Sadly, this is hypothetical...
I know 3 chests of gold are buried - somewhere within 300 acres... at 8 feet deep. There is no (or very little) iron buried with the cache.
How do I locate them?
This is the official re-opening of the TreasureNet Long Range Locator Forum.
PLEASE NOTE: As the administrator, creator and owner of this site, I HAVE SEEN PEOPLE GET RIPPED OFF (defrauded) by people selling so-called "long range locators" (devices, that supposedly, can find precious metals at a distance). I HIGHLY recommend consulting a geophysicist ($100 in consulting fees could save you thousands, and you'll learn something!), before spending ONE DIME ON ANY "long range locator" . With that, I open this forum to the discussion of said devices.
Well, since the LRL crowd know they have nothing useful to contribute the "Marc Austin Challenge", that leaves it open to everyone else by LRL forfeit. So, let's look at what there is that might be helpful.
1. Ordinary research and reasoning about the story being followed up on, could lead to clues which narrow it down (or better yet, might lead to the conclusion the things were dug up two centuries ago and ain't there no mo, sparing the TH'er yet another wild goose chase).
2. Satellite imagery is becoming part of "ordinary research", and could well provide clues about more likely and less likely places to look for a cache. The "photo" itself won't tell you much, the important part is understanding what you're looking at. .....In some places, there is airborne photogrammetry etc. available to augment satellite imagery.
3. Three hundred acres is nearly half a square mile (and a bit more than a square kilometer). There is various portable geophysical and metal detecting apparatus which might be capable of detecting the caches, and that kind of apparatus keeps getting better.
4. The problem with the portable geophysical & metal detecting apparatus, is that to cover 300 acres, you've got a lot of work ahead of you. That sucks. Even if prior research has narrowed the area worth searching down 100 acres, it's still a lot of work. That's still over 4 million square feet, and if you figure a 4 foot wide search path, that's over 200 miles to cover presumably on foot. At 1 mile per hour, that's 200 hours-- 5 weeks of full time work. Five weeks to search for three gold caches may sound like a worthwhile risk to someone who's serious about such stuff, but to lazy butts it's unthinkable.
5. This makes shortcut methods of locating a tempting proposition. Things like dowsing and Ouija boards. Problem is, those things aren't very reliable, and worse yet tend to lead into delusional thinking. For good reason the wisdom branch of the Judeo-Christian and most other religious traditions generally discourages or outright condemns practices that might be regarded as "magical". Wisdom is rightly skeptical: indeed without skepticism, no wisdom is even possible because the ability to discard malarkey has itself been discarded in favor of beliefs entertained to satisfy emotion-based desires. Notice that I am not saying that magical methods do not work, what I am saying is that for most people they are worse than worthless and that's an opinion that's been around for thousands of years. This very forum is a first class zoo exhibit of the kind of evidence that has informed the wisdom tradition on this matter throughout the ages.
6. So, suppose you want to use "magical methods" with your eyes wide open to admitting to what they really are and what the dangers are. And, for the sake of argument, let's say that the method you want to rely on is on-site dowsing. You can dowse it yourself, you can hire a dowser whom you think actually gets results better than random chance, or pile on with several dowsers including yourself and see if any two people get hits on the same spots.
7. You might try doing some followup scientific instrument investigation of spots that magical methods pointed out as promising, but at some point for the exercise to ever produce anything, you're gonna have to get dirty and dig. Hard work: it sucks. And a lot of the time, you get a dry hole. For some reason, locates done by relying on magical methods surprisingly often produce a supposed locate that for some reason can't actually be dug. Go figure.
8. Many an actual dig has led to nothing, either because there was never anything there in the first place, because it was there but has been removed, or because the actual dig was done wrong and therefore did not retrieve what was or is still there.
* * * * * * * AND THEN THERE'S LRL's * * * * * * * *
"LRL" is an acronym for "Long Range Locator". Apparatus which is not fraudulent is not identified either by the manufacturer or by LRL fans as "LRL": therefore this term refers specifically to apparatus which "skeptics" say is fraudulent and the LRL proponents know the same thing but refuse to admit it either because they've got skin in the money game or because they got suckered and admitting to that fact is painful.
The difference between dowsing rods and LRL's is that the latter incorporate bogus electronic stuff and then the fans claim it isn't really dowsing, even though the dowsing rods are there in plain view. (There is a narrow class of fraudulent locating apparatus LRL stuff that can't even be dowsed with, and it's the fact you can't even dowse with it that relegates it to such minority status.) So-called "MFD" does not change this picture, it is a key part of the big picture and helps to illustrate the fraudulent character of LRL's.
I have already pointed out the problems with dowsing. If you want to go that route, do NOT be a gullibilly, but keep your critical thinking skills about you when reasoning about results even if you have to temporarily step into non-critical mode to do the actual dowsing (since it requires subconscious activity unblocked by conscious activity). You can't dowse while you're doing your income tax return, but if you're investing in months of hard work to retrieve a possible cache of gold, you darn well better use conscious reasoning to interpret results and manage the execution of the project.
If you go the LRL route, you have really shot yourself in the foot. Right off the bat, you've invested in denying that what you're doing is dowsing, and pretending that you have a scientific sort of instrument which you just plain ain't got. Even if it turns out you can dowse using the thing, which isn't likely, by denying that it's dowsing you will misinterpret the results and ruin your ability to use information to manage the execution of the project. And, like I said, LRL's are fraudulent to begin with anyhow, so introducing LRL's into a recovery project is like hiring a crooked account to manage the financing of the operation. Why hire a known crooked accountant when an honest one would do?
The worthlessness of LRL's is on display right here on this forum. Compare this forum to the dowsing forum! On the dowsing forum there is debate over what techniques work better than others, and why-- most of it not very scientific, since most of the people who practice dowsing have no background in science. And if results of blinded dowsing are better than chance, there is no accepted scientific explanation for that, in fact not even acceptance that such is the case. It's obvious to me that most of the dowsing that's reported on the dowsing forum is by people who quite literally don't know how to tell the difference between success and failure, which is unfortunately the prevailing human condition. Despite all these problems with dowsing, on the dowsing forum you can find coherent two-way conversations, and little assertion of outright fraud.
The LRL forum is a whole different animal. Some who post there assert (without fear of rational contradiction) that the things are outright fraudulent. And the LRL promoters/defenders usually post incoherent babble, as you have seen in this very thread. Among the few stories of recoveries, you can take your pick: story so incoherent you can't even tell what the story is supposed to be; stories that are outright laughable; and at least one which is provably a photoshop-type fake. Credible recovery stories virtually nonexistent, and of those a person should usually begin with the understanding that the LRL didn't actually play a useful role in the recovery. ........The huge contrast between dowsing and LRLing becomes particularly evident in the case of a particular fellow who posts in both forums. He's often taken by newbies in the LRL forum to be in the middle stages of Alzheimer's, whereas when he posts on the dowsing forum you can usually figure out what he said, the guy may be a little off his rocker but no evidence he's actually senile. The whole story of what kind of thinking produces LRL's and what LRL's do to the brains of people who defend them, is right there in plain view in the forum itself, in the posts of the LRL proponents.
I'll put it another way. There are honest dowsing rod manufacturers, but there are no honest LRL manufacturers (in the conventional sense of that word). What there is in most cases of LRL manufacture, is advertising which makes it obvious that the manufacturer knows the thing is a fraud just like the "skeptics" say it is. So at least those who want "truth in advertising" can find it. Like I occasionally tell whiners, I don't need to buy an LRL to test it, the manufacturer already provided the necessary information.
--Toto
