Tag: buried treasure

The WWII Treasure Map That Caused A Modern Day Hunt

TRUTH CAN BE STRANGER THAN fiction. Rarer, and therefore even stranger, is when truth is exactly as strange as fiction. Case in point: the fevered treasure hunt for World War II loot that engulfed the Dutch village of Ommeren in January 2023. It felt like something scripted specifically for the Indiana Jones universe.

Local mayor begged them to stop

As it does every year, the Dutch National Archives started the New Year with a “Revelation Day”—disclosing documents that had hitherto been unavailable to the public, typically after a standard 75-year confidentiality term.

Among the thousands of documents released was an actual, hand-drawn treasure map for valuables hidden by German soldiers at the end of World War II. And the spot where the loot was buried was marked by an actual X. Just like in the movies.

The result was equally cinematic: Hundreds of detectorists and other fortune seekers descended on the treasure’s presumed location, digging so many holes that the local mayor begged them to stop. A full year later—and as is the case with the best treasure stories—the loot has still not been found.

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Treasure Hunters Press FBI for Answers on Suspicious Pennsylvania Dig

In the latest twist in a rather contentious legal battle between a father-and-son treasure hunting team and the federal government, emails obtained by the duo seemingly strengthen their argument that the FBI secretly recovered a long-lost horde of Civil War gold and are hiding the discovery from the public. The strange saga began back in March of 2018 when federal agents unexpectedly descended upon a Pennsylvania state forest to excavate a spot where Dennis and Kem Parada believe that a legendary bevy of gold bars had been buried after they went missing in the summer of 1863.

Given the specificity of where the FBI was digging, it was widely assumed that they were looking for the lost treasure, but the federal government only said at the time that they were investigating a “cultural heritage site.” Claiming to have been promised access to the site as the excavation unfolded, the Paradas later expressed misgivings about the whole affair because authorities kept them from observing the project and, once it was completed, told them that nothing was found at the spot. Since that time, the treasure hunters have been on a different kind of quest: a litigious search for proof that the federal government is not being honest about the dig and that, in fact, they had recovered the lost gold.

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