Oak Island trap
I found myself in a trap this weekend. Unfortunately, it was a familiar trap that I had been in before. I fear it is a trap that I will get into repeatedly.
I call it the Oak Island trap. The reason I call it that is I first discovered the trap while watching a television show titled “The Curse of Oak Island.” For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, the series chronicles a team of treasure hunters as they search for treasure on Oak Island, off the shore of Nova
Scotia, Canada.
The show has run for nine seasons so far and to date, no treasure has been found. Every week they are on the precipice of finding amazing treasures only to have their efforts thwarted. Sometimes it is a natural disaster or just bad luck. Of course, they always assure the audience that next week will be the week the treasure is found. As I said, this has gone on for nine years.
I watched this series of unfortunate events for approximately five years before I figured out the real treasure they were seeking. The treasure was television viewers who would continue to watch this band of budget bounty seekers piddle around looking for the mythical treasure. The longer they could keep the audience watching the more money these folks would make. Face it, if they ever find the treasure the show would be over and they cannot have that occur.
I thought I had become jaded enough to not go down this wormhole again. Boy, was I wrong.
It started innocently enough with Netflix recommending a documentary I may like entitled “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?” I enjoy documentaries so I decided to try this one. The four-part mini-series follows a group of investigators who think they have solved the mystery of who was D.B. Cooper.
As many of you remember, D.B. Cooper was a skyjacker that parachuted off a plane with a bag of stolen cash in 1971 — and got away with it. Decades later, his identity remains a compelling mystery.
Therefore, I started watching this series and forgot about the Oak Island trap. Some four-plus hours later there was no answer to the identity of D.B. Cooper. As I clicked off the television set, I was extremely frustrated with myself for wasting four hours on this dribble. Working in the news business I knew that if he had been truly identified it would have made a headline or two. The Oak Island trap jumped up and got me.
All I can do is warn you in hopes that you do not fall into the Oak Island trap. It is easy enough to identify it with things like what happened to Amelia Earhart and are aliens real. If these things were ever truly discovered you would hear about it. You would not need to wait until some television producer put together a series to inform you.
If you have to watch documentaries that tantalize you with solving decades-old mysteries my advice would be avoid television series. Stick to documentary films. At least with a film, you would only be burning two hours versus nine years.