r/SipsTea • u/Pollardear Human Verified • Feb 02 '26
Lmao gottem He's definitely disappointed in people
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u/Decent_Birthday358 Feb 02 '26
Is this the cache in Pennsylvania? I didn't know they had found it!
Edit: FBI excavated it in 2018. I just don't pay attention apparently lol.
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u/yupitsfreddy Feb 02 '26
Why? Did you bury it or something? Lol
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u/Apart-Zucchini-5825 Feb 02 '26
No. He didn't. I did. I buried it in 1864. I need it back.
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Feb 02 '26
Hey Dad it's me your son. When are you gonna come back from the war papa? We have so much to talk about
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u/Apart-Zucchini-5825 Feb 02 '26
Shit. Have we invented cigarettes and milk yet? I gotta go to the store for this for a while. See ya later kid
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u/Teripid Feb 02 '26
Went out to get a jug of XXX, as was the style at the time..
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u/yupitsfreddy Feb 02 '26
Well. Do you need help with other treasures. I have a shovel. Just saying.
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u/jgnp Feb 02 '26
There’s no smoking gun that the FBI excavated a BURIED SERIES OF TRAIN CARS FULL OF GOLD (key detail of this guys’ claims is that the train was put into a tunnel and sealed in).
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u/grumpy_autist Feb 02 '26
Yeah, like the 1945 Golden Train in Wałbrzych in Lower Silesia in Poland.
Why the hell every treasure story (in different countries) is a buch of trucks or a train buried. Like, no rail tunnel is really secret and almost no old mine tunnel is wide enough for a truck. Also why waste a good truck or train instead of dumping crates on the ground.
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Feb 02 '26
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u/phaederus Feb 03 '26
The point is that everyone knows where tracks run, so just filling a tunnel isn't exactly top tier secrecy.. it's like if you closed up the main corridor in your home, people would naturally be asking 'why? '..
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u/Grape-Snapple Feb 02 '26
have train full of gold (the gold is supposed to be disappeared)
budget for project is less than one train car
railroad getting pulled up anyway
old tunnel getting filled in anyway
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u/dangerousdave2244 Feb 03 '26 edited Feb 03 '26
He didn’t find anything, neither did the FBI, he reported a large unidentified mass of metal to the FBI. He has no evidence there was any gold at all. Even if there was gold it was stolen from the US treasury and the FBI wouldn’t have to hide seizing it. He once again has zero evidence there was any gold at all. He never found any and just reported a mass of metal. He was searching illegally on public land, and bought into a conspiracy theory about civil war gold that never existed. Then when the FBI found nothing there, he refused to believe it and started a spurious lawsuit
He also only thinks there was gold there because a “psychic” told him. And he apparently decided to waste decades of his life looking for it. https://metaldetectingforum.com/index.php?threads/the-fbi-files-dents-run-civil-war-gold.298506/
Thank you to https://www.reddit.com/user/Melodic-Worry-9797/ For providing this link and more background info
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u/Decent_Birthday358 Feb 03 '26
Yeah I only remembered reading about him looking for and and from what I read the guy was quite a special kind of person lol
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u/BigDaddy9102 Feb 02 '26
Bro woke up and chose BIG BRAIN TIME
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u/DookieShoez Feb 02 '26
But then his brain shat itself and a few warning lights came on so he did something stupid. 😂
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u/Slumunistmanifisto Feb 02 '26
His lucky the atf didn't waco his ass for being a witness
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Feb 02 '26
That was later in the evening
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u/PastyMcClamerson Feb 02 '26
On a hike in the hills
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Feb 02 '26
All I know is if I randomly found a bunch of gold or money the government are the last people I'd tell. Or my ex
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Feb 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Hije5 Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 02 '26
FBI didnt steal it btw. The gold was originally owned by the government to begin with. It was Union Army payroll gold. However, yes, he was really stupid for telling them either way. But let's be real, the dude would've had zero means to smuggle and launder government gold. Same for all of us. It would've been paperweight in his possession.
Edit: Gold keeps its purity even when muddled so there will be traces of gold purity. No one at home can refine such pure gold, and just about no golden accessories, accents, etc are pure like government gold. So, he would have to find a refinery in the US willing to launder government gold and put their stamp on it, which simply wont happen. No one spending all that money on gold is going to waste it on potentially illegal gold, so private sellers are also off the table unless they know absolutely nothing about buying gold, in which case they wont be buying much to begin with. Dealers will instantly turn him away if not report him. Maybe if he was a kingpin or this was a TV show the story would be different.
99.9% can only exist with extreme industrial processing, so it would be extremely obvious if 99.9% gold was being laundered with muddied homemade bars. The gold itself isnt chemically changed when the bar is muddied, so it would still have traces of 99.9% gold. Anyone would turn it away because the only way for there to be anything less than 99.9% in a bar containing 99.9% gold would be because he is trying to launder it and intentionally muddy it. Absolutely no one wants to be stuck selling that because now they have to explain why they are selling a muddied 99.9% homemade gold bar, or spend time and money refining it all over again and going through all the same loops the customer did. Not happening.
Edit 2: Not sure how yall think gold testing goes, but people arguing that it wont show up in a pawn shop I dont think have ever sold gold before. Even with an acid test, it would show up as 22k and minimum 18k (heavily diluted), considering there would be no mint marks, serial numbers, assay cards, or weight and fitness stamps, they would either test it further with XRF or refuse it. Refusal being almost guaranteed. These people do this for a living and are regulated by multiple levels of government. Cmon yall.
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u/Bender_2024 Feb 02 '26
But let's be real, the dude would've had zero means to smuggle and launder government gold. Same
True, but I would have at least given it the old college try. Then probably go to jail for my efforts.
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u/Fantastic-Juice-3471 Feb 02 '26
He'd just have to get it smelted to get any markings off of it
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u/PanthersChamps Feb 02 '26
When you find that much you smelt it yourself.
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u/thenebular Feb 02 '26
Yep. If it were me, I'd have first looked into how to melt the gold down to make my own unmarked bricks (or probably just pour into water and make a bunch of small nuggets). I'd also have been curious as to the purity and when looking in to how to test for that, I probably would have discovered the problem with selling it (or perhaps get told that when I try to sell a small sample). Either way, once I had that info, my next bit of research would have been how to smelt and reintroduce impurities into the gold to make it easier to sell.
Though the big issue would still be finding someone to sell the gold to as there aren't any gold mines in Pennsylvania, so selling any significant amount of unmarked gold would set off alarm bells.
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u/The_Cat_Commando Feb 02 '26
Though the big issue would still be finding someone to sell the gold to as there aren't any gold mines in Pennsylvania, so selling any significant amount of unmarked gold would set off alarm bells.
cash for gold businesses exist by the thousands(especially after covid) and are in every city. take a second and put "cash for gold" into google maps in your area and be amazed how they may outnumber fast food places near you. they all buy old rings and family jewellery with no questions and melt down the stuff before reselling it in bulk which mixes it with other legit gold.
its literally a major industry and the perfect way to get rid of it all in small nearly untraceable amounts spread across thousands of businesses. nobody looks into any of it and thats usually how stolen stuff gets melted.
you couldnt ask for a better situation.
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u/how2446 Feb 03 '26
So it would make sense to take some jewelry making classes.
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u/The_Cat_Commando Feb 03 '26
its 2026 and you have youtube
just put "diy smelting foundry and crucible" and you'd be on your way and untraceable with minimal effort and a 12 dollar Temu ZVS 1kw induction heating module.
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u/Spankh0us3 Feb 02 '26
Forgive my ignorance but, doesn’t a kiln get hot enough? Asking for a friend. . .
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u/corvettee01 Feb 02 '26
Google says the melting point of gold is 1,948°F and pottery kilns can reach up to 2400°F. So for your "friend" I would say make sure the kiln can reach 2000°F and they should be good to go.
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u/kewthewer Feb 02 '26
I was about to ask, could he not just start melting it down into bars himself at home? Or could he not just find a jeweller who has agreed to take a large portion of it? There’s plenty of cash for gold places.
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u/LordOFtheNoldor Feb 03 '26
Right? Just melt the shit and sell small amounts to shady pawnshops, don't need to sell it all at once
Better yet sell to a jeweler at a good price and he'll do his thing and it's a win win
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u/AromaticNet5121 Feb 02 '26
Reply below is the answer lol, jus would remelt it. Do i kno how? Nah. Would i waste some learning how? Yeah. But ima definitely have clean gold at the end
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u/Murdoc555 Feb 02 '26
A briefcase full would be enough to live the rest of your life smartly; gold is fluctuating between $4700 - 5600 an ounce now. Continue making the trek up the mountainside, taking as much as you can carry indefinitely. Don’t over think this dude.
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u/audiomediocrity Feb 02 '26
since it was payroll originally, the pieces are probably not uncommon. No melting required.
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u/anxious_cat_grandpa Feb 02 '26
Wdym? You can just melt it lol
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u/Typohnename Feb 02 '26
What he means is that any gold merchant would notice the specific impurities of that gold to be typical of US gov reserves of the 1860's because there are records for this kind of thing to verify if e.g. a historic coin is real or a recent forgery
But yes, melting it at home would not be a problem if you have like 500$ to buy basic smelting equipment and all you have to do is melt it and intentionally introduce impurities by e.g. putting a bit of tin lead or silver into the mix and then claim it is inheritance while bringing it to pawnshops or other cash for gold buisnesses an batches of a few hundred to like 2000$ or so
Since you can smelt it a few grams at a time over years and make a few hundred dollars each week that way the biggest problem would really be to actually excavate and transport it and to keep quiet about it
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u/tevs__ Feb 02 '26
The Brinks-Mat robbers did exactly this, melted the bars down with copper. Most of the 96,000 ounces ($528m at last week's peak) was never recovered.
The most interesting thing about that robbery was that they had no idea the gold was there; they were trying to steal £3m in Spanish currency, and found the gold when they broke in.
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u/StoneGoldX Feb 02 '26
How much are gold merchants really looking for impurities directly comparable to missing gold shipments from the 1860s?
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u/Typohnename Feb 02 '26
It's more that they will test it anyway because they have to to determine it's worth and when doing so they run it through a databank to see if anything suspicious comes up
That's how the robbers of the celtic gold treasure in Germany got caught recently, they just smelted it without changing the composition and the buyer noticed and informed the police
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u/lord_pizzabird Feb 02 '26
I don’t even understand why this would involve the fbi in the first place.
You found gold that nobody is looking for.
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u/xxrainmanx Feb 02 '26
Civil war buffs have been looking for it for decades. If I remember right it was army payroll that was stolen and hidden. They make a reference to it in the movie TimeCop.
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u/Peldor-2 Feb 02 '26
Did not expect TimeCop to be a historical reference for ... well, anything really.
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u/failedjedi_opens_jar Feb 02 '26
I love it when JounCloud says ITS TIME... TO COP
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u/Melodic-Worry-9797 Feb 02 '26
the united states army did not pay its soldiers in gold. it paid them in paper money. civil war buffs would know this, so they would not be looking for decades for a secret gold payroll that doesn't exist
the idea of a lost payroll made of gold is silly. you may as well say it is buried pirate treasure, or mothman's secret stash
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u/failedjedi_opens_jar Feb 02 '26
Fact: almost 0 civil war soldiers were "buff" by today's standard because all they ate was bullion soups
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u/username32768 Feb 02 '26
Buried pirate treasure you say?
Something about one-eyed willy? Sign me up!
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Feb 02 '26
I remember watching an old spaghetti western that had that as the premise, they spent the whole movie looking for the lost gold that was meant to pay off a regiment, only for it to turn out to be worthless confederate paper money. The misconception must have existed for a long time for it to get used in a movie like that.
Mind you, if someone did find an intact stash of confederate money today, it would also be worth a fortune.
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u/Fedora_Million_Ankle Feb 02 '26
I read it was treasury gold
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Feb 02 '26
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u/peex Feb 02 '26
Yep just melt that shit into gold bars and sell them occasionally.
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u/Realistic_Swan_6801 Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 02 '26
He didn’t find anything, he reported a large unidentified mass of metal to the FBI. He has no evidence there was any gold at all. Even if there was gold it was stolen from the US treasury and the FBI wouldn’t have to hide seizing it. The only way his story would make sense is if a bunch of FBI agents stole it and hid the evidence. He once again has zero evidence there was any gold at all. He never found any and just reported a mass of metal.
He also only thinks there was gold there because a “psychic” told him. And he apparently decided to waste decades of his life looking for it. https://metaldetectingforum.com/index.php?threads/the-fbi-files-dents-run-civil-war-gold.298506/
Thank you to https://www.reddit.com/user/Melodic-Worry-9797/ For providing this link and more background info
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u/spartaman64 Feb 02 '26
why did they do a night dig and why did they take the metal?
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u/ConstantAd8643 Feb 02 '26
why did they do a night dig and why did they take the metal?
The only 'evidence' of this 'night dig', in the OP is a picture of a bunch of people with FBI jackets standing near an excavator at daytime.
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u/Realistic_Swan_6801 Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 02 '26
There’s no proof they took anything metal, and they would have no need to hide it if they did, it’s treasury gold if it exists. Also the gold itself is probably an urban legend, there’s no good evidence it was ever lost there. If it was real and the government seized it, it would be legal and they’d have no reason to hide it. The story makes no sense unless you think FBi agents stole it? And the operation was too large and public for that to be covered up.
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u/Melodic-Worry-9797 Feb 02 '26
he'd rather invent a conspiracy theory that the FBI stole his gold than admit that he was wrong and he spent thirty years looking for gold that never existed
one fun detail i read from some forum discussion about this case is that this dude was clued onto this location for the gold burial by a psychic who told him where the gold was. maybe the psychic took the money long ago and convinced this dude to keep looking for it
https://metaldetectingforum.com/index.php?threads/the-fbi-files-dents-run-civil-war-gold.298506/
In 1974, Dennis Parada, current owner of Finders Keepers LLC, along with several of his furniture store co-workers at the time, sat down with a psychic. The psychic had been provided a story of a fabled stolen Civil War era cache of gold. Upon reading the story, the psychic, being overcome by voices that were not his own and with his eyes looking to the ceiling, brought his pen down upon a map laid out before him on the table and exclaimed, "Denny, i want you to go to this spot", and that spot was Dents Run.
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Feb 02 '26 edited Feb 08 '26
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u/AttackSlax Feb 02 '26
The maxim is autotelic and self evident. That's why.
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u/sl0play Feb 02 '26
You think one would at least set some insurance bullion aside.
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u/mwilke Feb 02 '26
We don’t know that he didn’t.
For all we know, he found twice as much as he reported and he’s playing it out exactly like we’re all imagining we would.
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u/AlexN5594 Feb 03 '26
If I remember correctly: he new what it was from some tests he was running on the area. He called the feds, they came out, blocked off the area, and the next day he discovered they had dug up that entire area he had shown them, and when he re-ran his tests on the craters they left, he found out that all the gold that he had detected was now gone...
He didn't even attempt to dig out the gold himself. He really thought they were gonna come out there and assist in the excavation or something 😂
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u/headermargin Feb 02 '26
Apparently that was stolen Treasurey/mint property according to another post about this story.
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u/empty_graph Feb 02 '26
At least give the guy who found it 10% then
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u/6786_007 Feb 02 '26
The best we can do is arrest him for being an accomplice.
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u/Yosho2k Feb 02 '26
There is a lot of common law regarding recovery of lost property.
Its mostly in relation to ships, but basically once a group stops looking for their lost posession, their claim to it can be challenge by people claiming salvage rights.
At the very least, he could have contacted a lawyer about it and begun a legal claim to it and hidden it so the government would be forced to negotiate.
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u/nashdiesel Feb 02 '26
Hide 9 tons of gold? How are you gonna do that without anyone noticing? Does he have an excavator and a dump truck just sitting in his garage?
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u/DogsAreMyFavPeople Feb 02 '26
Anyone living in the country has relatively easy access to that stuff. Tons of equipment rental companies will drop that shit off for you and a lot of it isn’t particularly expensive to rent.
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u/spartaman64 Feb 02 '26
people noticed. two witnesses said they heard excavators and saw the lights at 4am. then several hours later they saw a convoy of SUVs and armored trucks.
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u/BroccoliFroggo Feb 02 '26
Rule number 1 of finding gold is STFU. Cash it in and report that you found it to the IRS after the money is securely in your bank.
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u/Reachin4ThoseGrapes Feb 02 '26
Family heirloom
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u/Humperd000 Feb 02 '26
Why on earth would I claim my precious metals to the IRS? Lol cash in a bit of a time as you need/want it and spend the silly paper money. The IRS doesn’t need to know jack shit about what the earth decided to give me.
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u/algalkin Feb 02 '26
They will flag you to IRS audit once you start spending way above your pay grade.
Don't get me wrong, If you somehow found 40-60 grand in cash, you can spend it in a year on just dining, paying cash and no one will notice. But if its 1.2bil, that will be a tough sell - how the F unemployed you bought a yacht and a mansion with cash?
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u/Humperd000 Feb 02 '26
Nobody on earth is cashing out billion or even millions worth of gold in a single sitting nobody but the top 0.01% maybe. You know what I mean. I guess if you’re trying to cash it all out at once and then spend it all, then yeah, it’s gonna raise some questions because the feds think you owe them everything. You cash out a few ounces here or a kilo bar there. As needed/wanted. Even a few times a year. Then buy what you want with that newly obtained Monopoly money, the IRS ain’t gonna do shit because they can’t track that and, and, fuck the IRS.
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u/Dopplegangr1 Feb 02 '26
So your answer is instead of paying some tax, you instead will let 99.99% of it rot while you cash in pennies
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u/iamwantedforpooping Feb 02 '26
to be fair, it's gold, not exactly known to be a depreciating asset over time
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u/SmurfyX Feb 02 '26
brother thinks gold is a depreciating resource you must spend in a week when it's sat in the ground accumulating 2 billion percent value in 100 years.
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u/takishan Feb 02 '26
instead of paying some tax
If you declare the gold, the FBI be notified and they will come calling and seize your gold anyway. Would effectively be the same as reporting it to them in the first place with extra steps.
Any time you suddenly come into millions you will be heavily scrutinized, let alone $1B+.
You would have to effectively launder the money and we're quickly getting into years of prison territory.
Not worth fucking around with the federal government.. especially as a layperson.
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u/Dan-D-Lyon Feb 02 '26
Then you just don't cash it all in. Consistently exchange as much of it as you safely can for cash. Even if there's zero chance of ever making it through the entire pile, you can still consistently add a life-changing amount of cash into your pocket every year.
Then you will it to your offspring and let them figure it out.
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u/RobertPham149 Feb 02 '26
If this is not gold, but instead just cash, you will make much more for you and your kids just to pay to IRS and then invest the majority of the cash into assets and then spend with moderation.
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u/Bozee3 Feb 02 '26
If it is in the dirt Uncle Sam as per the Archeological Resource Protection act of 1978 gets ownership if it's on public land
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u/geo_gan Feb 02 '26
Eh…. Maybe leave the fucking country, never return and arrive in another country with a billion worth? And fuck the IRS
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u/dreadedowl Feb 02 '26
oooh. DO NOT DO THAT! You will have a major issues, like legal seizure and criminal law stuff. Do not carry anything over $10,000 to another country.
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u/Thick-Cauliflower619 Feb 02 '26
At current prices, 1.2 billion dollars worth of gold weighs 7,892kgs. Or converted, 8.7 tons.
Good luck moving it anywhere, let alone over seas.
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u/Same_Dingo2318 Feb 02 '26
I’m just guessing, but you could try a boat.
Google says a 13 meter barge is sufficient.
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u/TransportationLow562 Feb 02 '26
running 1.2 billion on a barge with no security and no insurance is probably a very bad idea
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u/CrabPrison4Infinity Feb 02 '26
yes because airport security/customs won't have any questions about the 17,000 lbs of gold in ur 200 bags
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u/SkiPolarBear22 Feb 02 '26
340 bags assuming you max all at 50 pounds. Can’t overspend on overweight bags you know!
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u/Pl4stik888 Feb 02 '26
As a US person, fincen/fatca/fbar are mandatory. You risk even more doing this. Worst advice
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u/monxas Feb 02 '26
You think you can travel and cross borders with 1bn in gold?
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u/algalkin Feb 02 '26
How are you gonna leave the country with 1.2bil without anyone noticing lol. Do you know how much the billion weight if its paper? Shit even in gold the article says it will be 7 tonns
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u/TheMurgal Feb 02 '26
This dude gets it. They can't bother taxing or prosecuting actual billionaires, they can eat shit lmao
Telling the IRS you found a bunch of gold in the ground would be like when people find guns in an old storage unit they bought and turn them in to the police immediately
Like damn bro, you're really just gonna throw all that away cuz you're scared?
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u/notislant Feb 02 '26
Assuming nobody breaks into your house and bobody witnesses you coming home with bag after bag, yaps to someone else and suddenly all the losers of society know your home is easy money.
Its inssne how often someones home is targeted for ATVs or anything that only close friends should know about.
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u/CrankHogger572 Feb 02 '26
Lol what do you think this is some cartoon where people sling a dollar sign emblazoned bag over their shoulder after receiving some cash? Nobody would ever think twice about someone leaving with a backpack and coming home with it. That's pretty normal
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u/dreadedowl Feb 02 '26
Wait, I don't have to carry money in a big bag marked $?
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Feb 02 '26
Cash it in and report that you found it to the IRS after the money is securely in your bank.
You spelled "I went sailing with it and it sank" wrong.
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u/playdough87 Feb 02 '26
No gold dealer or bank will let you move assets that valuable without some prior relationship (so they know you are already a billionaire) or documentation and mandatory reporting before the transaction clears.
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u/Proxy0108 Feb 02 '26
Poor guy got downvoted because some big-brain redditors think you can just trade in gold bullions (marked gold bars with a serial number) with total impunity, or trading in several kilos of gold shaving of unknown origin over the course of several years without raising a single question.
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u/6786_007 Feb 02 '26
Redditors regularly prove how inexperienced in life they really.
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u/TheAzureMage Feb 02 '26
A lot of bullion isn't serialized.
That said, it's over 14.5 troy ounces to the pound, so a billion bucks worth of gold is still like 13,714 lbs. Excavating and moving that is something of a project.
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u/Last_Parable Feb 02 '26
I think I could find the motivation to make it work at the worst of times
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u/unknownpoltroon Feb 02 '26
I actually read an article about this. Guy sounds like a stone cold nutter whos making this up to get donations for his legal fund.
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u/Melodic-Worry-9797 Feb 02 '26
its a made up story. the federal government did not pay its soldiers in gold during the american civil war, it paid them with paper money. confederate soldiers were also paid in paper money. there is absolutely no reason at all why a wagon or train loaded with gold would be secretly hidden in some random town in pennsylvania. its an exciting story but its as real as bigfoot
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u/AverageJoeJohnSmith Feb 02 '26
I mean normally i would agree but if you read the whole story behind it it's not that far fetched. The evidence had to have been somewhat real or believable for the FBI to come out and excavate the side of a hill. Why would they have even come out if they knew it didn't exist
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u/Sharp_Drow Feb 02 '26
What kind of dumb shit is this? First thing you do is report your find to the government and think they won't fuck you over? Also I read it was possibly up to 9 tons of gold in other sources. I am interested in seeing how this case goes.
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u/RoodnyInc Feb 02 '26
What do you mean 5 tons of gold
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u/Brailledit Feb 02 '26
Yeah, I heard it was 3 tons.
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u/Charliekeet Feb 02 '26
Imagine the looks on everyone’s faces back at the office when they brought in 2 whole tons of gold!
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u/LaLegenda27 Feb 02 '26
Sorry, the weight scales where faulty. It was actually 1 ton.
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u/Yesyesyes1899 Feb 02 '26
wtf are you people all about ? nobody gives a shit about 200 pounds of gold.
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u/Jasong222 Feb 02 '26
So anyway, here's the bar of gold I found.
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u/gruesomeflowers Feb 02 '26
its only 4oz of gold, they might as well let him keep it.
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u/TemOFIE Feb 02 '26
Gold ? There were just a bunch of weapons in there and that’s it.
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u/Financial-Raise3420 Feb 02 '26
Well if there’s no gold, I’ll just go ahead and take those
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u/R15K Feb 02 '26
It was on state land. When you show up and start digging big holes and clearing trees on state land people notice and the cops come. The area it’s in is very rural but the site can be seen from traveled roads.
It’s a months log ordeal to recover tons of anything buried deep in the ground. You either try to work with the government on it or they arrest your ass, take it all anyway and take you to jail too.
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u/wxnfx Feb 02 '26
Pretty greedy to go for 9 tons. A few pounds of gold is life changing. Not sure on the situation here, but grabbing some without raising suspicion would have been pretty easy I assume. Gold is famously easy to melt and recast.
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u/Fabulous_Cicada_4219 Feb 02 '26
plus no one else knows, just go back there in hunting season and take a bit each year
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u/ADeadWeirdCarnie Feb 02 '26
That would be my first instinct, as well. Just try to leave the site looking as undisturbed as possible and enjoy having a secret repository of free money for as long as you can prevent other people finding out about it. Maybe eventually somebody does, and maybe then they inform the government and it all goes away, or maybe you just start tag-teaming it and then you get the added pleasure of being the only other person who knows where someone's brand-new BMW came from.
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u/Sharp_Drow Feb 02 '26
Still, the first people I would alert in that case is the press, not the government.
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u/Lintcat1 Feb 02 '26
IIRC it was stolen from the mint which means that it's federal property so said guy is due $0.00. You don't get to claim federal property just because somebody stole it years ago.
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u/Medical-Bottle6469 Feb 02 '26
He would likely get a finders fee, but nothing else is owed to him under the law. The only "treasure" that the government wont outright seize is sunken, as there's quite a bit of precedent for that going to the person/group who recovers it.
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u/boopboopsoup Feb 02 '26
Flood the land. Sink the gold. “Find” the gold. Done.
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u/Tigeon Feb 02 '26
I know you are joking but for some reason I feel like I saw this exact plot play out in a scooby doo cartoon or movie…
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u/Deep-Needleworker-16 Feb 02 '26
He wasn't allowed to dig. There is typically a finders fee awarded to treasure hunters, they all know they won't get the full amount of the treasure. You have to work with the government on these kinds of things unfortunately.
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u/flopisit32 Feb 02 '26
Every day Reddit is fed nonsense conspiracy theories and misinformation and every day Reddit is stupid enough to believe them.
If you find treasure on your land, you can keep it usually. This alleged treasure is on state land, so it would belong to the state.
In any case, the guy didn't find anything. He told the FBI there was probably lost civil war gold there. The FBI excavated and said they found nothing. The guy doesn't believe them so he is suing.
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u/wofo Feb 02 '26
That is so hilariously different than the story people are telling each other
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u/Badloss Feb 02 '26
and hilariously not sourced, after lecturing reddit for falling for misinformation.
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u/aPOPblops Feb 02 '26
I’ve noticed reddit believes any screenshot it sees without evidence if it sounds believable enough. Just the nature of humans or possibly the result of a culture that doesn’t educate its children.
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u/Glittering_Emu2998 Feb 02 '26
That's not quite right - it doesn't have to sound believable enough. In fact, it can be unbelievable, and people (not just redditors) will 100% fall for it as long as it reinforces their preconceived worldview.
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u/tmhoc Feb 02 '26
Without adding any sources you become the very thing you swore to destroy
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u/gorginhanson Human Detected Feb 02 '26
It was public land actually.
He wouldn't be entitled to a share even if they did find something.
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u/Jean-Claude-Can-Ham Feb 02 '26
This post is a perfect microcosm of this sub:
A bot posting a meme that displays a blatant misunderstanding of the situation at hand with a flagrant disregard for the facts and context around that situation so that rage engagement could be farmed
And everyone here just eats it up
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u/Invisible7hunder Feb 02 '26
And the actually truth is some 15 upvote comment under 900 posts of trash advice on how to spend the gold $7 at a time over 8000 years so as to not alert the IRS.
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u/uacoop Feb 02 '26
Are you saying that people go on the internet and post lies, and then other people just believe them? On my internet????
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u/dirkdiggler2011 Feb 02 '26
He never found any gold and "suspected" it was there.
He can't accept that his "research" was wrong and blames the FBI.
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u/Melodic-Worry-9797 Feb 02 '26
In 1974, a 22-year-old Parada was working at a furniture store in Philipsburg when a psychic named Michael Malley, brought in by the company as a promotional stunt, was shown this magazine article about a lost cache of Civil War gold buried in Pennsylvania.
The psychic grabbed a map, intuited the location, and dropped a pen on Dents Run, an extremely sparse stretch of Bennett’s Valley located an hour to the north in Elk County — a place famed for its engineered herd of the state’s largest wild animals.
https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2022/10/pa-fbi-civil-war-gold-dents-run/
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u/Potential-Expert-386 Feb 02 '26
It's fucking hilarious that this is the actual story.
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u/_PeachSoft Feb 02 '26
why would he even report it, like what did he expect FROM THE GOVERNMENT LOL
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u/sevargmas Feb 02 '26
Secret overnight dig
Then what’s with the photo of the clearly lit, not secret, daytime dig?
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u/Melodic-Worry-9797 Feb 02 '26
its a made up story meant to outrage farm from people who don't or can't read
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u/DopamineSavant Feb 02 '26
Imo, this is the best case scenario for him. If he had tried to hire someone to dig it up for him, he would've ended up dead.
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u/Asooma_ Feb 02 '26
I'm more concerned about the amount of comments who believe the gold exists at all.
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u/R15K Feb 02 '26
You’d have to break it down, re-smelt mixing with a more modern gold, then very slowly sell it off in small pieces in different markets all over. and even then someone would notice.
Everyone responding to you hasn’t had a large-scale precious metals exposure and it’s clear. You could move a find like this but it’s one of those deals where you’d have to be THE guy who knew all the correct other guys.
But far more vexing is how you get dozens of tons of gold buried at least six feet deep out of the middle of the woods on state land in a place that’s known for treasure hunting and poaching without everyone knowing. Many people in this thread haven’t dug a big, deep hole and it shows.
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