11:50 My problem with the idea of a stone being there talking about the treasure is that it just doesn't make sense. Why would someone go through the effort to bury a treasure in a super secure manner with booby traps to make it as hard as possible to recover it BUT also leave a message part way down that would encourage people to keep trying to get to it? If you're trying to keep your treasure safe you're not going to advertise that they are digging in the right place, possibly listing how much further they needed to go, and the amount of treasure they're going to get it they make it there. The only logical explanation for a stone existing here at all with a message like this is one of two options: 1. It was planted there in "modern" times to keep the legend going. 2. It was put there in "old" times to misdirect treasure seekers. So, again assuming that the stone is real (which is probably isn't), best case is that it's a fake designed to fool gullible people. Worst case is that it's a misdirection to get people to dig where there's no treasure.
A good ,honest, no nonsense vid about why theres pits & tunnels , the most likely explanation (which i agree with) Salt was an expensive commodity , And the treasure myths all totally debunked.. Of course the romans never went to oak island , its a tv gimmick thats all. This vid needs a wider audience...
I don't really know anything about the Oak Island lore, but the very idea of 'flood tunnels' seems inherently stupid to me. The whole point of the historically real but rare phenomenon of burying treasure was that you secretly put it in the ground in a place where nobody else would find it, so that you could quietly retrieve it later. Digging a complicated network of 'flood tunnels' would a) make it much more obvious to any potential thieves in the area that someone was burying something, and b) make it much harder for you to retrieve it yourself without a huge corps of workers to help you, who'd all expect to be paid off with a share of the loot. I.e. the whole concept of 'flood tunnels' seems not only ludicrous, but to actively militate against the sole purpose of burying treasure in the first place.
Just to update, the tv show played the video that the previous searcher lowered into 10X; it's not that the video "didn't surface", it's because the data that those searchers had were never published anywhere; it was just in a large archive in the guy's house. They found the flood tunnels. More recently in the latest season, they found a massive stone pathway in the swap that leads up to shore. It's at least a meter thick with lumber underneath the large boulders that stretches out onto the shoreline of the swap and up into the island. They found iron ox shoes, empty barrel pieces and tools along the road. They found a pine tar kiln that you would use to waterproof ships with. They found wood and human bones in the money pit area that dates as far back as the 1600's. The swamp is confirmed man-made. There's a huge list, every time I rewatch the show I remember things I forgot about. Still not sure who did it, but it would seem that it was a much bigger operation requiring a large engineering effort and lots of money to pull it off. I would be interested to see another one of your videos about all of the stuff they found. Despite it being a History Channel show, the two Brothers did an excellent job uncovering artifacts and adding more pieces to the puzzle. Maybe let your curiosity come out one more time? Forget about the treasure, it's not really about that anymore, it's more about the history of the place.
Thanks for your thoughts, and thanks for being respectful. Many fans of the show who comment here are not as respectful as you've been. What we're dealing with here in the case of the History Channel show is a deception by subtle misleading and inviting the gullible audience to jump to conclusions. The show's veracity as a historical source is fatally tainted by the fact that none of its supposed discoveries are backed by any reputable documentary evidence. What about that "Roman sword" they found that proved to be a toy souvenir manufactured in the 1970s? The producers of the show were not very transparent about this, and there's a reason: being honest about it would have undermined their audience's faith in the central premise of the series, which is to keep you watching in the hopes that they'll unearth treasure there. They won't. Still, of all the things you point out, the only one that's factually inaccurate is your claim that the "flood tunnels" have been found. They haven't been. What was found were the remains of access tunnels built by the 1862/63 treasure hunt expedition who tried to come at the "treasure" site from below. Their workbook, documenting exactly where and how they built the lumber and stone-lined channels, is documented and was catalogued by historians in 2014 (a fact I would imagine the History Channel show would rather not have its viewers know). The 1862-built tunnels were found previously on the 1897 excavation. The fact that they aren't the "flood tunnels" famed in the legend is self-evident from the fact that the "treasure" pit was not discovered immediately afterwards, which it would have been if they were part of a treasure operation. Nevertheless, all the other supposed discoveries made by the show producers don't support the treasure hypothesis. They are, in fact, artifacts of previous treasure digs. Every time someone digs a 200-foot shaft on the island, fails to find treasure, goes bankrupt and gives up, they fill the holes they dug back in with the junk and detritus they originally dug out. What this means is that debris from previous treasure hunts has been continuously and repeatedly buried, re-exhumed, re-buried, dug up again, and churned multiple times over the last 150 years. Everything you mentioned--a stone pathway, lumber and boulders, iron ox shoes, barrel staves, tools, a pine kiln, waterproofing materials, a man-made swamp--every single thing is entirely consistent with what you would expect from previous large-scale treasure digs. None are consistent with an operation existing prior to the first treasure hunt. Furthermore, contrary to all the treasure stories, the island has been continuously inhabited (by Native Americans, among others) for hundreds of years. Thus the discovery of human remains going back centuries is, again, exactly as consistent with an island that never had a "treasure" operation on it, as it is with one that did--a real-world example of which, I might add, is virtually unknown in documentary history anyway. Why, if the Borehole 10X video was supposedly conclusive, did it wind up "in a large archive in the guy's house"? You would think if it's the slam-dunk proof that he claimed it was, decades before the Lagina brothers ever heard of the place, he would have been shouting it from the rooftops. This is a telltale sign of fraud. If by the "history of the place" you mean the history of previous treasure hunts, you're entirely correct--that's the history that they're exhuming, at great profit to themselves and the History Channel's advertisers. I'm not sure what other "history" remains there to be uncovered. There is no evidence of anything other than a scam, and a series of treasure hunts by gullible investors beginning in the early 19th century. None of the methods that historians use to verify and document the past, or to build plausible hypotheses about what happened in the past, are being used by the producers of this show. In fact, the show is an example of *not* to do history, and how pseudohistorical narratives can be used to manipulate the conclusions that people jump to, largely for the commercial gain of their advertisers (and the Lagina brothers themselves, who I am told have gotten rich renting the heavy excavating equipment that they own back to the producers of the show). If you really step back and think about what you've been shown, I think you'll conclude that it doesn't add up to even a shadow of what its purveyors so fondly suggest might be the case. Thanks again for your comment.
Oak island may not have treasure, but the curse exists. It steals men's souls, breaks up families etc, takes lives. It's even inadvertently stolen your time as well by you just being a skeptic of it.
There is no curse. For every claimed treasure there are people who want to find it and people who talk about it. There is no need for a curse as an explanation for something as normal as that.
I love the story of oak island. I don't even care if there is treasure there but I think it's undeniable that something happened there before Dan McGinnis started digging. Thats the story i want to know.
I'm so glad I found this channel. Excellent, thoughtful debunking without the smarmy air of insufferable arrogance other skepticism videos have. Really good stuff!
It's been a long time since I read anything about Oak Island, but, if memory serves, R. V. Harris book mentions that an inscribed stone was on display in Downtown Halifax in the early twentieth century. I am not aware of any photographs, but there may be some contemporary newspaper accounts.
I think it would make more sense if that tackle they found was above That tackle most likely found . It was used to support a caldron To boil off the salt water to be boiled off to harvest the salt. The I think the original location. Was simply a place to produce salt the reason why it was few feet deep was to conceal the fames from prying eyes.
Your videos are insightful and intelligent. I respect that. I believe there is nothing on Oak Island too. I was wondering what is your thoughts on ghost hunter and ghost adventures and the ancient aliens shows too. I think these three shows are scams too. I would love to see a few videos about these shows in your honest opinions. Thanks and keep up the great research.
So, are you saying the History Channel and the Lagina brothers are planting artifacts in the treasure pit site that they are digging up in their bore holes at 120-150' levels?
Money Pit seems a fitting name for Oak Island. Eager and often gullible people buried a lot of money, looking for an illusionary treasure on that island.
It's just a karstic geological feature that formed during a glacial when sea level was much lower. Here in Jamaica we'd call it a sinkhole. How could anyone be surprised that it floods once you're down tens of metres? It's a small island made of limestone.
I could be misunderstanding something but are you saying there was burnt material found under the "box drains" and they were used to cook salt down? The article you link to does not argue that the salt work operated in this way. The article argues these drains were used to drain highly concentrated salt water into a well where it could be captured and moved to another place to be cooked down. "Where would the concentrated salt solution be boiled? It would seem the concentrated salt solution from the well was boiled at an unusual structure discovered by Dan Blankenship about 150 feet [50 metres] south of the centre of Smiths Cove Beach in 1969, at a depth of about 2 feet [60 centimetres] (17). It was a concrete U-shaped foundation buried in the soil.
Sticking to the world's great pass time, avoiding taxes, I'd love to hear one day that the current History Channel searchers had found a ton of gold, and continued the show because it was cheaper to produce a few more seasons rather than pay the taxes.
Great videos and I agree the idea of treasure on Oak Island is just bunkum. I am not sure I agree with you though that fisherman were producing salt on the island. In theory producing salt is easy but to produce it in the quantity needed by fisherman was very capital and resource intensive. Many of the fishing schooners carried in excess of fifty tons of salt. That is a lot of seawater to boil and a lot of trees to cut, size, transport, dry and then burn. I think this "illegal" production would have been known by everyone in the area due to the smoke and easily noticed by the authorities. Producing illegal salt on an island also does not make sense. The island would be denuded of its forest quickly and then the wood would have to be brought from the mainland. Also for security an island does not work well. If the authorities suddenly appear you need to have a path of escape and an island makes that a bit of a problem. The nearby mainland was the better option in this case to establish a salt works. It was not illegal to salt fish. What would have been illegal maybe was not paying the salt tax.
Even if true, I don't think it's very remarkable. If you dug that deep pretty much anywhere that has been continuously inhabited for hundreds of years, you will find human remains. This happens routinely, for example, in New York and other big cities, so often it rarely makes the news. Contrary to what the legend holds, Oak Island has been inhabited for centuries. Native Americans lived all over this area for thousands of years. European visitation of the area began in the 1600s and permanent homes of European-stock inhabitants were first established there no later than 1750. It would be a wonder if you dug that deep and didn't find bones.
Seems right, however how do you explain human carbon dated remains (before searchers) from almost 170 feet below? Or all the other really old structures for that matter? I don't think there is treasure left but it appears something big happened on that damn island.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, the island has been continuously inhabited by native peoples for thousands of years (the Eurocentric belief that the island was "uninhabited" before 1795 is obviously nonsense). Second, whenever a treasure company pulled up stakes and left after another failed attempt, they would bulldoze all of the debris from the dig to fill in the holes they had dug, some going down more than 200 feet. Most of this was done since 1900. So, it's obvious there are modern structures buried deep down. Third, no other maritime island has been as extensively excavated and churned up as this one has. We have no way of knowing if the finding of human remains that deep is indeed "normal," which I suspect it is given the island's long history of human habitation. Yes, something big happened: a bunch of failed treasure hunts, in the 19th and 20th centuries. But before that, it was just an ordinary island.
Actually I've never seen the show. These videos are based on books and research about the Oak Island legend before the show began. To my knowledge, the History Channel series has not contributed anything of value to the phenomenon and is mostly a publicity stunt.
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11:50 My problem with the idea of a stone being there talking about the treasure is that it just doesn't make sense.
Why would someone go through the effort to bury a treasure in a super secure manner with booby traps to make it as hard as possible to recover it BUT also leave a message part way down that would encourage people to keep trying to get to it? If you're trying to keep your treasure safe you're not going to advertise that they are digging in the right place, possibly listing how much further they needed to go, and the amount of treasure they're going to get it they make it there.
The only logical explanation for a stone existing here at all with a message like this is one of two options:
1. It was planted there in "modern" times to keep the legend going.
2. It was put there in "old" times to misdirect treasure seekers.
So, again assuming that the stone is real (which is probably isn't), best case is that it's a fake designed to fool gullible people. Worst case is that it's a misdirection to get people to dig where there's no treasure.
Step 1 buy uninhabited island
Step 2 create pirate treasure legend
Step 3 profit
A good ,honest, no nonsense vid about why theres pits & tunnels , the most likely explanation (which i agree with)
Salt was an expensive commodity ,
And the treasure myths all totally debunked..
Of course the romans never went to oak island , its a tv gimmick thats all.
This vid needs a wider audience...
I can’t believe you fell for the old, “Light a fire at the inlet of your flood tunnels to disguise them as salt works,” con. Oldest trick in the book.
I don't really know anything about the Oak Island lore, but the very idea of 'flood tunnels' seems inherently stupid to me. The whole point of the historically real but rare phenomenon of burying treasure was that you secretly put it in the ground in a place where nobody else would find it, so that you could quietly retrieve it later. Digging a complicated network of 'flood tunnels' would a) make it much more obvious to any potential thieves in the area that someone was burying something, and b) make it much harder for you to retrieve it yourself without a huge corps of workers to help you, who'd all expect to be paid off with a share of the loot. I.e. the whole concept of 'flood tunnels' seems not only ludicrous, but to actively militate against the sole purpose of burying treasure in the first place.
I agree!
If treasure was ever there, its been totally destroyed or dispersed into the water by now from all the digging.
This is what I was looking for. Rationality. Thanks man, I like resolution whether it's gold or dirt, the true value is truth.
Just to update, the tv show played the video that the previous searcher lowered into 10X; it's not that the video "didn't surface", it's because the data that those searchers had were never published anywhere; it was just in a large archive in the guy's house. They found the flood tunnels. More recently in the latest season, they found a massive stone pathway in the swap that leads up to shore. It's at least a meter thick with lumber underneath the large boulders that stretches out onto the shoreline of the swap and up into the island. They found iron ox shoes, empty barrel pieces and tools along the road. They found a pine tar kiln that you would use to waterproof ships with. They found wood and human bones in the money pit area that dates as far back as the 1600's. The swamp is confirmed man-made. There's a huge list, every time I rewatch the show I remember things I forgot about.
Still not sure who did it, but it would seem that it was a much bigger operation requiring a large engineering effort and lots of money to pull it off. I would be interested to see another one of your videos about all of the stuff they found. Despite it being a History Channel show, the two Brothers did an excellent job uncovering artifacts and adding more pieces to the puzzle. Maybe let your curiosity come out one more time? Forget about the treasure, it's not really about that anymore, it's more about the history of the place.
Thanks for your thoughts, and thanks for being respectful. Many fans of the show who comment here are not as respectful as you've been.
What we're dealing with here in the case of the History Channel show is a deception by subtle misleading and inviting the gullible audience to jump to conclusions. The show's veracity as a historical source is fatally tainted by the fact that none of its supposed discoveries are backed by any reputable documentary evidence. What about that "Roman sword" they found that proved to be a toy souvenir manufactured in the 1970s? The producers of the show were not very transparent about this, and there's a reason: being honest about it would have undermined their audience's faith in the central premise of the series, which is to keep you watching in the hopes that they'll unearth treasure there. They won't.
Still, of all the things you point out, the only one that's factually inaccurate is your claim that the "flood tunnels" have been found. They haven't been. What was found were the remains of access tunnels built by the 1862/63 treasure hunt expedition who tried to come at the "treasure" site from below. Their workbook, documenting exactly where and how they built the lumber and stone-lined channels, is documented and was catalogued by historians in 2014 (a fact I would imagine the History Channel show would rather not have its viewers know). The 1862-built tunnels were found previously on the 1897 excavation. The fact that they aren't the "flood tunnels" famed in the legend is self-evident from the fact that the "treasure" pit was not discovered immediately afterwards, which it would have been if they were part of a treasure operation.
Nevertheless, all the other supposed discoveries made by the show producers don't support the treasure hypothesis. They are, in fact, artifacts of previous treasure digs. Every time someone digs a 200-foot shaft on the island, fails to find treasure, goes bankrupt and gives up, they fill the holes they dug back in with the junk and detritus they originally dug out. What this means is that debris from previous treasure hunts has been continuously and repeatedly buried, re-exhumed, re-buried, dug up again, and churned multiple times over the last 150 years. Everything you mentioned--a stone pathway, lumber and boulders, iron ox shoes, barrel staves, tools, a pine kiln, waterproofing materials, a man-made swamp--every single thing is entirely consistent with what you would expect from previous large-scale treasure digs. None are consistent with an operation existing prior to the first treasure hunt. Furthermore, contrary to all the treasure stories, the island has been continuously inhabited (by Native Americans, among others) for hundreds of years. Thus the discovery of human remains going back centuries is, again, exactly as consistent with an island that never had a "treasure" operation on it, as it is with one that did--a real-world example of which, I might add, is virtually unknown in documentary history anyway.
Why, if the Borehole 10X video was supposedly conclusive, did it wind up "in a large archive in the guy's house"? You would think if it's the slam-dunk proof that he claimed it was, decades before the Lagina brothers ever heard of the place, he would have been shouting it from the rooftops. This is a telltale sign of fraud.
If by the "history of the place" you mean the history of previous treasure hunts, you're entirely correct--that's the history that they're exhuming, at great profit to themselves and the History Channel's advertisers. I'm not sure what other "history" remains there to be uncovered. There is no evidence of anything other than a scam, and a series of treasure hunts by gullible investors beginning in the early 19th century.
None of the methods that historians use to verify and document the past, or to build plausible hypotheses about what happened in the past, are being used by the producers of this show. In fact, the show is an example of *not* to do history, and how pseudohistorical narratives can be used to manipulate the conclusions that people jump to, largely for the commercial gain of their advertisers (and the Lagina brothers themselves, who I am told have gotten rich renting the heavy excavating equipment that they own back to the producers of the show). If you really step back and think about what you've been shown, I think you'll conclude that it doesn't add up to even a shadow of what its purveyors so fondly suggest might be the case.
Thanks again for your comment.
Oak island may not have treasure, but the curse exists. It steals men's souls, breaks up families etc, takes lives. It's even inadvertently stolen your time as well by you just being a skeptic of it.
There is no curse. For every claimed treasure there are people who want to find it and people who talk about it. There is no need for a curse as an explanation for something as normal as that.
citation needed
I love the story of oak island. I don't even care if there is treasure there but I think it's undeniable that something happened there before Dan McGinnis started digging.
Thats the story i want to know.
I'm so glad I found this channel. Excellent, thoughtful debunking without the smarmy air of insufferable arrogance other skepticism videos have. Really good stuff!
It's been a long time since I read anything about Oak Island, but, if memory serves, R. V. Harris book mentions that an inscribed stone was on display in Downtown Halifax in the early twentieth century. I am not aware of any photographs, but there may be some contemporary newspaper accounts.
I have never believed in the booby traps. I really like your explanation.
The whole thing makes no sense The tax avoidance with the salt thing does and that seems to be it.
I think it would make more sense if that tackle they found was above That tackle most likely found . It was used to support a caldron To boil off the salt water to be boiled off to harvest the salt. The I think the original location. Was simply a place to produce salt the reason why it was few feet deep was to conceal the fames from prying eyes.
Your videos are insightful and intelligent. I respect that. I believe there is nothing on Oak Island too. I was wondering what is your thoughts on ghost hunter and ghost adventures and the ancient aliens shows too. I think these three shows are scams too. I would love to see a few videos about these shows in your honest opinions. Thanks and keep up the great research.
So, are you saying the History Channel and the Lagina brothers are planting artifacts in the treasure pit site that they are digging up in their bore holes at 120-150' levels?
Lagina bros. (Love them, tho I do) didn’t find squat. (Nobody has found squat) They had an adventure. There isn’t a treasure and never was.
Didn't Leonard Nimoy do an episode of *_'In Search Of... '_* on this? I seem to remember that.
Money Pit seems a fitting name for Oak Island. Eager and often gullible people buried a lot of money, looking for an illusionary treasure on that island.
It's just a karstic geological feature that formed during a glacial when sea level was much lower. Here in Jamaica we'd call it a sinkhole. How could anyone be surprised that it floods once you're down tens of metres? It's a small island made of limestone.
It would be great if they did find treasure, but I'm starting to think that if there ever was, it is long gone by now.
I could be misunderstanding something but are you saying there was burnt material found under the "box drains" and they were used to cook salt down? The article you link to does not argue that the salt work operated in this way. The article argues these drains were used to drain highly concentrated salt water into a well where it could be captured and moved to another place to be cooked down.
"Where would the concentrated salt solution be boiled? It would seem the concentrated salt solution from the well was boiled at an unusual structure discovered by Dan Blankenship about 150 feet [50 metres] south of the centre of Smiths Cove Beach in 1969, at a depth of about 2 feet [60 centimetres] (17). It was a concrete U-shaped foundation buried in the soil.
Sticking to the world's great pass time, avoiding taxes, I'd love to hear one day that the current History Channel searchers had found a ton of gold, and continued the show because it was cheaper to produce a few more seasons rather than pay the taxes.
Isn't this about the time Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island and again meant buried treasure stories were in vogue?
There is treasure on oak island. It's the millions and millions of dollars spent trying to find it.
This has always been the only treasure that's there!
There was a video of 10-X, it's just grainy as hell... there's since been an HD video taken that completely debunks the original.
Well-done!
Great videos and I agree the idea of treasure on Oak Island is just bunkum. I am not sure I agree with you though that fisherman were producing salt on the island. In theory producing salt is easy but to produce it in the quantity needed by fisherman was very capital and resource intensive. Many of the fishing schooners carried in excess of fifty tons of salt. That is a lot of seawater to boil and a lot of trees to cut, size, transport, dry and then burn.
I think this "illegal" production would have been known by everyone in the area due to the smoke and easily noticed by the authorities. Producing illegal salt on an island also does not make sense. The island would be denuded of its forest quickly and then the wood would have to be brought from the mainland. Also for security an island does not work well. If the authorities suddenly appear you need to have a path of escape and an island makes that a bit of a problem. The nearby mainland was the better option in this case to establish a salt works.
It was not illegal to salt fish. What would have been illegal maybe was not paying the salt tax.
I think it was a rum running operation
10:00 trhe highest elevation on Oak Island is 30 ft ABOVE sea level. (not 30 ft below)
What do you think about the human bone found over 150 feet underground. Forget the idea of treasure that is crazy if real.
Even if true, I don't think it's very remarkable. If you dug that deep pretty much anywhere that has been continuously inhabited for hundreds of years, you will find human remains. This happens routinely, for example, in New York and other big cities, so often it rarely makes the news. Contrary to what the legend holds, Oak Island has been inhabited for centuries. Native Americans lived all over this area for thousands of years. European visitation of the area began in the 1600s and permanent homes of European-stock inhabitants were first established there no later than 1750. It would be a wonder if you dug that deep and didn't find bones.
@@erikacece4565 turns out it was actually slag from molten metal
Nope. No bones
I love your pieces. You are confirming all my suspicions.
Sick Rhapsody shirt
Oi! You got a loisence for that salt?
Maybe something could have been there once, but much lesser than anything the show mentioned, and it's not there now if there was anything.
9 years for naught
Seems right, however how do you explain human carbon dated remains (before searchers) from almost 170 feet below? Or all the other really old structures for that matter? I don't think there is treasure left but it appears something big happened on that damn island.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, the island has been continuously inhabited by native peoples for thousands of years (the Eurocentric belief that the island was "uninhabited" before 1795 is obviously nonsense). Second, whenever a treasure company pulled up stakes and left after another failed attempt, they would bulldoze all of the debris from the dig to fill in the holes they had dug, some going down more than 200 feet. Most of this was done since 1900. So, it's obvious there are modern structures buried deep down. Third, no other maritime island has been as extensively excavated and churned up as this one has. We have no way of knowing if the finding of human remains that deep is indeed "normal," which I suspect it is given the island's long history of human habitation. Yes, something big happened: a bunch of failed treasure hunts, in the 19th and 20th centuries. But before that, it was just an ordinary island.
@@SeanMunger I can agree with that logic. Have you seen the show since? I'm sure your viewers would like to know. Thanks
Actually I've never seen the show. These videos are based on books and research about the Oak Island legend before the show began. To my knowledge, the History Channel series has not contributed anything of value to the phenomenon and is mostly a publicity stunt.
Digging for oak island treasure is like looking for unicorns
They have treasure in the pit now
They do not. It's nonsense.
Shame on the HISTORY channel!
that mic is made specifically to not need a pop filter
If true, that feature of it isn't working because it definitely needs one!