Million-Dollar Forrest Fenn Treasure Found

Hello, hello. Welcome back to the show. I'm Everett Millman and thank you for joining me on Breaking the Dollar. So as I get caught up on some of these topics I wanted to discuss that got interrupted by the coronavirus as I'm sure it's happened to basically everybody's routines, one of the ones that I've had in mind is the story of Forrest Fenn's treasure.

This one is really fascinating and I've been following it for several years because it has actually gone on for more than a decade and until now there was no resolution to this really cool treasure hunt. So let me give you some background on how this whole thing started and now update you on what the new news is about this. So Forrest Fenn is an elderly man who is an eccentric art collector. In fact, I believe he may have been an art dealer. So this is someone who buys and sells rare art for other people because he is an expert in antiques and collectibles and all of those related things.

Around 2009 or 2010, so roughly 10 years ago, Forrest Fenn came up with something almost like a scavenger hunt, more of a treasure hunt, but it did come along with poems that contained clues about where he had hidden this treasure. So let's talk about the treasure. According to Fenn, somewhere around the Rocky Mountains in the American West, he hid a treasure chest full of gold and gemstones and diamonds, all sorts of cool stuff. Even the treasure chest itself was an antique collectible that I think I saw it was valued at $25,000 just for the chest, even if it was empty. But Fenn claims he put roughly $1 million worth of gold and rare gemstones in this treasure chest and hid it somewhere.

Now his whole intention of doing this was partly just to generate some excitement and stir things up, do something fun. But really it was to encourage people to be more active and healthy and get out and go enjoy the outdoors. Very noble stuff, I like the idea. So with that in mind, he hid it somewhere in not quite the wilderness, but it wasn't in somebody's backyard, it wasn't in a neighborhood. And he was very specific, Fenn was, about the location: it was not on private property, it was not in protected land for a state park, so nobody needed to be looking in those places and encroaching on anybody's property.

Well, unfortunately the story was not without a bit of controversy, because some of the treasure hunters did not follow Fenn's advice, they did look on private property and they dug up burial sites and encroached on government land. It really was a case of just some people behaving badly because they really wanted that million dollar treasure. We can understand that. Well unfortunately it even got worse, because not only was there the nuisance of all these treasure hunters ripping up the land as they went, you had some of these treasure seekers getting into increasingly dangerous situations on their journey to try and find the treasure. This was another case where if they had listened to the instructions of the hunt, Forrest Fenn pointed out he was about 70 years old when he hid this treasure, so if a seventy year old man couldn't get to the spot, then it's not there, right? And again, unfortunately people did not heed his words and they got themselves into some precarious situations where they needed to be rescued.

So now the state of New Mexico was using its resources and its workers to go and save these people who had put themselves in the situation. Obviously I'm not suggesting that they should have been left there to die or suffer, but it was frivolous to say the least. And unfortunately in at least two or three cases that did happen where somebody lost their life trying to find this treasure. As you might expect, that did stir up a lot of anger from the media and there were newspaper editorials in those western states where people were doing this and they were saying Fenn needs to call off the treasure hunt. It's causing too many problems, people are dying. So that is sort of the dark side of it that even with the best intentions, some people took this too far.

Maybe worst of all, with people getting lost or injured or dying, is that nobody found the treasure. So for ten years people were looking pretty avidly. Anytime the weather permitted, there were always people searching for Fenn's treasure. And that was actually one of the really cool sides of it, is not only were people being active and enjoying the outdoors and many of them reported that, that although they didn't find the treasure, they were really happy that they went and they got to see nature and they wouldn't have done it otherwise. But an entire community really sprung up around this. They had a gathering once a year called Fenn-boree where they would exchange notes about where they had looked for it, how they were deciphering the poems that Fenn would give them as clues and they made maps and they distributed maps so that everyone could have a better chance of finding the treasure. But even with all of that brain power and manpower combined, after ten years no one had found it.

Well, that brings us to the recent news that last month, Forrest Fenn confirmed that somebody discovered his treasure. Now of course this was reported in the newspapers, but they kept the man's identity anonymous for pretty obvious reasons that if you told everyone you just found a million dollars in treasure, they might come after you, right? And that is also one of the unfortunate side effects of this really cool, really awesome treasure hunt is that some people rather than looking for the treasure just looked up Forrest Fenn's address and went and robbed his home. He was burglarized on more than one occasion because people figured if he has this treasure to hide somewhere, well then maybe he has more treasure at home. As I pointed out, this story definitely has its own dose of controversy and sort of a dark side, but alas, now it has been discovered.

So I saw this reported in a couple different newspapers in, you know, Arizona, New Mexico, but what really irked me is that we didn't get to see a picture of the treasure. Nobody shared a photo of it. The reports did give an updated estimate of the value where they said it could be worth as much as five million dollars now that it's 10 years later, but we want to see it, right? I want to see what type of gold and gemstones and old relics. I want to know. So that did bother me to no end that they didn't include any photographs of it. I do think I have one picture of supposedly the treasure before Fenn hid it because as I said, I've been following the story for a few years and I've written a couple of blog posts on it when different developments would happen, but that's the only picture we have and I for one am not satisfied with that. I want to know what the Forrest Fenn treasure looks like.

So if anybody wants to email Forrest Fenn and ask him, that would be much appreciated. And so that's basically where we're at with the Forrest Fenn story. He hasn't said if he's going to do it again, but it was just something for fun and it raises a sort of interesting tangent that I think about sometimes about buried treasure. So as I often speak about when I'm talking about what's driving the gold price and how the government is printing money, this problem of government control of the money supply and how it manages it has been recognized for quite some time.

Ever since we went off the gold standard in 1971, in fact, different economists have been studying this problem in hypothetical. What happens if money loses its value if it is not backed by something? How long can, for lack of a better phrase, how long can we keep this charade going? And one of the proposals to combat this that really struck me and I've always remembered is someone proposed that the government could print all the money it wanted, but then go and bury that money in caves or mountains or mines somewhere where people would have to work to go get the money. They would have to go and dig up the dollar bills that were buried in a cave somewhere.

And as comical as that sounds to us, that's not how money works. That's not how we get money. The underlying principle actually does make a lot of sense that if there is work that has to be done in order to get the money, well then obviously that money has value. It has value equal to that work it took to get it. And you see this principle is underlying Bitcoin, that Bitcoins don't just come out of thin air. There's actual work and computer calculations that have to be done. So there is a price or a value on that electricity being used and on that work being done and time being spent. So that yes, that money has value.

And so the whole Forrest Fenn story of burying treasure brought back up that idea of, hmm, if the government ever got into a really bad position where nobody wanted their money, you know, it was hyperinflation Weimar Germany where money is worthless. Maybe this idea of putting everyone on a treasure hunt could actually revive the value of the currency. Now unfortunately, that would be total chaos. I'm sure people would be fighting in the streets over control of the mountain or the cave wherever the money was buried. So as we've discussed before about the unlikelihood of a gold standard coming back, sure, we're not going to see the government burying dollar bills and telling everyone to go out and find them. As a thought exercise, it does reveal something, a true insight about what gives money value and how our current financial system is gradually and increasingly faster getting further and further away from that. So just some interesting food for thought there.

So that wraps up this episode. As always, I want to thank you so much for listening. We appreciate everybody out there in the audience. It's great that you enjoy the show and you keep listening. Be sure to check out our next episode where I'll be discussing how the COVID pandemic is changing things for banks. It'll be interesting. Thanks for watching!