A treasure hunter has made allegations against the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying that it hid its recovery of Civil War-era gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Co-owner of Finders Keepers, Dennis Parada, told Fox News that the FBI is covering up a plot of gold dug up in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, in 2018. Parada was responsible for helping the bureau identify the location as a potential site for a purported missing shipment of gold, lost on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia in 1863.
While the FBI admits it pursued the lead in Dents Run, it holds that no gold was ever found.
In 2022, maintaining that allegations of treasure being discovered were false, the bureau reiterated that it “continues to unequivocally reject any claims or speculation to the contrary,” Fox News reported.
Parada believes otherwise.
“We feel we were double-crossed and lied to,” he said, per Fox News.
Last year, Parada moved to sue the bureau to release documents — like videos, photos, and maps — linked to the alleged excavation. In one released video, an interview with an FBI art-crime team reportedly shows them discussing the possibility of a large gold deposit.
“We’ve identified through our investigation a site that we believe has US property, which includes a significant sum of base metal which is valuable … particularly gold, maybe silver,” the agent recounted in the video, the Guardian reported.
The agent went on to say that “scientific testing” corroborated the details previously provided by Parada. All that was left to do was excavate the area and “get to the bottom” of the mystery, per the video, as reported by the Guardian.
Despite a prior geophysical test of the site apparently revealing a 7- to 9-ton underground mass consistent with a material like gold, the FBI maintained that no precious metal was ever found, per the Guardian.
Parada, who was largely prevented from visiting the site, suspects the bureau conducted an overnight dig, located the treasure, and swiftly removed it in secrecy.
Furthermore, Parada and consultant Warren Getler have pointed to inconsistencies in some evidence, the Guardian reported. One image provided by the FBI, reportedly taken an hour after a snowstorm, shows no snow on a large boulder in the photo. However, that same boulder was covered in snow in another image said to have been taken the next morning.
“We have compelling evidence a night dig took place, and that the FBI went to some large effort to cover up that night dig,” claimed Getler, per the Guardian. Getler co-authored Rebel Gold, a book that discusses rumored buried treasures dating back to the Civil War.
According to a legal motion submitted by Finders Keepers, the hundreds of photos initially provided by the FBI were rendered in low-resolution, high-contrast black-and-white. This made it difficult to distinguish the time of day in the photos. The bureau did provide dozens of images in color upon request, according to the Guardian.
The agency also reportedly declined to provide video evidence of the second day of the dig or any evidence related to what the agency’s own map reportedly labeled as a 30-foot-long and 12-foot-deep trench at the site. This is the excavation that Parada and Getler suggest could only have been dug overnight, the Guardian reported.
Another so-called anomaly relates to a report from a consulting firm hired by the bureau to investigate the potential gold cache. In the version of the report provided to Parada, a page is alleged to have been missing.
In a legal filing penned by Anne Weismann, a lawyer representing Finders Keepers, it is said that the released records “cast doubt on the FBI’s claim to have found nothing and raise serious and troubling questions about the FBI’s conduct during the dig and in this litigation, where it has gone to great lengths to distort critical evidence,” the Guardian reported.
For his part, Parada insists he will “stick at this until I know everything that happened to that gold,” per Fox News.
