Threes Company, because that's where he developed his love for like misheard conversations. You know, but that's a premise for a novel like Shakespeare traveled, traveled back in time from Threes Company too. It started writing his comments like this is going to blow up in the Elizabeth in Europe. Yeah, it's like they're gona people are gonna love this when I get back to where I came from. This idea that you hear a conversation miss only here part of it get a come to a wild conclusion. It's all textbook threes. Come don don knots, should be should have been in more Shakespeare adaptations. Uh okay, So walk through as best you can to how this you know, art dealer, Um a little bit of a fable list. I mean he himself breaking tour on. I mean he himself said, you know of what I say is true? You know? And he said he said that, He said, um, it's not what you are, it's what people think you are. So there was a little bit of the kind of rogue ish storyteller to him. Always can you quickly tell the story you talk about in your article? Um, at least an early draft to 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. So he had an intern. This is in I think the early eighties or late seventies, 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 club. This is in New York City, and she was really interested in Egyptology. Go figure, and a customer of hers at the Playboy club UM made a gift to her of a small like something small and mummified. Um, and she had an X rayed by a doctor friend I'm using like a medical X ray device, and it was a baby crocodile that had been mummified but for mumified by a real Egyptian mummified baby crocodile and internet stuff man, and like a nile crocodile. I mean, I don't know if, I mean, I don't know which river it came from, but that that's my guess, is that species. And they wrapped it up like a little Halloween costume and mummified it. 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 fence hands like he buys it, and he was always buying just like interesting objects. So he buys this for the gallery and he displays it um in a case and says, you know, d accession from the British Museum, you know, and it was sort of implied that it was a human mummy. What's de accession means? That means like sometimes museums have um too much stuff and they maybe need money, so they se all this 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, or of of of validation and respectability. Is that only in museum lingo or is there another case where you would say private, private collectors who have sort of collections d accession things. I learned this working on the Wine book, because the Forbes family collected all kinds of stuff and they would d accession things from their collection. Yeah, a lot of other people do that. They call it selling something. I gonna started switching all this lawnmower. Okay, so continue about the crocodile. Alright, So Linda Durham Young, you know intern in Fenn's gallery sees this thing that used to belong to her and went to to forest then and said, you know that's not the accession by the Bridge 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 this story he was telling about this object corrected. I think it's important to bring up the uh, it's important to bring up I don't want to call him credibility act. I don't want to call him credibility problems. It's important to bring up the showmanship of Fen or what's the word you would use, showmanship, credibility gap. I don't know. I think he was 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. Um. But and he was, as he said, he was a storyteller. So you know, you know, it might be good word for him, a bit of a rascal. He's rascally. I think he'd liked to just generate like ideas and and creator ruckets. He wasn't 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 fan Um unlike a lot of archaeologists who thought he was a pot hunter, and Thomas said Forest was a rascal. You know. He reminded me of the what you see in the Native American oral literature. A lot got in my head as you use the word. I was thinking my buddy Fred who used to call Bill Clinton the rascal president. That words always stuck in my head. But he was like attempting to build the same age as though like um the dosekis commercial is the most interesting man in the world, like it. It has big that energy totally yeah yeah, but he's got like combat. I mean, there's like a foundation there right absolutely. And in fact, you know, when I went into this, I first thought, am I gonna have to do all this kind of verification, like get his military records, because that's the sounds like a tall story, but it actually is. It is all true. And it was somewhere along the way I think, where he had cracked Um a jet and then somebody went into where he said he crashed it and they found it and like verified the whole story about you know this crash that you know who did that. I didn't know this. I met those guys. I have a giant thing. That's a long story. Do you mind if I tell us really quickly interesting? I have a box of one thousand meat bags plastic bags that butcher's used to send meat home in because years ago, the production company we work with was doing a show with Pat La Frieda. The guys I work with, the camera guys I work with, had been working on that and came over my house and these bags of lamb meat and whatnot, and I was admiring the bags. They passed along to the La Frida's 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 La Frida's brother, the famous butcher went to Vietnam to find a chunk of airplane. I 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. He's an engineer. He became electrical engineer. He became i think, really interested in the puzzle of seeing sort of the historical research and um, you know, could he cracked this puzzle? Could he? He was a treasure hunter. Oh so he was a fan treasure was a fan treasure guy. And if you're a spinoff exactly so like if you're a fan treasure guy, job one is basically making a study of forest Fan because you're trying to understand like places that might have been special to him, where he might have hit the treasure. So Chris Lafreda happened to go down the rabbit hole of Fens Vietnam experience, and I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to find this wreckage if it still was still sell it back to Fan. He Oh, he gave him. He gave him a couple of the pieces that he got ship. Yeah. I mean he was using like drone, you know, 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 are like, oh, yeah, there's wreckage over on that slope over there, no kid you know, 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 thirty two years ago, Forest Fen 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 and in fifty plus sleeping pills um to spare his family the agony of you know, drawn out death. So when Forest is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he decides he's going to do the same thing, but with the twist that he's gonna 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's 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 suicide note. 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 that's where that's where if you're the centric, 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 he did not die. He recovered fully from cancer UM and but he kept sort of toying around with this idea of hiding a treasure chest. You 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 um collectibles. And when friends came over, he had 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 this work in progress, which was this bronze ten by ten treasure chest that he was filling with valuables. Oh that's how big it was? Ten by ten inches yep, but forty two pounds pounds I was thinking of. I didn't know I was thinking of a big Remember I was asking you a lot of questions last night about the actual like stashing of it. Ten by ten yeah, yeah. I was picturing like like in a pirate movie, like a steamer trunk size. Yeah, oh, ten by ten Okay, go on it, um, you know, I'm looking at Spencer's pull up 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 gonna actually look like that treasure chest out of Like you know that it's too small box, a small pirate I would have found it and would have been, like I was expecting something much larger out of walked away and discussed. So one of the questions was, well, if he hides this treasure, how's he gonna know if it ever gets found, if it's often 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? UM that will let me know it's been found. And I think at that time, like he was kind of early for GPS, and he wasn't that technically minded a guy, So I don't think there was ever a quite 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 UM bank doctor, you know, 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 between you like a hundred thousand dollar bearer bond, they're not gonna just sit on that and when they went to the bank, he would be notified. He then though, UM thought, well what if the bank doesn't exist anymore? So apparently he he took that out of the chest and he came up with some other item kicked around. He's imagine he kicked around, putting some thousand dollar bills in which I didn't know existed, didn't. He actually put in some thousand dollar bills, which you know, as was recently discovered on the internet, futures the face of Grover Cleveland. UM, 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 Clothus points, but like a lot of like big gold nuggets, eagle gold, eagle coins, double eagals, um, other kind of more esoteric jewelry, and some projectile points or no, I don't know. I'm not sure. I thought you mentioned that there are some projectile points in there. I think someone I talked to you said they thought there were, but I don't know for sure. Maybe he put them in and took them out a couple of times because it looks like he's like staging the perfect scenery. Yeah, you might have thought, you know, the point wen't like impressive enough visually, so he stashes it. So he stashes it well, so in in um the summer of two thousand ten, he hides it. UM doesn't tell anybody where UM and he self publishes a memoir called the thrill of the chase. With this twenty four lines 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's outside 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 war 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 the beano. 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'm 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 hm that has everything you need to know. And then he, over the decade, makes himself available intermittently in terms of rascaliness. Though, I think before we move on, we gotta back up to two thousand nine, 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 holders of you know, artifacts from the Four Corners area. Um, and it's the FBI is uh. I don't know what the name of the ace was, but Fenn was involved. And I think they took like ten things from his home, um, 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. No, I don't know about that. I think he got them back. I mean there were charges filed a bunch against a bunch of other people. I think they're like over thirty people were arrested, but not against him and what but here at home. But now it's interesting to point it out. But if the FBI knocks on your door and takes a bunch of 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 built by like they didn't determine that he did something bad Fenn. 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, two people that had their doors knocked down to grab stuff, and then the informant himself killed himself. Um, and Fen never had any charges in the thing. But I said, let's say, I said, oh, I heard the FBI kicked 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 like, Still, one thing that happened, one thing, 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 had 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 bar, and after that was reported, people just thought fun was you know, more implicated than he was. And I don't think it's like a far leap either. I don't mean to sound like Alan dersh was here, but I'm just saying it's like there's a little bit like, you know, if he did, if he didn't get in trouble and got his ship 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 two thousand nine, and then a year later he hides one or two million dollars worth of UM 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 UM or that like this was a ploy to cell books. And I'm sure we'll revisit this part of the story itself, but it plays into the thing of like, uh, this guy doesn't have a perfect past, and so it could be a reason why, Uh, this isn't just like an innocent treasure hunt. Had you encountered that, had you encountered that little plot twisted reporting? Ben? Yeah? Yeah, I mean, but but the idea that he's like, I don't I'll do with all my illegal stuff is putting this box and buried on in the woods. Yeah, but yes, but I'm glad you remember that because I actually had forgotten that part. M hm. You chose not to put that in your article? I did, really why because I forgot about There's only so much you can fit. It's a long ass article. Yeah, I was looking looking. I couldn't put the fen cash in there, you know. Yeah. The whole point was to talk about the fen Cash, the project of closus quints. That's why I wanted a big, clous point article from Ben Wallace. And what do I get was it 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 who was involved in that case, and like Fenn 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 someone who really seemed to kind of tread close to the line a lot and was constantly having these skirmishes with you know, archaeologists, with museums, with the state government. Um so I think he was kind of ripe to be under suspicion. Yeah, now we're gonna jump to this. Fen 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. But in that include that Fenn continues to um give little like getting warmer or Nope, not that, or I can assure you it's not this like 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 controversy. 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 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, um, 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 them. The pressure of the 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 I think that Today Show is kind of like, we need you to do us better than that. They want some of the posts yea more possets like you know, so they wanted to like they wanted to lead to a discovery, right They're trying to force I think so they're trying to yea narrow the search possibilities. UM okay. So so simultaneous with that, there emerges this robust community of treasure hunters around the fin treasure UM and you know, on the Internet they all get together in a bunch of forums that are extremely UM active, and you know, people throwing out their various theories, which they called salves, or people talking about their boots on the ground trips as they refer to their field trips to actually look for the treasure UM. And like you know, like the Internet is about everything, I mean it was. It was a very varied group of people with varying levels of UM evidence backing up their theories. And so you know, there were people who would put forward UM serious interpretations of the poem, and then there'd be other people who would say, Um, did you notice in that interview Fen 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 treasures in Colorado. Uh. Some of the clues he gave her substantive absolutely, and 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 men 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's must be where it was exactly one one one one of the 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 fans backyard. And I said, but what about it being north of Santa Fanci If you go all the way around the world, you can be in his backyard and still be north of Santa Fe. He then people started dying. Then people started dying. I mean people were interpreting, you know, really like like home of Brown people started interpreting as an outhouse, so he had to eliminate, like say, it's not it's not in an outhouse, it's not under an outhouse. Yeah. But but yeah, so Home of Brown you get into that too. Because there's another interesting thing. Everyone everyone who's read Catchering the Rye, which if you haven't, go read its phenomental book, Catching the Rye, written by J. D. Salinger. J D. Salinger's publisher was Little Brown. The Salinger family ended up owning a property and Wyoming or so there was a Sallenger ranch. It was in Wyoming. I'm not sure whether or not that must be it Little Brown. Um, they're authors families ranch. Ye. Crazy shit. So this the search began just attracting, you know, thousands and thousands of people. Some of those people were kind of desperadoes there that you know, they quit their job 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 available. It's available for pre order. It's called The Mediator'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 into the Rio Grande on a inflatable raft. Um, and he's not heard from again. Kids, Like, wasn't it like only is a child's inflatable raft Because 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 cash the treasure and then proceeded down the river and saw that most so everybody starts doing float trips. Everyone starts doing float trips. So eventually his body is found. He drowned. U. Two more guys drowned, one I think also in the Rio grand d a another in the Arkansas River. UM. A fourth guy died in Yellowstone National Park. He was he slipped on a slope and dropped five feet to his death. And then another guy uh snowmobile into Dinosaur National Monument wearing like a thin get him jeans and froze to death. And that same guy. That's here's why you shouldn't because a month beforehand he had to get rescued for the same thing. Yeah, and it was some of these moments, um that inspired Fenn to like give further clues as he talked about like having his dialogue right, trying to stem the bleeding. So like when when this Randy died in the Rio Grand, I think Fanny just said he's like not in the real Grand or he had said it's like it's not uh south of Santa Fe or something like that, basically eliminating um the Rio Grand. And then Randy's wife 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 see the guy. Probably, I mean, I'm sure she had many motives um for her husband being killed looking for the treasure, but she was like one of the very vocal people. It was like this this isn't real. And actually they head of the new Mexico State Police, Pizza SETAs Uh, publicly implored Fen to to end the hunt, um, you know, to stop the deaths. Yeah, and I in your article, I was surprised to read too that that the Fen Treasure, in addition to Breaking Bad, the television show, is credited with an influx and tourism to New Mexico. It was that substantial. New Mexico's tourism department created a video featuring Fen 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 didn't say not to mention the Fen Treasure. Interesting. Yeah, I think Breaking Bad sent a lot of people to Albuquerque, and um Fens sent a lot of people to Santa fe 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 shuding 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 exactly and then he said, I guess a number of times he said I was how old eighty when he when he buried it or hit it. It's forty five pounds. I'm eighty years old. I carried it from my car, So keep that in mind. Yeah, to Alip, presumably to eliminate a lot of the people who are doing the crazy. Yeah, he eliminated side like it's not that was the main thing. It's no, it's nowhere. An eighty year old man couldn't have gone. Um, but yeah, specifically, it's not the real grand I think he might even said it's not in a river or beside a river, And I think I think he may be eliminated, like national parks because of the Yellowstone thing. Um never eliminated National parks. Okay, maybe it was the Yellowstone thing. He was like, you don't need rock climbing gear. It was something from one of those insis nothing you're not Yeah, you don't need crampons, or like you're not gonna be repelling down. Although there was a guy, another guy who repelled into the Grand Canyon um and ran out of rope before he got to the bottom. And then when like eleven 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 people. And then there was an Indiana treasure hunter in Yellowstone, Um 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 uh, when he got to the judge, he said, you might call me a lunatic what ever, but I feel wholeheartedly I solved that fan 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 his place he wasn't supposed to be, it was like, that's where the treasure was, your honor, That's why I should be innocent. There were there I just say like there were 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 um, there's 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, can you get into I think we've kind of touched on the crazy ship is like right, the crazy ship is 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 and all this kind of like avenue that this whole avenue approach emerges of like that that you'll find additional materials within his biography, but spend some time on some of the people who are who we're 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 um, 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 yellow Strand in particular was was sort of the biggest focus for a lot of people. One of the very popular spots was, you know, just like thirty miles from us, the way the Crael 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 uh Osborne Russell in his journal this is before Heaven Lake existed. It's a it's you know, it's an artificial lake. It's an empolierment um. They used to call that the firehole 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 atom was burning, and they called the fire hole. Then it got like subsumed by Lake hopgan Um. People started to feet realized or started to feel that there has that that that that the poem can't do it like like a literal understanding of the words in the palm, that it can't be adequate, like it can't put you on a spot to find a ten by ten inch box. But 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, it could refer to it like uncountable sort of hydrothermal locations. You know, there's I mean, there's so many. I went down to the Boiling River when I first moved to Montana looking looking for this treasure, A big box, you know what I may have, but I wasn't you know, maybe I mistake it for a rock. But because fed But then one of these treasure hunters, that the primary treasure hunter your profile talks about that Fenn had mentioned in some writing or some lecture or something he had mentioned as a kid being in the river and how he would hop around near a hot spring trying to find water was boiling Actually okay, it was, but that he would hop around and talk about places that were too hot, places that were too cold, and so him saying, begin we're warm waters and or whatever. Lad some serious people to think that that's that that that like, that's got to be like kind of where you need to look. And you get another guy that thought Sunlight basin right. That was also the same guy who whose first search location was boiling River. Um really fixed on Sunlight Basin because that was the place where he found, you know, the Salinger Ranch, and there were other sunlight he thought might refer to the warmth Sunlight Creek um and he found there was a mining aim where his clues sort of had led him there that happened to be owned by an LLC company that was registered to an attorney and Cody you sat on a museum board with fen 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 explained that a little bit of the of the solve. I mean, there were so many potential legal issues, right like what what's what are the tax issues depending on what kind of land it's on? Um, you know what are is it government property? Or can a finder claim at his property? Um? You know what's going to happen with this is are the land right stable? Like in five hundred years will the same or the land still be preserved in the same way, or might have come into private ownership or at least out for logging or whatnot. So you know, the was a lot of thought given to what kind of land might find have most seriously considered to to to avoid those issues? And where was the the good money was on? What public or private? I would say public, but um, but even that had a lot of complications. I mean private probably had more complications. You couldn't search it, You couldn't search somewhere where people wouldn't be able to look. 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 you 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. Uh, did he at one point in time, I think Spencer mentioned to me, did he at one point in time announce that someone had been a couple of hundred yards from it? He said, on more than one occasion that a bunch of people have been within five hundred feet and one or two people have been within two hundred feet of the treasure, like actual searchers, actual searchers, because they would send him emails. He was feeling hundred hundreds of emails, like over a hundred a day. UM. Searchers were constantly contacting him, and he was, you know, engaging with them. UM. And so they would say, hey, I just you know, here's my solve. They would want to tell him there solved. I think maybe some of them were hoping he would give him a clue or a hint and um, which he would not do for the most part. UM. And so that's how we knew where people were searching. And like all this dialogue um that kind of happens among fen and searchers. And then Fan and media, um, and these different interviews. It causes like some missing clues that like is it real? Is it not. One of them that it 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 and you can't actually find where he said that. But there's like a 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 planes 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 and unintentionally created these red herrings, um like this you know, it's a day trip from his house sort of thing. They were also like these super searchers who kind of befriended Fen and would really focus a lot on developing that relationship, and it created a sort of amount of disharmony and politics in the in the Chase community, because people would think that some people were secretly be and given like a leg up that they didn't have, that they were getting tips from fenn Uh. I want to bump along to more contemporary realizations here, but a thing that I want to cover um two observations. One was 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. So there was a community people who be like, hey, how about this, Hey how about this? Not like hoarding it for themselves, but they just wanted to like see it gets. They wanted to see resolution and not so much take ownership of who Um one of the searchers that the primary search you focused on, tell his name again, justin posey. Who Um takes an extremely organized, passionate, expensive, exhaustive approach to this. He and a friend it on an idea they don't attempt They hit on an idea of this this technological tool that's out there that can track someone's eyeballs and looking at a screen, like what are they looking at? As they're looking at a screen. It's software that will see what would be to the human eye imperceptible movements and also what you're trying not to look at. So you can show someone a screen and get a sense like this person is is purposefully not putting their eyes in that direction or whatever, and they get this idea that if they could get fed in the room with this software, with this program and flash for him a map of the Rockies, they will pick up what is eyeballs don't want and this eyeballs betray it doesn't want lie to detector tests 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 and he's he's a software um, you know, engineer, Uh, that it's shockingly precise, and he doesn't do it on ethical grounds, right. I mean, first of all, getting fan in the room and looking at a screen already begins to tread close to potentially sounding like kidnapping. But even if he's there voluntarily, Um, it just seemed like not, you know, not fair play. Like it's it's almost like yea, you know, and they're interesting using an unconventional Yeah, they're interested in fairy player. All right, now we're gonna jump ahead. I want to ask Ben what his personal favorite find theory was like if you had to guess um where it was. I mean, I I kind of think that these the solution that I might talk about it a little bit was the correct one. I don't know, how about you, Well, I don't know. I enjoyed all of it. They're like 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 um stuff in there that seemed to make sense where it was like, um, the warm waters haul at the boiling river, right the canyon down Yankee Jim Canyon HOMEO Brown the Joe Brown boat launch. Um, the end is drawing. Ever Now there's ny Montana, And because I live here, I like the idea of the Paradise Valley thing. And you're kind of a rockhound. Yeah, but rockhound. That's that's actually like probably where I saw the greatest overlap in communities were like people who like to look for rocks and then people who like to look for treasure, way more so than like people who like fishing or mushroom hunting or something like, Dude, I need to tell you if you want some yellow stone egg and holy ship, I found the motherload South later. I'll tell you later. Like every big news story. Um, I wake up one day not long ago, and I have many, many text messages from various friends. Uh, the fen cash has been discovered. Immediately everyone I talked to says bullshit. M Because I'll tell you why it is bullshit. Forest Fan, these five people have died. Forrest Fan is under pressure to uh stop the bleeding. Um, he's being sued by various participants who have devoted the decade of their life to finding the treasure. Uh, there's any like not emerging. There's always been a rumor that it's a lie. It's becoming to burden some for him. He's of failing health, which was borne out by the fact that he died a couple of 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 Ferres Spencer. Um. I don't think everybody was that pessimistic or like you and I were. Uh. Yeah, So I feel that way a little bit 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 June June? Right again, Like the timing is a little bit suspicious, just like with the FBI rate and him hiding the thing. Um. But yeah, I don't know, there's like warranted suspicion. Still, I'll let Ben take it from here. Just one other one other part of the burden was like, I mean, his family was dealing with the 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 to end this. Um, 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, um, you know, people were a lot of people were skeptical, people wanted to know more. Maybe a week later we post a couple of photos of him with what looks like the recovered treasure and what looks like like a lawyer's office at a conference table. Um. But it's got you know, dirt encrustment on some of it and age signs of aging. Um. 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 what where it had been found. And Fenn said, I have always said, and this is true, he had always said, I'm gonna leave it to the finder to choose whether or not to identify themselves and to choose whether or not to reveal the location UM, 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 I R. S. 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, I was pretty skeptical for all the reasons you mentioned. UM. Anyway, there's a ton of pressure on him. Finally, a couple of weeks after the discovery, he posts online again. He says, the finders 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 he 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 that just like the details weren't even deep. Hailes really no best on how back East has used for a guy who hits. It's not some dude from Nebraska. Okay, it's not. It's not. I mean, it's not. It doesn't narrow it. It trims off maybe a hundred million Americans, but there's still a couple hundred million left over that way. The Santa Fe New Mexican, which is his hometown newspaper, after like the solve or after it was found and it was announced him 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 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 who Summit missing in Costa Rica. The assumption was that he had been murdered, okay, and it was about his efforts to find his son. Roman Dial wrote a book about this. It was his efforts to find his son's body, identify the murderer, and 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, new Heart. It's like that same unsatisfying feeling though. Oh yeah, I'm with you, but that 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 it's found, uh, you know, by a shy guy back east backs real Wallflower. This guy, Um, it's in Wyoming. You know, people were just not people were not satisfied, and so the suspicion and the skepticism, I would say, you know increased. Um. People wanted 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 Fenn had ended the hunt and and gotten the treasure, retrieved the treasure or had a family member to it, and the searcher again that you spend the time on Posey, Justin Justin Posey. At first, he's like depressed and kind of catatonic. Yeah, but then instead of quitting searching, instead of being like, yeah, I'll move on to whatever the hell's next, like, uh, I'll get a dog and hang out at home, he's like he resumes just searching for the spot where it had been well just as insane as a side note. As a side note, I mean he already had a dog, dog I forgot about. So. One of one of his super methodical, you know, tactics that he used to kind of increase his chances of finding the treasure was he had a visla named uh Tucker Visla, and he had read about how in the nineteen sixties in Russia, in Finland and Sweden they had geologists had trained what we're called or dogs who had an ability to to sniff out mineral deposits you know that are like buried forty deep. And so he began to wonder, what what you know? We know the chest is made of bronze. We also know that searchers have gotten within five two hundred feet of the chest. You know, it would really suck if I got close to the chest, but not close enough. I could at least eliminate that possibility if I trained Tucker to be able to smell bronze. So he trained Tucker to smell bronze, burying dog treats next to the bronze chunks and metal amazon correct, and then eventually just would bury the bronze and give the dog a treat. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, this fella, this gentleman is like, wow, just keep searching and just trying to find a little hole where some other dude dragged a treasure out. I mean, he was not he was not alone, and he was not alone. An enormous number of people like I talked to would be like, you know, I'd be like, what are you gonna do now that the search is over? And 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 you were with me? It's like Peter's Terror or something. The search is over. I don't know what I'm talking about. You were It's like the last thing he says, the searches. Anyhow, you guys don't know the song talk about. I was gonna say, it's like a sun 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. In the same way that there were people who are like, yeah, my solve is correct, and the fact that the treasure is there, you know, not there means like it wasn't there he took it. These people would say, well, um, you know, they would get like a second there's a second treasure, Like they would have theories like there's a second treasure buried there, or the treasure the treasurer uh finder probably left part of the treasure there because that's what I would have done. So there was there were there were reasonings behind is it Peter Starr? Hit it, Steve, I'll say it again. Let's say it again, dude. When they make this into a movie and Ben's like in the movie and ship and the end, they're gonna have this song play survivor, then you're saying about a second treasure. No wait, hold on, So I have a question. Out of all of the searchers who you interviewed, is there common thread, like what's the typical psychological profiles? I mean, there was actually a scholarly study done by a psychologist at the University of North Dakota of the fen Chase community UM and you know, I mean you read the study and 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 ten percent 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 talked to because that they're the ones who kind of know about each other. And you you meet at these events, get into I'm trying to lead you gently where I want you to go. Out here, ben h the dude Posy wants to find the spot because if he can find the spot, he can 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. 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 it's been found, and he was, I mean, there was a concern that am I even gonna 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, they will still be evidence of where the chest. And he's got photographs to go off now because the finder snapped a couple of cell phone pictures of the box. What happened is so in September, someone calling himself the Finder post 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 now they've they spent twenty five 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. But they're anonymous UM and normally it would be easy to dismiss them because tons of people throughout this whole thing have claimed I found the treasure um. But in this case they included photographs that had not been We're not among the photographs Fenn had posted, so but they were clearly outtakes from the same photo shoot, so it had to be someone who had some connection to the situation. UM. Also, the Fenn family posted a link to this article on their website, which gave it that validation. So people are like, Okay, this is the finder. Okay. 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 go out looking for what is supposedly the real location where the treasure was found, and it was and it was in Yellowstone and the the solve, according to this source was that basically there were words in the poem that sound or looked like numbers. UM. There were either they were called like homophones or which was like sounded like 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 near to s a lake um at the continental divide, which is kind of like like looking at it, it's kind of like an auspicious sort of lake for clue given, because it flows both ways or like a drains. It 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. Uh. It's right off right there, so he could have old man could have carried it right from his car. And this dude justin um starts trying to match up photographs, right, I mean, what he's really trying to do is verify the information that this source has provided, right, Um, And the source has provided a few photographs. The sources provided the information of you know, these words in the poem and 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 kind of leaders of the forums were being inundated with like you know, I was the Finder. Like literally like more than thirty people said I was the Finder. Um. They were being inundated with like I know what the solve was, like more than three 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 Cowling's who ran you know, one of the sites um saying like I know the Finder, I know the solve, and he wrote back coolbro, 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 media article comes out from the Finder, and so he's like, maybe that guy actually doesn't know something. So then he started talking to him and this this this source basically said he had met the Finder online. There's 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 gonna tell you everything I know. Um. And so that's what Justin Posey was going out there with these two other searchers, Cynthia Mitchum and Christie Thor to try to verify what the source had said and where did they find. So they so they found First they go out um and find nothing. Okay, they go out to the 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 figured. They they determined that if you wrapped her and I think they talked to the source again, if you start the poem at the beginning 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 UM for coordinates, you get point to um, which is twelve seconds. And they had previously been treating two as meaning two seconds. Twelve seconds put them exactly at a location that Justin Posey was able, to his satisfaction, to match up with the source photographs based on the angles of leaning trees, the distance between trees, the height of the sun, 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 exactly like in the original photographs. One deciduous leaf that they thought was an aspen, there were large pole pine needles, and there was one a cottonwood twig, I think they thought. So he was 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 what the work. We actually had somebody Steve and mediator Instagram comments that had commented on multiple posts and they were like, my coworkers solved it. It was my coworker that found it. So then I reached out to that guy, and I was like, who's your coworker? Like why should I believe you that kind of stuff? And he's like, this is what he told me. Here you can talk to him. Here's just info. Or no, it's 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. And I was like, okay, uh, like how can you prove it? Can you like 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 Bennett said earlier, but he had like multiple days exchanging emails and texts and stuff. He was telling me he was the guy and that he was in maybel uh, Colorado and uh. And then he eventually you know, told me. They're like, oh, there actually was no treasure. But I solved his clue and here the reasons why and and stuff like that. But I was hot on the trail for a few days. I was like, I got it. That'd be cool, little feather like internet sleuthan camp. Yeah, Ben, how how confident are you there like that's where it was. I mean, I'm not very I'm not very confident. I mean, I guess the question I asked justin Posey, how confident is he? And he I think put his confidence at like I think he thinks it is it, but there are reasons to to doubt it. I mean, one 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 um. And they let's tuck her out of the out of the 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, menute bronze residue in the dirt. How confident, I just thought, a good idea, man, you gotta 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, and he has relatives who are pilots also though flight records. How confident are you, ah and and as 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 not that there was a leisure 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 it. 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 hall to this location? And I think there's a good chance like none of that ever matter. Yeah, I was going to ask him all of those words were only to lead to get you to figure out the numbers, or if those words also pertained to to cluse. I kind of think so, because even if you know these this location, like, there's no way the words could ever lead you to a price precise place. And if you have the coordinates, you don't need big words. When you need a bunch, you need a bunch of words they have numbers in them. You need a bunch of words that have numbers. And then he also is a fan of the rhyme, so they gotta rhyme, they gotta rhyme. Yep, is it I ambic contameter? 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 remember needed to learn. I think Shakespeare I am a contameter. You're not gonna have an answer, 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 you go back and look for a dude with a lot of jewelry at well, actually would don't expect him to be And they're 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. Um. My first attempt is going to be to have it end up in a place for UT wanted it to, which people think was a museum, probably maybe the Buffalo Bill Museum and Cody um. But basically they're going to try to sell it at auction UM, where I think they can maximize the value not just of the actual objects, but of the whole story around it, the historia. It doesn't make any sense to liquidated. Yeah, and then your guy that you spend most of your time with your search, or that you spent because you couldn't spend time with the Finder because he doesn't want to. He doesn't want to, he's too shy, um, too concerned about the whatever economic issue he's faced with now legal issues. The guy, one of the guys you spent time with, was kicking around like how he might like to get it, but acknowledges that it's beyond its probably gonna be beyond his means because it's not even gonna be sticker value. Yeah, I mean, he thinks it will be you know, exponential or multiple. So you know, let's say instead of one million, it's ten million. It was worth a million bucks ten years ago. I mean, it's also based on the you know, fluctuating price of gold, so and whatever, who knows, you know, 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 and forest Fan. That's right. He found a meteorite which he's confirmed as a meteorite, and apparently there's a lot of there's a lot more where that came from, and so all of them together would be very value able, and that's that would be the basis of this treasure, that he would hide and set up his own treasure hunt. Spencer's perking up. I've had two instances where I thought maybe this is a meteorite, and it like the dollar value on those things is crazy. So if this person has a meteorite to hide, that's that's great, that's a valuable treasure. I and Fraser did a piece about meteorites one time, or some aspect of it. He was dealing with a meteorite that it again didn't come through a guy's roof and Montclair, New Jersey, came through his rus and cracked his toilet. Yeah, and he goes upstairs. That a meteorite. So do you think we are going to ever have like the satisfying ending, like the murder solve, but haven't identified the killer thing? Are we going to get all the details someday? I mean, I think the the you know, the combination of the source coming forward if they are legitimate, has kind of taken away a lot of the you know, 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 if if they're concerned about, you know, 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 to to They probably published a nice book about it. They could, you know, make a movie about it. Um. So I would. 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 mm hmm. And that that's also like one of the big red flags for people referring to the forest Fan 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 were the books were selling for like a or 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'shidden. I have to say, that's a roundabout way to sell some books. Maybe we should try. 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 book store 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 sure of the later books, but that first one 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 talk about forest friends death? Nothing suspicious? Nothing suspicious, I mean, and you know he was he turned ninety in August and then um, in early September, there was a kind of last gathering of the most devoted searchers in Yellowstone and a fishing bridge in West Yellowstone and a fishing bridge and which you said, as a sign says you can't fish, which says no fishing allowed. Um. And it was the Labor Day weekend. And then that Monday, uh Fen died of what the Santa Fe police said was natural causes. You know, there was some suspicion or nine years old. He's nine years old. And his wife died a few weeks later, his wife of sixty six years Peggy, Oh, that's touching. Yeah, I like that man. But he held on and my wife dies like fast. Um. One of the things I like the Fenn said was someone was saying him, ah, 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? And he had expressed right that that he just wanted people to get away from their devices and ship and go do something and just be outside. If that was true, I wonder if the 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 it 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 he I mean, you've never been to the Rockies. So I think I think there are a lot of people like that. I think it did get people, But there was definitely a very robust, you know, bunch of armchair treasure hunters who maybe never went to the Rockies, went a lot of time talking on in the forums. So how do people, um, how do people find your article? I think if you go to ny mag dot com. It'll be there on the front page and why mag dot com If you're running another problems ben Wallace type in Ben Wallace fan Benjamin Wallace, unless you want to get the don oh sorry, Benjamin Wallace. Type in Benjamin Wallace, something like fen something that treasure New York Magazine. Yeah, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll get there, 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 um emailed my agent about it and he said, there's already like 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 major publishing. How yeah, you're you're a publisher random House sounds a bit. Yeah, I'll buy yours, like your copy better? All right? Thank you, Ben, thank you being here. Are you gonna write more stuff to come and talk to us about? I mean, it's hard to get Meat Eater relevant material into New York Magazine. I got like, I don't think New York is where a lot of like hunting and fishing is happening. Yeah, but this is now it's true. I mean, I hope I will. I hope I will. Yeah. This what makes it relevant is what wasn't in there, which is colopus points which were used for hunting. That's a tenuous that's a tenuous connection. And I had a twist Steve's arm to like talk about this. He's like forest Fan. Oh I never said such thing. I wrote about forest Fan when you still had your mom's milk hanging off. I wrote about forest Fan in two thousand eight. But you were very cool on the idea of like having this be a thing on our website and like getting Ben more involved and having him on the pod cast. You you were not very on this. You have been on the podcast after. I think after some text messages where I'm like, people are gonna want to hear this, dude, I just I do not. I'd have to revisit some of this. I could picture me being a little dismissive of the find. He's he's just holding a grudge because he proved him wrong about the squirrels. Oh no, he doesn't think that, because dude, I have Spencer's coming back on very soon, he goes, I have developed an overwhelming body of evidence. Okay, we'll see to contradicts 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, Thanks Ca.