Blackmail - a possible explanation to how the chase ended
Jun 10, 2020 4:53:51 GMT -5
zaphod73491 likes this
Post by Deleted on Jun 10, 2020 4:53:51 GMT -5
What we know:
Fenn, a honorable war veteran, created a treasure hunt. He did not intend to make any money of it. It was free to participate and the proceeds from the books went to charity.
His main motive seems to have been to make the current generations discover the great outdoors.
It is likely that another motive was to go down in history. While he said he doesnt care when the treasure is found, it is also true that if it was not found by the time he died, there would be no way to know if it was found and therefore the legend of him and his treasure would live on forever!
We have very limited photos of the treasure, and said photo(s) appears to have been taken in a dark studio, maybe in his vault or in a museum. Nothing when it was out under the stars. Not even now, after the chase is over. Nor any other evidence either.
For his second book, he had a celebrity tell people about his treasure in the forewords. But all the celebrity says is that he saw the treasure once, and then another time he was inside the vault but did not see the treasure, and Fenn then told him he hid it. It is noteworthy that the celebrity (Douglas Preston) did NOT choose to add any sense of "and I believe him" to the foreword...
We also know that Fenn once in an interview got the question whether he would reveal the correct the solution once the chase ended. He did not address the question and instead said that the finder would have decisions to make. This could be interpreted in different ways - either he misunderstood the question or he wanted to hint that he wanted to leave this up to the finder (which would be a weird position, wouldnt Fenn himself want to show the world the correct solution to the creation he worked on for decades? If I was Fenn I would be dying to show the clever solution to the riddle "where do warm waters halt").
Now Fenn says someone found it. But the only details he gave us was that the finder was from "back east". Thats it! So few were the details that Fenn had to elaborate about "under the stars" and whatnot, so it wouldnt be embarrasingly short. What he doesnt say, is more important than what he says.
Searchers, including Fenns friend Dal Nietzel, of course want to know the correct solution to the riddles they have spent so many hours working on.
But the way things look now, Fenn has no interest in giving those solutions. As I concluded in another post, there is no real reason for that. Unless there is something fishy going on. That fishy thing does not have to be "Fenn never owned a treasure" or "Fenn never hid the treasure". I dont think Fenn lied about having hidden a treasure, and here is why: then he would never have said that someone had found it. And he would have gone down in history forever. His name would live on and people would keep searching for the chest out in the great outdoors even in 300 years from now.
The only explanation I could find is that something went very wrong. I am a former private investigator and I would say the most likely possibilities are:
1) Criminals learned about the chase and either bribed or more likely threatened Fenn to reveal the location and the solution. "Or we will shoot someone in your family". Then they went and retrieved the treasure. If the police had made an ambush, they could just have said they solved the riddle fair and square, "we were not the ones that called in the threats". The call could have been made over an untraceable phone. Almost the "perfect" crime.
If we dont see the chest surfacing at some Sothebys auction, this explanation seems even more likely. The gold in the treasure has been sold for scrap metal by some lifestyle criminals, the rest destroyed so there would be no evidence of the crime. And Fenn never got his bracelet back, he didnt even get to buy it back.
Maybe sounds a bit far fetched but think about it and I welcome you to present an explanation which works and is less far fetched.
2) But there is also one other possible explanation. Fenn understood early, maybe even the first year of the hunt, that he had underestimated the brilliance of thousands of searchers and how good the solves could be. Maybe Fenns own solve was far worse than many of the other solves that led to nothing. I have seen this happen in the many treasure hunts I have participated in. If so that must have made Fenn embarrassed and wanting to cancel the treasure hunt, thinking it had been a failure even though it did lead people to discover the great outdoors. He would not want people to try to solve a riddle which would turn out to be flawed. He was also sick of the douchebags suing him in court. So he decided to end the chase. But he had never reserved the right to cancel the hunt (except once when he said he might go and get it if its value reached $1000000). He understood people would be pissed if he did, and maybe it would even cause more legal problems. So he went and took it back (or sent a relative or something), and claimed some searcher had found it. Success, he still gets to write it off as a loss so now he won back $600 000 but tax free. Perhaps he then sold it to a private collector who had offered to buy it. Maybe the purchase even included the experience of going to the place and digging it up. Yes there are many billionaires who would want that. People pay handsomely to travel up into space for a few minutes, I know I would have paid to dig up the chest if I could afford it and was given the chance and was unable to solve it. Maybe this was Fenns intention all the time, to sell the unique experience "finding a real treasure" for perhaps $3M. It is not something you can find on Groupon, but being an antiques collector, Fenn has the perfect network to find customers for something like that.
What Fenn maybe didnt think of is that people still expect to hear the correct solution so now they are pissed anyway.
Fenn, a honorable war veteran, created a treasure hunt. He did not intend to make any money of it. It was free to participate and the proceeds from the books went to charity.
His main motive seems to have been to make the current generations discover the great outdoors.
It is likely that another motive was to go down in history. While he said he doesnt care when the treasure is found, it is also true that if it was not found by the time he died, there would be no way to know if it was found and therefore the legend of him and his treasure would live on forever!
We have very limited photos of the treasure, and said photo(s) appears to have been taken in a dark studio, maybe in his vault or in a museum. Nothing when it was out under the stars. Not even now, after the chase is over. Nor any other evidence either.
For his second book, he had a celebrity tell people about his treasure in the forewords. But all the celebrity says is that he saw the treasure once, and then another time he was inside the vault but did not see the treasure, and Fenn then told him he hid it. It is noteworthy that the celebrity (Douglas Preston) did NOT choose to add any sense of "and I believe him" to the foreword...
We also know that Fenn once in an interview got the question whether he would reveal the correct the solution once the chase ended. He did not address the question and instead said that the finder would have decisions to make. This could be interpreted in different ways - either he misunderstood the question or he wanted to hint that he wanted to leave this up to the finder (which would be a weird position, wouldnt Fenn himself want to show the world the correct solution to the creation he worked on for decades? If I was Fenn I would be dying to show the clever solution to the riddle "where do warm waters halt").
Now Fenn says someone found it. But the only details he gave us was that the finder was from "back east". Thats it! So few were the details that Fenn had to elaborate about "under the stars" and whatnot, so it wouldnt be embarrasingly short. What he doesnt say, is more important than what he says.
Searchers, including Fenns friend Dal Nietzel, of course want to know the correct solution to the riddles they have spent so many hours working on.
But the way things look now, Fenn has no interest in giving those solutions. As I concluded in another post, there is no real reason for that. Unless there is something fishy going on. That fishy thing does not have to be "Fenn never owned a treasure" or "Fenn never hid the treasure". I dont think Fenn lied about having hidden a treasure, and here is why: then he would never have said that someone had found it. And he would have gone down in history forever. His name would live on and people would keep searching for the chest out in the great outdoors even in 300 years from now.
The only explanation I could find is that something went very wrong. I am a former private investigator and I would say the most likely possibilities are:
1) Criminals learned about the chase and either bribed or more likely threatened Fenn to reveal the location and the solution. "Or we will shoot someone in your family". Then they went and retrieved the treasure. If the police had made an ambush, they could just have said they solved the riddle fair and square, "we were not the ones that called in the threats". The call could have been made over an untraceable phone. Almost the "perfect" crime.
If we dont see the chest surfacing at some Sothebys auction, this explanation seems even more likely. The gold in the treasure has been sold for scrap metal by some lifestyle criminals, the rest destroyed so there would be no evidence of the crime. And Fenn never got his bracelet back, he didnt even get to buy it back.
Maybe sounds a bit far fetched but think about it and I welcome you to present an explanation which works and is less far fetched.
2) But there is also one other possible explanation. Fenn understood early, maybe even the first year of the hunt, that he had underestimated the brilliance of thousands of searchers and how good the solves could be. Maybe Fenns own solve was far worse than many of the other solves that led to nothing. I have seen this happen in the many treasure hunts I have participated in. If so that must have made Fenn embarrassed and wanting to cancel the treasure hunt, thinking it had been a failure even though it did lead people to discover the great outdoors. He would not want people to try to solve a riddle which would turn out to be flawed. He was also sick of the douchebags suing him in court. So he decided to end the chase. But he had never reserved the right to cancel the hunt (except once when he said he might go and get it if its value reached $1000000). He understood people would be pissed if he did, and maybe it would even cause more legal problems. So he went and took it back (or sent a relative or something), and claimed some searcher had found it. Success, he still gets to write it off as a loss so now he won back $600 000 but tax free. Perhaps he then sold it to a private collector who had offered to buy it. Maybe the purchase even included the experience of going to the place and digging it up. Yes there are many billionaires who would want that. People pay handsomely to travel up into space for a few minutes, I know I would have paid to dig up the chest if I could afford it and was given the chance and was unable to solve it. Maybe this was Fenns intention all the time, to sell the unique experience "finding a real treasure" for perhaps $3M. It is not something you can find on Groupon, but being an antiques collector, Fenn has the perfect network to find customers for something like that.
What Fenn maybe didnt think of is that people still expect to hear the correct solution so now they are pissed anyway.
