OLD MAN,
A guy just stepped into the spot light of 60 Minutes and the world, after going "all in". He could have run to another country or sold these illicitly but didn't. He may be the new face of treasure hunting.
That, right there, is the strongest motive of all, for certain people.
Recognition, renown. For some men, the pull of 'fame' is even stronger than that of money.
One needn't look further than our own fantasists right here on Treasurenet who post all manner of fantastic coins or artifacts ostensibly from their own collections, covered with a dash of muddy topsoil (or perhaps carefully laid in the dirt outside), photographed, then claimed to be an amazing find they made with their trusty VXQ-4000 metal detector, right there next to Miss Johnsons old barn where they'd looked a thousand times before... The ego can do bizarre things when you try at something but fail for years and years and years... IIRC, as stated in the 60 Minutes piece, the chief party associated with this Emerald story was very much at that point.
Regardless, the biggest problem here is the Emeralds having been heat treated.
Oops.
That is a totally, 100% fatal flaw to idea that these emeralds were from antiquity. Since the area where these emeralds were found is known to occasionally yield shipwreck emeralds- but since heat treated emeralds don't grow naturally there (or anywhere else)- the result is a totally unnatural situation.
So where does this leave us?
We might take the guy at face value and assume that a n'er-do-well band of emerald smugglers happened to lose a sizable bag of emeralds overboard, and that those emeralds sat right there, on the surface... and that subsequent to buying an ancient piece of pottery from a downtrodden diver, these unexpectedly modern emeralds were coincidentally discovered right there in the "Ancient Emerald Belt" by a treasure hunter who, up to that point, had achieved nothing of substance in the TH world and was essentially bankrupt?
Or, maybe we go with Occams Razor; that this is a garden variety TH scheme- not too dissimilar to ones we've seen in the past- intended to defraud investors? The "treasure" in question was bulked up with investor money as it rolled in, then laid carefully on the bottom to be conveniently 'found' in front of the cameras?
That the people behind the scheme were shitty planners and didn't think it through carefully enough, to account for freak variables that might expose them like the uncut emeralds they were buying (with investor money, to keep the hope flowing) from the wholesale Colombian distributor had been covertly heat treated, thus completely kinking their story that they were from an ancient Spanish shipwreck? Or that the ego stroke they were really chasing after would collide with the latticework of treasure laws regarding found items of high value, thus endangering their ability to sell the "found treasure" and remain liquid?
Sorry man, but I've been in cow pastures that didn't smell of bullshit as badly as this whole thing does.
We skeptical types traded in the joy of believing in Santa so we could grow up into adults that could see things as they were.
Right now, this appears as a 1 + 1 question.
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