Tells the unhappy research of the Fenn Treasure: NPR

Forrest Fenn was rich and he had a flair for the dramatic. He therefore announced in 2010 that he had hidden a box of “treasure”, made up of gold and jewelry, somewhere in the rocky mountains. He convinced a large number of people to devote years of their lives to try to find this box, looking for clues in a cryptic poem that he included in his memories with lines like: “If you are courageous and in wood / I give you a title to gold.” He went on television from time to time to drop a clue, and he enjoyed the online community of people, frantically using all the bizarre techniques that you can imagine to decode the poem.

People died in search. People have abandoned their work. They spent a lot of money. All this is published the story and therefore not a spoiler, but if you want to know how it turned out, it has been gone: after about 10 years, shortly before his death, Fenn announced that the treasure had been found, and despite an early overview of the details, his family finally produced the “Finder” – a medical student. But Fenn never said exactly where the treasure had been hidden (although he said it was in Wyoming) or explained how the poem clues would have led someone there.

A researcher named Justin Posey, who appears strongly in the new Netflix docuseries Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasurefinally found a The spot he decided must be the Correct location, and a large part of the researchers community now treats it as the solution. The treasure, meanwhile, was sold at auction.

The series deals with this story as original and charming, a story of eccentric go-details in the American West. He focuses on a handful of “researchers”, including Posey, none of whom has ever found anything.

Their stories can be sad: a family described years Exhausting work to pursue a single theory on the place where the treasure was. They hoped to get money to help a member of the disabled family. A guy took his wife and children, and in each clip he shows, one of his children seems to be bored miserably.

Researchers may seem bad: Cynthia Meachum, one of the best known researchers who has become close to Fenn, said in the series that when people started to die, she was really worried – that treasure hunt was canceled. After all, she says: “S *** arrives.”

In the series, he fell to a single journalist, New York MagazineBen Wallace, to offer skepticism on fenn or hunting. Wallace’s feature on Fenn, published for the first time in 2020, explains why it was not sure that FENN’s statements should be taken at its nominal value. He also underlines the differences in the proposed solution of Posey in Yellowstone that the series does not mention.

There is something … Gross, honestly, about a rich person who hangs money in front of people, telling them to chase him in the water and on the mountains and through icy temperatures. Shake them, attract attention, then blame them for bad results, as Fenn did when he said there were rules to be in the rocks, and people generally don’t have to say. “There are always exceptions, and they learn the hard way,” he said.

The series seems to share its impulse to blame researchers for any problem. After all, it’s called Gold and greed. But is it really greedy to seek a reward that you are explicitly offered? Can a rich guy throw money into the desert, send people afterwards, make themselves famous, then when they waste their time or suffer or die by trying to understand his little poem as if they were analyzing an episode of The white lotusBe absolute because they shouldn’t have been greedy enough to do what they told them?

Perhaps the most striking and most appropriate thing about the series, however, is that it shows how much and again amateur detectives have set up long “solving” on the basis of “evidence” which seemed convincing but which were ultimately nothing. Again and again, what someone has found convincing – what he did his own research to conclude, which made them scream Eureka! – was wrong, even if it sounded well. And it never slowed them down. To date, it seems that no one really knows how or if, this poem could have been cracked to reach the right answer.

Maybe wealthy people are waving money and asking people to make exploits to get a game is not a great idea. Maybe it’s worth walking outside in the mountains, even without the promise of wealth. And perhaps a story on such losses for the fun of a man is not so charming.

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