A cache of gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars has long been rumored to be buried somewhere in the Pennsylvania hills.
The technical survey data collected by geophysical consulting firm Enviroscan gave credence to the treasure hunters’ own extensive fieldwork at the site — and prompted the FBI to excavate in aJohn Louie, a geophysics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, unconnected to the dig, reviewed Enviroscan’s report at the request of the AP and said the firm’s “methods were very good,” and “their conclusions represent a physically reasonable hypothesis” that gold was buried at the site.
FBI agents and representatives of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources set up base in March 2018, in Elk County, Pennsylvania.Enviroscan co-founder Tim Bechtel declined to comment about his work at Dent’s Run, saying the FBI has not given him permission to talk. The FBI would not discuss Bechtel this week but said that after the dig, agents “did not take any subsequent steps to reconcile the geophysical-survey findings with the absence of gold or any other metal.
She added that if the government does not produce a fuller, more contemporaneous accounting of its search for the gold, it “will heighten my view that this is not an accurate record and this was created as a cover-up. And I don’t say that lightly.” The FBI denied any work took place at the site after hours, saying the “only nighttime activity was ATV patrols by FBI Police personnel, who secured the site around the clock for the duration of the excavation.”
FBI agents are shown standing around the hole in photos that appear earlier in the series, but they are absent from nearly all of the later images at the dig site.