Although I do not know ECS personally I do LIKE his method of presenting facts. I have found that
treasure yarns are usually embellished with obvious discrepancies. It is also obvious that many will
take the embellishments at face value and not undertake due diligence. It used to be the norm for
serious and especially professional treasure hunters to not pack up and leave the house without a
90% certainty of the cache's existence and the means of acquiring such cache without drawing a
crowd of well wishers or claimants. Also the pro kept a careful record of expenses associated with
a taxable event. Realized gains were handled according to IRS standards contrary to popular myths.
Sometimes it was better not to realize a gain at that particular time and was left 'in situ' until a later
time. But in all cases publicity was strictly avoided. For those adventurers freedom to roam the wilds
was unfettered unlike today. That era is gone as well as most of the big ones. Caches are still found,
mostly at random, the multi-million stashes have been hunted to death by people you never hear
about and if found you never hear that either. Bad things happen to people in the limelight as per
Mel, KVM and others. The best thing to wish for is to die in your sleep prepared the other side.
One of my problems with ECS is his inability to keep any and all facts straight. If you want to believe everything he comes up with that is your prerogative. He does seem to be very good at coming up with lots of names and places but just as with the newspaper reporters he makes a lot of mistakes.
As far as a professional treasure hunter always having a 90% certainty of finding treasure, I think that sounds a little overly optimistic and entirely unrealistic. Now if I heard that from ECS I might believe it.
Keeping things secret in the "old days" was a lot simpler. Now we all have cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, the internet, Google, and websites such as TNET. We have reality shows where nothing is sacred. There is Oprah, Phil, Jerry, and more to help people share their darkest secrets. So if someone were to find the big one, keeping it a secret and to themselves is almost impossible. We have become a society of gossipers.
Cell phones with built-in GPS track our every move. Even our cars transmit our location. On-Star has the capability to listen in on our conversations as we drive. Cameras are everywhere. Satellite cameras that can read the serial numbers on a dollar bill are looking down on us 24/7. They can see into buildings. The IRS can track every expenditure we make thru credit and debit card transactions.
Okay so you find the big one. If you can't spend money from it, it may not do you any good. You go public with it and now you have to worry about crack heads and if you believe what you see on TV and the movies all forms of lowlifes will be after you and your treasure. You don't report it to the IRS and they find out you may have them knocking down your door in the middle of the night taking everything of value that you own. Computers, files, cameras, guns, money, and more, out the door, never to be seen again.
lastleg-You say that bad things happen to people in the limelight. I have news for you, bad things are happening on a daily basis to people that are NOT in the limelight. If by winning the lottery you had to go public with it, would you still want to win? There are thousands of people in the limelight that seem to be doing just fine.
For the record, one of my biggest worries about finding treasure is the safety of my family. I am not worried about myself, and my friends will tell you that I would be more than happy to send a few bad guys to the other side, down under that is.
My thoughts at the time is that if I knew for a fact where a serious treasure was buried I would attempt to make money off of the event of actually digging it up. I will go into more detail in a future post.