Hunters challenging FBI over dig for legendary gold

SurD ENTS rounded by dozens of stonefaced FBI agents on a frigid winter’s day, Dennis and KemParadastareddownat the empty hole and knew something wasn’t right.

The fatherson duo spent years combing this bit of Pennsylvania wilderness with highend metal detectors, drills and other tools to prospect for a fabled cache of Civil War gold. They felt certain they had discovered the hiding place of the longlost booty, leading the FBI to the mountainous, heavily wooded area last March.

Now, at the end of the courtsanctioned excavation, the FBI escorted the treasure hunters to the snowcovered site and asked them what they saw. They gazed at the pit. Not so much as a glimmer of gold dust, let alone the tons of precious metal they said an FBI contractor’s instruments had detected.

“We were embarrassed,” Dennis Parada told The Associated Press in his first interview since the wellpublicized dig last winter. “They walk us in, and they make us look like dummies. Like we messed up.”

Since that day, however, neighbors’ accounts of latenight excavation and FBI convoys have fueled suspicions that the agency isn’t telling the whole truth. The Paradas are challenging the FBI’s account of the dig, insisting that something had to have been buried in the woods near Dents Run, about 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

That something, they believe, was gold.

“After my years of experience here using equipment, there was something here, something here of value, some kind of precious metal. And whatever it is, it’s gone now. And that’s what I want to get to the bottom of, is what was in that hole,” Kem Parada said.

Federal investigators insisted a few days after leaving the site that the search came up empty, adding cryptically that its work there was related to an “ongoing investigation.” The FBI declined further comment, and a bureau spokeswoman told AP last week that court documents related to the dig are sealed.

The dispute between the Paradas and the FBI is the latest chapter in a mystery that has persisted for more than a century and a half. As the story goes, around the time of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, the Union Army sent a shipment of gold from Wheeling, W.Va., to Philadelphia. The wagon train took a circuitous route through the wilds of northern Pennsylvania so as to avoid Confederate troops. Along the way, the gold was either lost or stolen.

The legend has inspired generations of treasure hunters to take to the thick woods of northwestern Pennsylvania — including Dennis and Kem Parada, who spent five years digging in a cave on state land, and two more years drilling atop the cave, before going to the FBI in January with their evidence.

The Paradas showed agents how their sophisticated metal detector lit up like crazy when aimed at the spot where they believed the gold was hidden. Within a month, they said, the FBI had hired an outside firm to conduct an underground scan using a device called a gravimeter. The scan identified a large metallic mass with the density of gold, ac cording to the Paradas and Warren Getler, an author and journalist who’s been working with them.

Soitwaswithgreatanticipation that father, son and Getler arrived at the dig site March 13. But nothing went as planned. The treasure hunters and Getler said they had an agreement with the FBI to watch the excavation. Officers instead confined them to their car — out of sight of the wooded hillside where a backhoe was digging — for six hours that first day before they were finally allowed up the hill. The digging proceeded for another hour before an agent called an abrupt halt at 3 p.m., saying the team was cold, tired and hungry and it would be getting dark soon. They were just 3 feet from the target.

“I said, ‘You’ve got three hours of daylight and we’re only 3 feet away,’ ” Dennis Parada recalled. He said the agent replied, “Denny, we’re going. We’re going.”

Whether the FBI actually left the woods that afternoon is itself an open question. Cheryl Elder, who lives nearby, told AP she heard what sounded like a backhoe and jackhammer at least until 2 a.m. — the noisy machinery keeping her awake and annoying her because she had to rise early for work—andshesawthatthe hillside was brightly lit.

“It was just real loud all night,” the former constable recalled. “It was driving me nuts.”