Treasure hunters not taking FBI’s word
DENTS RUN, PA. >> Surrounded by dozens of stonefaced FBI agents on a frigid winter’s day, Dennis and Kem Parada stared down at the empty hole and knew something wasn’t right.
The father-son duo spent years combing this bit of Pennsylvania wilderness with high-end metal detectors, drills and other tools to prospect for a fabled cache of Civil War gold. They felt certain they’d discovered the hiding place of the long-lost booty, leading the FBI to the mountainous, heavily wooded area last March.
Now, at the end of the court-sanctioned excavation, the FBI escorted the treasure hunters to the snow-covered 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.
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 to comment further, and a bureau spokeswoman told the 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, West Virginia, 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, according to the Paradas and Warren Getler, an author and journalist who’s been working with them.
If Union gold was indeed recovered from the woods, the discovery of a historic and extremely valuable trove of federal property on state-owned land would almost certainly touch off a court battle over who owns it, and whether the Paradas are entitled to a cut.
According to the legend, the lost shipment had either 26 gold bars or 52 bars, each weighing 50 pounds, meaning it would be worth about $25 million or about $50 million today. The Paradas say the government contractor’s scan detected a much larger quantity of precious metal — 7 to 9 tons — that could be worth more than $250 million if every ounce of it was gold.