The Curse of Oak Island: TOP 5 FASCINATING FINDS

For 226 years now, Oak Island has been home
to a fascinating treasure mystery.
Although many compelling reports
have surfaced over the generations about
evidence of treasure,
booby-trapped flood tunnels,
and even a large stone bearing a carved
message saying “40 feet below 2 million
pounds are buried,”
most of that is all anecdotal, with no
hard evidence to verify any of it.

So tonight, we’ll be counting down the top
finds the fellowship has made so far
that indicate Rick, Marty, and the team
are closer than ever to the ultimate
answers.

Number five: the slipway.
We’re going to let him just kind of peel
this away,
and then we’ll hopefully expose it to some
degree.

“Hold up, Billy,
there’s a timber right there.”
“Wow, there’s another beam right there.”
“Right here.”

That’s odd. In 2018, Rick, Marty, and Craig
surrounded Smith’s Cove with a massive
steel cofferdam in the hopes of finding
important clues,
and also in an attempt to shut off the
flood traps believed to feed seawater
into the money pit.

“There’s another piece. Here’s another
piece there, yeah.
Look at all of those logs! This is quite
different from what we’ve encountered
down there. The logs are
basically rollers, if you will. It’s like
a subway.
This kind of signifies there’s quite a
load—
quite a load expected.”

This could be the dwarf.
What they had found was indeed a wharf
or slipway. The questions that arose were:
who built it and when?

“Guys, this is the part of the war room meetings I really
like. We’ve got some information, some
results. Sample number seven is the slipway.
It’s the north arm on the east end.
So the slipway, we believe, red spruce.
It’s reminiscent of some of the samples we did
in other areas of Halifax.
We had a fairly strong date on, and
that’s 1771.”

“Wow! It is original features.”
“Yep.”
“Predates the money pit? Yeah, this is
quite impressive. For me, this is the
biggest thing that’s happened since we
started this quest.”

Number four: the lead cross.
During season five, the Brooch brothers
were trying their luck at Smith’s Cove.
They made one of the most important
finds in Oak Island history.

“Someone here, Rick!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! What?”
“I see someone.”
“Oh! Holy shimoli! All right,
it’s a cross. That’s a cross.”

Well, I first thought—I thought that
looks like a medieval cross.
So I would say that is somewhere in
between 1200 and 1600.

“So, Jack, if you can ring to buy us up.”
Rick was already confident that he and
Gary made a key find, but he, along with
his brother and Craig, also knew they
needed to apply some objective science
to be sure.

“Hello, Tobias! Hi, guys.”
For that, they turned to geochemist
Tobiah Scott Roenick, who analyzed the lead
isotope composition of the cross to find out
where and when it came from.

“I compared the lead isotope data of the
cross that you gave me with my database
of all bodies and metals here, and I think
I got some pretty interesting results for you.
Comparing the data, I noticed that the
lead isotopes of the cross are somehow
related to European deposits,
but I did not find any match with the
quarries that were used in the 15th to
17th centuries.
I therefore went on and compared the
lead isotopes of the cross with those of
deposits where archaeologists know
medieval mining took place, and I think I
found a match there.”

“Really?”
“Yeah, and time period wise, you think it’s
pre-15th century then?”
“Um, I think it’s pre-15th century, yes.”
“Wow, you nailed it, Gary!
Where the heck did it come from?”

The data of the cross is very consistent with
the area of southern France.

Number three: the paved area.
One year after discovering the cross, the
team once again drained the swamp and
conducted a massive excavation to
investigate the theory long held by the
late Fred Nolan that the swamp was
man-made.

“Look at that!”
“That remarkable!”
“Yeah, tell me that’s natural.”
“Oh, there’s no way that’s natural, Rick.
Look at it; it’s just layered right on top!
And it’s so uniform; it’s just perfect!”

“I’ve seen some strange things in this
swamp, but this is—
I don’t know; I don’t know how you
explain this.”
“This stick will tell me when that stone
was placed.
If you date the stick, you know when that
happened.”

The results were nothing short of astonishing.
“So you remember that squished stick?
There’s the dates we’re getting.”
“Wow! Yeah, what are they? Around 1200 A.D.?”
“Medieval, medieval, baby!”

Number two: the stone wharf.
It began when Dr. Spooner launched an
investigation of the southeastern corner
of the brackish bog.
“That’s great news! I’ve always felt
there’s something weird about this one, right?”

But what he first thought might be a
wall of some kind was soon revealed to
be something much more telling.
“I didn’t expect to see this.
Do you hear that? No, it is my belief, at
least my initial belief, that it is a
road or a pathway or a
platform.”

The swamp was drained, and the fact that
this wharf, which Dr. Spooner determined
to be at least 300 years old,
was completely contained within the
swamp could only mean one thing:
that the swamp is a man-made feature.

“That looks exactly like an old Roman
road. It’s possible you know indicates
probably a loading or unloading from a
ship. It means to me
that something rather massive was
occurring well before the discovery of
the money pit on Oak Island.
Could it be an indirect indicator of
treasury? Yes, because why go to all this
expense and construct this road that
seems to have been constructed to be
hidden?”

Number one: silver in the money pit.
Over the past decade, this team has drilled
more than 100 boreholes
and dug nine massive steel-cased shafts,
attempting to verify those incredible
historic tales of treasure in
the money pit.

We saw them find more pieces of
parchment, a gold-plated button, and even
video footage of numerous gold-colored
objects more than 170 feet underground.
But up until the fall of 2021, any
verifiable evidence of treasure had
eluded them as well.

“Not really any wood that we were hoping
to run into.
Clock is ticking; we’re running out of
time.”
“Yeah, exactly.”

“Hey, guys!”
That’s when geoscientist Dr. Ian Spooner
came up with a revolutionary plan.
“So the idea is to look at water
down drill holes that exist, okay?
The water in those wells should reflect
the chemistry of the ground that they
interact with.”

“Well, how would we identify whether or
not there was treasure?”
“I absolutely love this idea of Dr.
Spooner’s.
If there’s a massive amount of metal
down there somewhere, it should be
leaching into the waters. Let’s test it
for the very things which we seek!”

Working with team members, as well as
chemist Dr. Matt Lupman, Dr. Spooner took
samples from numerous boreholes and
shafts that the team had previously dug.
It would lead to the greatest scientific
discovery in Oak Island history.

“So I’ve got one question to ask:
Do you think there’s treasure in the
money pit?”
“Oh, I like that lead!”
“No, you know I’m serious!”
“Do I? Yeah, small chance.”
“I do; I absolutely do. I believe that
what they drilled into in 1897 is a real
right, and I think it’s still there.”

“Right. So Doug, can you bring up the
presentation?”
“I can’t.”
“Great.”

[Music]
“There is every reason to believe down in
those holes that there is something
close by that contains a very large
amount of silver.”

“I guess I’m still trying to get a mental
picture of how much silver it would take
to give these levels. Like, is it a
handful of silver, or is it a
gearheart dump truck load of silver?”
“It’s a gearheart dump truck!”
“Oh, baby!”

“Are we closer to finding an actual
physical treasure? We’ve got a shaft here,
and maybe it’s the money pit. I think the
clues are adding up that ultimately
we’ll get either ourselves there or
someone there.”