FBI records on search for fabled gold raise additional questions
A scientific analysis commissioned by the FBI shortly before agents went digging for buried treasure suggested that a huge quantity of gold could be below the surface, according to newly released government documents and photos that deepen the mystery of the 2018 excavation in remote western Pennsylvania.
The report, by a geophysicist who performed microgravity testing at the site, hinted at an underground object with a mass of up to 9 tons and a density consistent with gold. The FBI used the consultant’s work to obtain a warrant to seize the gold — if there was any to be found.
The government has long claimed its dig was a bust. But a father-son pair of treasure hunters who spent years hunting for the fabled Civil War-era gold — and who led agents to the woodland site, hoping for a finder’s fee — suspect the FBI double-crossed them and made off with a cache that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The newly revealed geophysical survey was part of a court-ordered release of government records on the FBI’S treasure hunt at Dent’s Run, about 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, where legend says an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.
Dennis and Kem Parada, who co-own the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers, successfully sued the Justice Department for the records after being stonewalled by the FBI. Finders Keepers provided the FBI records to The Associated Press. The FBI subsequently posted them on its website.
The technical survey data collected by geophysical consulting firm Enviroscan gave credence to the treasure hunters’ own extensive fieldwork at the site — and prompted the FBI to excavate in a massive, secretive operation that lasted for several frigid days in late winter of 2018.
John Louie, a geophysics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, unconnected to the dig, reviewed Enviroscan’s report at the request of the AP and said the firm’s “methods were very good,” and “their conclusions represent a physically reasonable hypothesis” that gold was buried at the site.
But he cautioned the subsurface gravity anomaly that Enviroscan identified did not definitively establish the presence of gold. There are other technical reasons why Enviroscan’s data could have turned out the way it did, Louie said.
“Thus, it is also entirely reasonable that the FBI did not find anything at the site, because there was not really any gold there,” he said via email.
Enviroscan co-founder Tim Bechtel declined to comment about his work at Dent’s Run, saying the FBI has not given him permission to talk. The FBI would not discuss Bechtel this week but said that after the dig, agents “did not take any subsequent steps to reconcile the geophysical-survey findings with the absence of gold or any other metal.”
Other documents in the just-released FBI case file raise still more questions. A one-paragraph FBI report, dated March 13, 2019 — exactly one year after the dig — asserted agents found nothing at Dent’s Run. No “metals, items, and/or other relevant materials were found,” the report said. “Due to other priority work … the FBI will close the captioned case.”
Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, cast doubt on the FBI report’s credibility. She cited its brevity, as well as its timing — it was written after Finders Keepers began pressing the government for records.
“It does not read like one would expect,” said Weismann, a former Justice Department lawyer. “If that is the official record in the file of what they did and why they did it, it says almost nothing, and it’s crazy.”