What Lies Beneath Could Collapse | The Curse of Oak Island
What Lies Beneath Could Collapse | The Curse of Oak Island
More wood post at the bottom.
Did you see that rush of water coming in down there?
Uh, no.
It’s still coming in.
Can you see that?
No. Walk more over there.
I’ll grab your belt buckle or or—
Oh, yeah.
You can see it squirting up like a geyser.
Here, stand where I am.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. It’s freaking awesome.
Marty, come look at this.
After being alerted to the discovery of a potential flood tunnel
in the uplands near Smith’s Cove—
possibly the same one identified by recent seismic imaging—
Marty Lagina joins Craig Tester, Jack Begley, Gary Drayton,
and Billy Gerhart to inspect the site and continue the investigation.
The water’s squirting up from the bottom.
You’ll see it in the back corner.
Oh, yeah.
Do we know if it’s fresh or salt?
Don’t know.
Can’t say we found the flood tunnel itself,
but what I see and hear is a lot of water rushing in.
And it appears to be rushing in from the uphole side—
in other words, from the landward side.
This to me is very impressive.
Base is giving a little bit now.
You can see a crack up in through here.
Yeah.
Suddenly—
Oh wow. That whole edge is about to come.
Oh man.
Yeah. Yep. Let’s go.
Yep.
This is all getting kind of dangerous.
Yeah. This is not—
So, that was a big enough piece
where that whole bridge could go.
Yep. Yeah. We’re getting out of here.
It’s not worth it.
Unfortunately for the team,
the flood tunnel did what it was designed to do more than two centuries ago—
frustrate the efforts of would-be treasure hunters
to shut off the flow of water
to the booby trap system that guards the Money Pit.
It’s all caving in now.
He’s lost a ton of holes. A ton.
Do we need to see anything more there?
I just think it’s going to cave in too fast.
I’d say put enough in there to make that stable.
Yeah. Hold on, Mike. Let’s reposition.
In order to stabilize the area against further cave-ins,
the team will now need to act quickly to backfill the hole.
Unfortunately, this also means
that any further digging in search of the main flood tunnel
will have to wait until the ground has settled.
We take some risks out here,
and this is a dangerous place.
It’d just be foolhardy to keep digging.
It wouldn’t have made any sense.
It was sloughing all the time.
So you got to get water.
You can put a line on that towards the Money Pit.
I think we may have to give up on that one for now.
I think we’re all quite excited
that it could be the so-called flood tunnel booby trap system.
Of course, we’re going to investigate.
We have to see what it looks like.
That’s amazing.
Two things. I’m going to look, but he’s done.
He’s undermining right there.
There’s hardly anything left.
Oh, that’s not good. Where’s your rock? Over in that corner.
No, it was right—
It was right here. Right. I heard you hitting on it.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was a rock.
I’ll look.
Well, you basically got a slit down below.
There’s wood on the left—your left—
and it looks like a tunnel to me going that way.
But it’s probably 15 ft off bottom at least.
Has the Oak Island team finally found the main flood tunnel—
the one which searchers have been trying to locate and shut off
for more than two centuries?
This is obviously not very stable.
Yep.
I don’t like the looks of it.
All right. Well, maybe we should try
mounting the camera on the side of the bucket right now.
I think that’s a great idea.
Can you rig that up, Scott?
Y. [Music]
The problem with doing this the simple way—
with a long-reach excavator—
is that we do not have a stable hole.
If we had dug a big pit with stable sides,
then we could go down and look at it.
But it’s not safe to do that.
So, we’re going to lower a camera on the excavator arm itself.
The object is to find out what’s going on here.
Tell me which way you want to go.
Hey, Billy.
In a little towards you. Yeah.
Now down.
He’s still on the wall.
He’s got to go lower.
Okay. Down.
Look at that.
There’s all kinds of wood everywhere.
There is definitely structure on the left wall.
Yep. It’s got to go this way. Stop.
Doesn’t that look like it’s a hole?
It’s a hole.
Is it a tunnel?
Well, looks like it’s braced with wood to me.
If it’s a tunnel, it’d be great.
Well, I think it is.
And it doesn’t look good under there.
Let’s get out of here.
I think we got what we need to get.
Billy, come on up.
All right, Rick, we got the data.
We need to put our heads together
and see what the heck this means.
Let’s convene in the war room and discuss all this.
Okay, pretty cool. Real cool.
Gents, we’re here to talk about the uplands—
what we’ve done, what it means,
and where we go from here.
So, I think we’re going to start out with that video we took.
Here we go. [Music]
This is down 30 ft.
There’s a lot of rock in between those.
Yeah. Let’s pause that.
Okay. So, what are we looking at? What is that?
Is it a tunnel that’s been filled with rock?
Could have been a collapsed tunnel or shaft.
That’s what it looks like to me.
That’s wood on either side.
And you have this piece right here—
it looks like a beam.
You can see the wood at the bottom coming out.
So, I’d say it’s probably shaft or tunnel.
Wow. You see the—
You can see the double layer there.
The double wall.
That looks like a tunnel to me.
I mean, it goes in there.
It seemed like it followed wood the whole way down.
How thick are those boards? 2 in plus?
Yep. The ones on the right were.
The ones on the left were a little bit narrower.
Ones on the right were much more substantial.
Which one? This one—to your upper right.
Keep going. Here. You’re right. This one right there.
What I’ve got tagged this year—
you can see up on the screen.
Right here. You can see it lines up. Calculated by Craig.
Purely going off of the U-shaped structure,
assuming that the U-shaped structure was put in there with a specific purpose—
it looks more tunnel-like than shaft-like.
Yeah, ’cause it’s just hard to picture that being a searcher effort, isn’t it?
What I’m getting at is the 1769.
Which means that if it comes back old,
it almost has to be original work.
That’s right. That’s right.
The dendrochronology—
if it puts that wood that we got
as pre-Money Pit discovery—
then, yeah, you pretty much have to say,
geez, very good chance it’s part of the flood tunnel.
If that data comes back old,
we’re right back at this thing.
That’s where the bad news comes in.
We have to pull the sheet pile.
We have a timeline for that—
a very specific timeline—
but there’s still great hope for Smith’s Cove.
I don’t think we can put an X through it.
Smith’s Cove isn’t done.
Although the team has found promising evidence of the main flood tunnel,
they are faced with a disappointing and unfortunate reality.
In less than 24 hours,
representatives from Irving Equipment Limited
are set to arrive and begin staging heavy equipment at the Smith’s Cove area
in order to remove the massive steel coffer dam.
Because this operation will take several weeks
and make working at Smith’s Cove and the nearby uplands virtually impossible,
Rick, Marty, and the team
will now have to suspend their search activities in the area for the rest of the year.
Look, it’s obvious, isn’t it?
If you have undisturbed soil, and then a bunch of wood,
and then undisturbed soil—
that sure sounds like a tunnel to me.
It’s about where the so-called flood tunnel needs to be.
We aren’t going to give up on something like that.
But having said all that,
our permits aren’t going to allow us to do any more excavation this year.
We’re done.
Okay, guys. Well, here’s what I heard.
Lots of interesting stuff,
but the key piece of data is yet to come.
We’re all keenly interested in the dendro results
on the Question Mark Shaft.
That could lead us—well, could lead us just about anywhere.
But in the meantime,
Billy, you got a lot of work to do,
because that sheet pile has to come out.
So back at it. Good meeting.
As a new day begins
in the quest to solve a 229-year-old treasure mystery
on Oak Island…
Let’s get these next holes decided.
Brothers Rick and Marty Lagina,
along with their partner Craig Tester,
are meeting with members of their team
inside the Research Center
to discuss their current search operations
in the legendary Money Pit area.
I have been focused very much
on these metals in the water
after our recent go-round with the scientists.
They seem to say
that that had the most potential
to be where the metals are coming from.
Wasn’t it yellow?
That’s Fred’s sort of special area of interest,
mainly because that’s where we got
persistent high copper, lead, zinc, and tin.
And while their most recent tests
have suggested that the treasure
lies buried inside of a 2,500-foot region
known as the “PI,”
Dr. Michael believes
that it is most likely hidden
within a mere 30-by-5-foot oval-shaped area.
We need a name for this.
Golden circle, golden oval, golden ellipse.
All of those are too difficult.
Let’s call it the Golden Egg from here on out.
And let’s hope
that that name is prophetic.
We have the Golden Egg,
where most likely the metals are coming from.
So we have to drill a bunch of wells in there,
sufficient to evaluate it.
So our first well, by the sounds of it,
is going to be EN-13.
So 13 is covering the Baby Blob
and the Golden Egg.
Yep. Seems like a good idea.
Yeah, this is what we need to do.
Okay, this is the year.
Let’s go back.
We’re looking for treasure.
We’re not going to find it in here.
No, that’s a good point, Scott.
We’re not.
The following morning—
an intense moment
in the Money Pit area
for Rick Lagina
and members of the Oak Island team.
So, we’ll have a good look here now.
While drilling borehole 13
in the possible treasure zone
dubbed the Golden Egg—
What do you got, Adam?
Ninety-nine.
Ninety-nine feet. Thank you.
Evidence of a possible structure
has been encountered
at a depth of nearly one hundred feet.
How you doing?
Good.
Felt like you just caught something.
Well, it was really soft at the top here.
Felt like it anyway—then got super stiff.
Yeah, it was a little soft.
Let’s carve it up.
Most of the intersections at about this level
get soft, but it gets relatively firm here.
But no wood.
And this—
this is relatively soft material.
We’re in fertile territory.
This looks pretty good, Mike.
So, we could be close to something.
We’re through that zone of interest,
but that is suggesting something…
something might be close.
It could go back.
I’d just move over here,
right in the next hole, five-T away.
So if there’s something there,
we should be able to find it in that hole.
Any utility in grabbing a sample of the water
for metal testing?
I’d like to see Dr. Spooner take a sample.
All right, good luck, guys.
We’ll see you later.
Later that afternoon,
Rick Lagina arrives back at the Money Pit area
after being alerted
to a potentially major development
near the recently drilled borehole EN-13—
the one in the so-called Golden Egg—
where just one day ago
the team believes
they nearly drilled into a man-made structure
a hundred feet underground.
Right there. That’s the drill hole—EN-13.
And I just sampled FN-13 in the yellow cone there.
Right under the yellow cone.
Yep.
And I was bailing it,
and I thought there was thunder.
I—boom boom boom—
and it’s coming out of the well.
Really?
You’ve never heard that underground before, right?
No. No. Honest to God,
it was really quite extraordinary.
It went on for about thirty seconds.
What do you make of that?
My thought is that
when they were drilling in 13 there—
we know they were in soft ground—
that they’re near something.
Mhm.
And now it’s moving around air within it.
The implication being,
there’s something open down there.
Yes. This thing’s collapsing.
So to collapse there
means there has to be a void.
Dr. Spooner revealed
he heard some sort of collapse underground.
I never heard anyone talk of that before.
So might there be a chance here
to discover the treasure once and for all?
Sure.
There’s all of these clues
that strongly suggest
this area holds significant interest.
So I think something’s going on here.
All the chemistry’s kind of pointed to that.
So, here’s one example.
If you hold it up to the sun,
you can see the discoloration in it—
the yellow color.
Yeah. That wasn’t there beforehand.
You just took a sample?
Yeah. After that.
Yes. So the darker water
can indicate we’re closer to wood—
the source of wood.
So I’m very interested,
’cause we have not seen this well before.
And if that’s the case,
then we’ve moved something around.
There’s almost a direct connection to something.
Yes. I think the underground collapse
probably means
that we’re in and around an open chamber.
So what we think
is that this event moved water
from a tunnel or a shaft—
and all of this
is critical to understanding
where the metals are coming from.
So it’s a good place
to have a very strange event occur.
Well, that next hole will be very interesting.
Yes. Hopefully we’ll drill there,
we’ll hit it,
we’ll actually hit something
that can help us explain the metals.
Okay. Well, thank you for the update.
Yep. We need to keep our wits about us.
The next morning—
following the discovery of another Roman coin,
which the team believes
may be connected to descendants of Vikings—
Doug and Emiliano
have a new and potentially important development to discuss.
We learned that by 875 A.D.,
the Norse had reached Iceland,
and by 985 A.D.,
they had reached Greenland.
But what’s more intriguing
is the only known Viking settlement
on the North American continent—
the L’Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland—
was active in 1021 A.D.
Seems like that’s our next destination.
Located in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada—
approximately six hundred twenty-five miles
northeast of Oak Island—
L’Anse aux Meadows
is a Viking settlement established more than a thousand years ago
and designated by the Canadian government
as a national historic site.
Today, it remains
the only officially recognized Viking settlement in North America.
The descendants of Vikings
are very important to understanding
how an Old World treasure
might have come to Oak Island.
I believe they were integral
to the ability of someone—once—
to come across the North Atlantic
to the Maritimes
and do this work on Oak Island.
Are we going to bring the things
that we suspect possibly could be related
to the Viking descendants?
We can certainly get permission to do that.
What about the arrowhead?
Absolutely.
So when did they discover L’Anse aux Meadows?
In the 1960s.
Yeah. Okay.
So if that one was hidden until 1960—
why would it be the only one?
Yeah.
Well, this is another mystery.
And this is why I think
since we have found other things on the island
of possible Scandinavian origin,
this could be indications
of prolonged activity
by descendants of the Vikings—or the Templars.
Maybe they came down
from L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland
to hide something.
And I think that’s what brought them to Oak Island.
Yeah.
If something happened in the 1200s here—
it almost has to have a component
of Viking descendants.
Based on everything we know right now,
it almost has to.
There weren’t a lot of other people
who knew about this place.
Then it’s entirely possible
that they could have brought
the Knights Templar—or anybody else—
to Oak Island
for purposes of depositing something.
So I want to just chase that.
I think we should mount an expedition.
I really do.
I want to go this time.
I totally agree.
There’s always something to learn.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, we just found another Roman coin
on Lot 5.
My suggestion would be—
go to L’Anse aux Meadows
and see what you can find.
Absolutely.
I can stay, hold down the fort here.
I mean, we’ll get a full lowdown
of what happens there.
New perspective, new insight—
that’s always a big thing.
Yeah, I’m in.
I’m in.
We’ll give you a full report, right guys?
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay, let’s go.
I’m good.
Let’s make it happen.
See you, gentlemen.
