The Treasure Hunt that Broke America (Part 1)

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Speaker 3 Pushkin.

Speaker 3 If you're in the Bristol area, you might be interested to know that Cautionary Tales is appearing live at the Bristol Festival of Economics on the evening of Friday, the 21st of November.

Speaker 3 I'll be speaking to the Financial Times columnist Sarah O'Connor about what really happens when the robots come for our jobs.

Speaker 3 She's brilliant, she's wise, it's going to be an amazing conversation full of cautionary tales for us all. If you want a ticket, just search for cautionary tales at the Bristol Festival of Economics.

Speaker 3 A warning before we start, this cautionary tale discusses death by suicide. If you're suffering emotional distress or you're having suicidal thoughts, support is available.

Speaker 3 For example, from the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US.

Speaker 3 1968.

Speaker 3 Major Forrest Fen is leading a group of fighter planes over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Their mission, bomb the trail and the North Vietnamese troops traveling along it from Laos.

Speaker 3 Inside his cramped cockpit, the smell of hydraulic fluid mingles with sweat, mildew and the stench of burnt wiring. Beneath the plane, the jungle blurs into a sea of green.

Speaker 3 Major Fenn is under fire. As bullets tear into his canopy, the plane starts burning around him.

Speaker 3 He realises with a further jolt of horror that the gunfire might have damaged the plane's ejection system. Will he burn to a crisp with his aircraft?

Speaker 3 The plane holds together just long enough for Major Fenn to get clear of the action. He steals himself and pulls the ejection lever.

Speaker 3 The bullet-riddled canopy tears away on the slipstream and the pilot punches high into the air. His spine is being crushed.
His vision blurs.

Speaker 3 Suddenly, his neck whips forward and he slows, the harness biting into his body. His His parachute is deploying.

Speaker 3 As he hangs on the breeze, Major Fenn watches his now pilotless plane cruise into a cliff face and explode.

Speaker 3 He keeps falling through the air, lurching towards the treetops and down to the humid jungle. 18 inches from the ground, He finally comes to a halt, suspended from creaking branches.

Speaker 3 Enormous orchids tower above him, climbing the trunks of gargantuan trees.

Speaker 3 What's that sound?

Speaker 3 Major Fen can hear something scuttling and skulking on the forest floor. He knows there are tigers and cobras in the jungle.
The North Vietnamese patrol will be looking for him too.

Speaker 3 If they find him, he'll be tortured.

Speaker 3 Night falls, drawing its cloak of darkness around the stranded pilot.

Speaker 3 I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

Speaker 3 A crew from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found the man's body.

Speaker 3 He had been out in the wilderness for so long that his flesh had given way to bone, and his skeletal remains were tangled in the undergrowth.

Speaker 3 The body was removed, and dental records eventually confirmed what the authorities already suspected.

Speaker 3 The dead man was a treasure hunter, and he'd been looking for a box of gold and jewels said to be hidden somewhere in the wilds of the American West.

Speaker 3 For this was not Vietnam, but the Rocky Mountains.

Speaker 3 Yet there was a connection between the stranded pilot and the dead treasure hunter.

Speaker 3 It was Major Forrest Fenn who'd hidden the box of gold and jewels.

Speaker 3 This dead treasure hunter was one of many thousands of people who hung on Fenn's every word and who trusted him enough to head into the wilderness on his promise of treasure and glory.

Speaker 3 Forrest Fenn was born in Texas in 1930. He saw the devastation of the Great Depression, but his school principal father kept steady employment and the family was shielded from the worst of it.

Speaker 3 The Fennes were of modest means, but they had enough money to go on vacation each year.

Speaker 3 Every summer they would pile into their Chevy and drive 1,600 miles to West Yellowstone, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park.

Speaker 3 Forrest relished these adventures, and he got to know the Rocky Mountains like the back of his hand, hiking in high pine forests, swimming in warm mountain springs and fishing for brown trout in fast-flowing streams.

Speaker 3 At home in Texas, too, Forrest felt the pull of adventure. He loved collecting whatever treasures he could find.
String, bottle caps, and marbles all appealed to his magpie sensibilities.

Speaker 3 He and his father Marvin would scour the local creekbeds for trinkets like beads and old pieces of pottery. He found his first arrowhead at the age of nine, and it remained his most prized possession.

Speaker 3 Grab every banana, Marvin would tell a rather confused young forest on these excursions.

Speaker 3 One day he expanded on this maxim.

Speaker 3 Son, the train doesn't go by that banana tree but one time, so you reach out as far as you can. Every banana you don't grab is a banana you'll never have.

Speaker 3 Father and son came together on these quests, but most of the time Forrest felt his poor grades were a disappointment to Marvin.

Speaker 3 I didn't think I was very smart, but I didn't have to be smart to figure out that my parents weren't really proud of me, he said.

Speaker 3 Forrest graduated, just.

Speaker 3 But the pipeline of high school to college to work wasn't for him. For a while, he pretended to be enrolled at Texas A ⁇ M University with his friends.

Speaker 3 It took about four days for the registrar to catch him in his lie.

Speaker 3 Feeling lost and worthless, he fled the university in tears.

Speaker 3 What he really wanted, he decided, was to be a pilot in the Air Force.

Speaker 3 Forrest knew that this was the domain of academic high achievers, but he also knew that when you set out on a journey, there was usually more than one way to reach your destination.

Speaker 3 And so, Forrest enrolled at Radar Mechanic School on an Air Force base in Mississippi.

Speaker 3 After learning all about how to repair and maintain radar systems, he was eventually accepted into pilot training.

Speaker 3 In December 1953, with his training complete, he married his high school sweetheart, Peggy Jean Proctor. They had two daughters.

Speaker 3 Life was good, but domesticity did nothing to curb Forrest's craving for adventure. When the Air Force took him to Europe, he grabbed every banana.

Speaker 3 In Italy, Forrest rode the train from Naples to the ruins of Pompeii and secretly sifted through volcanic cinders for archaeological treasure.

Speaker 3 He dove in the turquoise waters off Sabratha in Libya, once a Phoenician trading post.

Speaker 3 In the quiet and cool of the deep, he spotted something intriguing and unwieldy. He dislodged the object a little, then got out of the water, tied a rope to his jeep, and pulled it up.

Speaker 3 Forrest was astonished to find that it was an ancient amphora, filled with bronze coins.

Speaker 3 He ventured to the Sahara too, where he unearthed 8,000-year-old spear points amid the remnants of hand grenades and burned-out tanks.

Speaker 3 Back in the United States, Forrest's hunger for beautiful storied objects became, in his own words, insatiable.

Speaker 3 Teaching on an Air Force base in Arizona, he learned how to read the patterns of cacti in the desert for possible ruins underneath.

Speaker 3 He traversed canyons in search of hidden caves where Native American jewelry and art might be stockpiled.

Speaker 3 And he traded his artefacts, converting a bracelet into six rings, and those rings into a necklace and another bracelet, and so on.

Speaker 3 It was on December the 20th, near the end of his tour, that Forrest was shot down and spent the night in the jungle.

Speaker 3 As he listened to the rhythmic croak of tree frogs and waited to be rescued, he began to reflect on his time in Vietnam and on what he'd been doing there.

Speaker 3 At dawn, his forward air controller found him and a jolly green giant helicopter lifted him up and away to a US Air Force base in Thailand where he had a cup of coffee and some scrambled eggs.

Speaker 3 He also called Peggy and told her not to worry about the telegram she'd just received, declaring him missing.

Speaker 3 Later, it wasn't the threat of capture that stayed with Forrest, but the peace of the jungle and the imperative to hold his nerve in the face of the unknown.

Speaker 3 Forrest was awarded both a Purple Heart and a Silver Star for his bravery, but something shifted in him after Vietnam. Or perhaps something that had always been inside him pushed to the surface.

Speaker 3 He started having nightmares about how many people he'd killed in Vietnam. When the Air Force offered him a promotion, he knew it was time to leave.

Speaker 3 I wanted the world to stop and let me out, he reflected.

Speaker 3 Driving away from base for the last time, he said he pulled up beside a field, climbed over the fence, and threw his wristwatch as far as he could into the open brush.

Speaker 3 It was a rejection rejection of the regimented world he had inhabited for the last 20 years, and he never wore a watch again.

Speaker 3 Forrest decided he wanted to go somewhere he could wear hush puppies and blue jeans and still make a living. It was 1972 and he'd heard about a bohemian city with a burgeoning arts scene.

Speaker 3 So he and Peggy packed their daughters into the car and headed west for Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Speaker 3 Although he'd never bought a piece of art before and had no education in the art world, he'd decided to start a gallery. Before long,

Speaker 3 Forrest Fenn was a millionaire.

Speaker 3 Cautionary Tales will return.

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Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

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Speaker 3 In Santa Fe, Forrest used his retirement pay to buy an old adobe house, and the family slept on the floor while he renovated and added to the building. This was to be his gallery.

Speaker 3 As Forrest saw it, the fact that he hadn't been educated at a prestigious liberal arts college or worked for a big auction house set him apart and gave him an edge.

Speaker 3 The art world considered cash to be crude, dirty.

Speaker 3 But making money, and lots of it, was Forrest's chief objective. Art is a business to me, not a religion, he declared.

Speaker 3 Whether art was just business for Forrest is debatable. He craved rare and fascinating objects.
But he certainly kept a close eye on his profit margins, and he revelled in doing things his own way.

Speaker 3 He displayed please touch signs in the gallery, and when students visited on field trips, he let them feel the old paint on a portrait of George Washington, valued at $150,000.

Speaker 3 He owned everything in the gallery. Nothing was there on commission.
In this way, I have complete control of the work, he told the Santa Fe, New Mexican newspaper.

Speaker 3 Of course, Forrest encountered critics, people who were cynical about his dearth of traditional credentials. He met them with unassailable confidence.

Speaker 3 It doesn't matter who you are, it only matters who they think you are. It's true in Hollywood, in politics, and it's true with a painting.

Speaker 3 Forrest spun yarns about his outrageous treasure-hunting exploits in Europe, Africa, and the American West. and he kept a pair of pet alligators in the pond next to the gallery.

Speaker 3 He named them Beowulf and Elvis, and locals chuckled that the gators bore a striking resemblance to their owner.

Speaker 3 In short, Forrest styled himself as an eccentric. But he also made sure to tell the press about his time in the Air Force and the 300-plus missions he'd flown in Vietnam.
People admire veterans.

Speaker 3 and they appreciate their sense of honor.

Speaker 3 His gallery inventory included some of the artefacts he'd gathered over the years, but he acquired paintings and bronzes too. Here, Forrest thought big.

Speaker 3 In 1975, he hustled his way into the Soviet Union and negotiated with the Ministry of Culture to collect paintings for a celebrated show of Soviet and American art.

Speaker 3 By 1976, just four years after his arrival in Santa Fe, Forrest Fenn had one of the most successful galleries in the city and he employed 15 people.

Speaker 3 There were guest houses at the gallery and celebrities were invited to stay free of charge. Steve Martin and Cher came to visit and soon Robert Redford was a customer.

Speaker 3 Steven Spielberg bought a Charles Russell bronze from Forrest.

Speaker 3 Ethel Kennedy, widow of Bobby, was in raptures to singer Andy Williams about Fenn galleries, so much so that Williams also paid Forrest a visit.

Speaker 3 Forrest didn't belong to the elite, but he recognised that he could borrow their credibility, and he took that credibility all the way to the bank.

Speaker 3 Soon the gallery was grossing around $6 million each year.

Speaker 3 Along the way, Forrest also ruffled some feathers.

Speaker 3 In 1981, an advert appeared in newspapers all over the world. A collection of paintings by Elmir Dehori was for sale.

Speaker 3 Dehori, who died in 1976, had been one of the most successful art fraudsters of all time.

Speaker 3 He had a flair for the modern masters and had forged over a thousand pieces, including Picasos, Matisse's and Modiglianis, and inserted them into the art market. This gave Forrest an idea.

Speaker 3 A fake Picasso is only fraudulent if you sell it as a Picasso, but if you're upfront about its provenance, it's both a faithful copy of a beloved masterpiece and a beautiful piece of dark history.

Speaker 3 The unorthodox art dealer clubbed together with former Texas Governor John Connolly and bought up the cache of Dahore's.

Speaker 3 Some prospective customers were outraged when they learned the paintings were counterfeit. If you like it less because it's a fake, who's the fraud now? Forrest parried gleefully.

Speaker 3 It was a strategy that worked, and he sold the Dahoris on for a huge sum.

Speaker 3 It wasn't all plain sailing. Over the years, Forrest was raided twice.
The Bureau of Land Management and the FBI both believed that he'd illegally looted precious items from protected lands.

Speaker 3 But no charges were filed against Forrest, and he roundly criticised the authorities for these investigations.

Speaker 3 In a few short years, Forrest Fenn had gone from Air Force retiree to wildly successful art and antiquities mogul.

Speaker 3 What was his secret?

Speaker 3 I've always thought of myself as one who plays monopoly, Forrest told the Celebrity Weekly, People.

Speaker 3 It was was true that Forrest had rolled the dice and worked his way up from scratch, but there was more to his success than a willingness to take a risk.

Speaker 3 Forrest understood how to win the trust of those around him

Speaker 3 and how to spin that trust into gold.

Speaker 3 Trust is the condition that enables all of us to face uncertainty. As the author of Who Can You Trust, Rachel Botsman, has noted, it's a confident relationship with the unknown.

Speaker 3 That makes trust a kind of social glue. It enables acts of exchange and cooperation, both big and small, and it keeps economies and societies moving.

Speaker 3 All businesses draw on trust. But Forrest had understood something key about his own.

Speaker 3 In asking people to believe in the authenticity and value of his wares, he was asking them to trust him.

Speaker 3 What Forrest Fenn was selling, first and foremost, was Forrest Fenn.

Speaker 3 It is curious, though, that people did trust Forrest.

Speaker 3 He wasn't an archaeologist. He didn't hold a degree in art history.
He liked to joke, but it wasn't always obvious that his jokes were totally benign.

Speaker 3 He'd been known to bend the truth, was a self-declared hustler, and his relationship to the law was a little hard to pin down.

Speaker 3 And yet, people invested in his artefacts and paintings. They trusted him with transferring cultural treasures between enemy nations, and they went into business with him.
Why?

Speaker 3 Perhaps the answer lies in the wider landscape of trust. After his tour in Vietnam, Forrest wasn't alone in his loss of faith in the military.

Speaker 3 Trust in the United States government and the armed forces slumped in the 1970s, and since then, it's kept falling. Confidence in institutions like Congress, public schools and banks has tumbled too.

Speaker 3 When trust in a system declines, people look for alternatives. Outliers become more appealing.

Speaker 3 Those who break the rules, vocally challenge the old guard of experts and elites, and criticise the authorities may suddenly seem more dependable.

Speaker 3 Forrest Fenn was a gifted raconteur. His was a tale of going against the grain, of starting with nothing, and beating the odds.

Speaker 3 It was a story that people liked, and they were prepared to buy into it, quite literally.

Speaker 3 The gallery business might have been thriving, but Forrest met with his share of grief and pain, too.

Speaker 3 In the mid-1980s, his father, Marvin, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. After a grim illness, He told his son that he planned to take his own life.
Forrest begged his father to wait.

Speaker 3 He wanted to see him one last time, said he'd fly to him in his own plane the next morning. But Marvin was adamant.

Speaker 3 It was time for him to go.

Speaker 3 And when Forrest reached him, he was too late.

Speaker 3 Forrest was still grieving his father when he received another blow. His doctors had found an aggressive tumour nestled beneath his kidneys.
Treatment had just a 20% chance of success.

Speaker 3 When the news finally sank in, Forrest was angry. He was 58 years old and in the midst of an exhilarating adventure-filled life.
He didn't want to go anywhere.

Speaker 3 He decided to roll the dice and try treatment.

Speaker 3 A short time later, his friend Ralph Loren, the famous fashion designer, came to visit. They sat together in Forrest's study, a room filled top to bottom with wondrous curiosities.

Speaker 3 Ralph eyed a Native American bonnet with carved antelope horns and offered to buy it. Forrest told him it wasn't for sale.
Why not?

Speaker 3 The fashion designer was baffled. You can't take it with you.

Speaker 3 But Forrest knew that he couldn't take money with him either.

Speaker 3 Later on, when he was alone, he looked around at his glittering trove.

Speaker 3 A gold dragon bracelet with ruby eyes, jade figurines, two gold frogs. He thought about his father, and he hatched a plan to take control of his ending.

Speaker 3 Forrest decided he would fill a chest with treasure, an intricate Romanesque lockbox dating from the 12th century, and bring it with him to a secret location.

Speaker 3 Here, he would follow in his father's footsteps and take his own life.

Speaker 3 Out in the wilderness, these riches wouldn't be trackable or traceable by any bank.

Speaker 3 And he could invite ordinary people to come and find the chest and claim its contents. His legacy would be the greatest treasure hunt America had ever known.

Speaker 3 The plan was perfect.

Speaker 3 Nearly.

Speaker 3 There was one thing that Forrest Fenn didn't count on.

Speaker 3 We'll find out what that was after this short break.

Speaker 2 In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal. T-Mobile knows all about that.

Speaker 2 They're now the best network, according to the experts at OOCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

Speaker 2 With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged. With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

Speaker 2 With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

Speaker 2 And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid. That's your business, supercharged.

Speaker 2 Learn more at supermobile.com. Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.
where you can see the sky.

Speaker 2 Best business plan based on a combination of advanced network performance, coverage layers, and security features. Best network based on analysis by UCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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They've also raised real concerns about people's well-being in some of the world's poorest communities.

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Speaker 3 If this is your first gift to GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to $100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last.

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Speaker 3 Two decades passed. In 2008, the investment bank, Lehman Brothers, crumbled into bankruptcy.
Its collapse triggered a seismic wave that smashed through global markets. Trading floors went dark.

Speaker 3 Bankers packed their belongings into boxes. Against the odds, odds, seventy-eight-year-old Forrest Fenn was still alive and watching on with interest.

Speaker 3 He had lived through another economic crisis as a child, the Great Depression, and he knew the pain and suffering that mismanagement by the banks could bring to ordinary people.

Speaker 3 Forrest's dream of leaving an epic treasure hunt as his legacy had been derailed by something quite unexpected. He had recovered from his cancer.

Speaker 3 He'd sold his gallery and was now enjoying semi-retirement. But he hadn't forgotten his treasure hunt idea.

Speaker 3 Over the years he'd added to his trove, waiting for the perfect opportunity to plant it out in the wild. It now held at least a million dollars worth of precious items, maybe two million.

Speaker 3 A Mayan bracelet, salon sapphires, Alaskan gold nuggets the size of chicken eggs. A copy of his unpublished memoir crammed into an olive jar.

Speaker 3 Now, as the aftershocks of the crash rippled out across America and beyond, Forrest realized that his moment had finally arrived.

Speaker 3 Millions of jobs had vanished. Unemployment had surged, wages were stagnating, and families had lost homes and life savings.

Speaker 3 But the treasure chest could promise financial security to the lucky finder.

Speaker 3 Forrest decided to launch his treasure hunt. It would be, in his words, for every redneck in Texas who lost his job with a pickup truck and 12 kids and a wife to support.

Speaker 3 There was nostalgia in his offering too.

Speaker 3 Perhaps he remembered those happy missions for trinkets with his father, because he said that he hoped the hunt would be a morale booster in dark and difficult times, getting families outdoors to solve a puzzle together.

Speaker 3 One afternoon in 2010, around his 80th birthday, Forrest Fenn slipped away in his car. He didn't tell his wife or daughters where he was going or what he was doing.

Speaker 3 The treasure now weighed about 42 pounds or 19 kilograms.

Speaker 3 So when he reached his destination, a secret spot amid towering pine trees, he had to make two trips from his sedan, first with the box and then with the loot.

Speaker 3 When he was satisfied that the little chest was secure, he drove away.

Speaker 3 Forrest delivered a thousand copies of his self-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, to a small bookstore in Santa Fe called Collected Works.

Speaker 3 Any profits from the sale of the books would go to the store and to a cancer charity. Forrest wanted people to be able to trust that this project wasn't about personal gain.

Speaker 3 Anyone who bought the book would learn of his days in the Air Force and his adventures in the art world, of his love for his wife Peggy and their two daughters.

Speaker 3 They'd find something else in its pages too.

Speaker 3 A six stanza poem containing nine cryptic clues to the whereabouts of the million dollar treasure chest.

Speaker 3 The memoir itself was also peppered with subtle hints to help decode the poem.

Speaker 3 It took a while for word of the treasure hunt to spread. The story appeared in a southwestern newspaper, and it was mentioned on some area television stations too.

Speaker 3 It was a quirky local tale, a whimsical curiosity.

Speaker 3 An eccentric elderly art dealer had hidden an ancient box of treasure somewhere north of Santa Fe in the thousand-mile stretch of mountains known as the Rockies.

Speaker 3 A few blogs devoted to the quest appeared online. It piqued the interest of practised treasure hunters, people who habitually went looking for lost artefacts or liked solving puzzles.

Speaker 3 Some people thought the whole thing was a hoax. How could they be sure the box was really out there? And Forrest Fenn was eighty.
What if he was senile? What if the whole thing was a fabrication?

Speaker 3 Others poured over the memoir and the poem, trading their solutions, which they called solves.

Speaker 3 Begin it where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down, not far, but too far to walk, put in below the home of Brown.

Speaker 3 Where warm waters halt?

Speaker 3 Was that near a hot spring of some kind?

Speaker 3 Which canyon?

Speaker 3 And Brown was capitalized. Was that a person? Perhaps it was a brown bear.

Speaker 3 Forrest had included his email address in the book so that searchers could get in touch with him and tell him about their adventures.

Speaker 3 He would reply to their questions about the clues with mysterious half-answers, evasive but also gently pulling strings from afar.

Speaker 3 In 2013, the Today Show on NBC covered the story, and overnight, the hunt exploded.

Speaker 3 There was a run on copies of The Thrill of the Chase, and the Collected Works bookstore printed more to meet demand.

Speaker 3 International media outlets followed up with their own coverage of the story, and before long there were countless documentaries too.

Speaker 3 The consummate salesman, Forrest flashed his alligator smile and spun his gripping yarns. Though he also admitted a tendency to embellish the truth, just a little.

Speaker 3 The quest escaped the fringe world of routine treasure hunters and people connected to Fenn and drew in others with no previous experience of treasure hunting at all.

Speaker 3 People like Randy Biliu, a 53-year-old grandfather who moved to Colorado to be closer to the Rockies in hope of finding the gold.

Speaker 3 Visitors flooded into Santa Fe and the mayor announced a thrill of the chase day to thank Forest for the boost in tourism.

Speaker 3 The national parks were also inundated. Bold treasure hunters marched through protected wildlife zones, digging up the land in search of the home of Brown.

Speaker 3 The park authorities scrambled to keep up, issuing cautions and special new rules.

Speaker 3 There were tales too of people remortgaging their homes to fund their searches and burning through their savings.

Speaker 3 Some of them broke into Forest Fen's property, convinced that the poem instructed them to do so.

Speaker 3 And then in 2016,

Speaker 3 a call came in.

Speaker 3 A treasure hunter had gone missing.

Speaker 3 In deepest January, Grandfather Randy Billy and his little dog Leo had ventured alone into the snow-capped wilderness, carrying a GPS device, a wetsuit, waders, and an $89 raft.

Speaker 3 Randy had planned to float along the Rio Grande River to the place where he believed the gold and jewels were stashed.

Speaker 3 When he hadn't been heard from for over a week, his ex-wife filed a missing persons report.

Speaker 3 On January the 15th, the police found his parked car and his raft.

Speaker 3 They also found Leo the dog alive.

Speaker 3 But there was no sign of Randy Bilieu.

Speaker 3 The treasure hunting community sprang into action, arriving from Colorado and all over New Mexico and splitting into teams to find the missing man.

Speaker 3 Forrest joined in too, renting a helicopter and scanning the area from the skies.

Speaker 3 But he denied any responsibility for the disappearance. Randy Bilieu was an adult who made his own decisions.

Speaker 3 People went missing in the wilderness every year, with or without the prospect of finding treasure.

Speaker 3 Forrest Fenn's treasure hunt held an emotional appeal. People were seduced by the nostalgia and romance of the quest,

Speaker 3 and they trusted in his status as an outsider.

Speaker 3 But trusting outsiders can still be perilous, and romance and nostalgia can blind us all to danger.

Speaker 3 Six months later, Randy Bilieu's skeletal remains were found by the Rio Grande River. He may have succumbed to hypothermia or dehydration, but his actual cause of death remained unknown.

Speaker 3 It was hoped that the horrible incident was a one-off. A mistake made by someone foolish enough to head out in the bitter midwinter, wholly unprepared for the conditions.

Speaker 3 It wasn't a one-off.

Speaker 3 The treasure hunt had metastasized, from a whimsical curiosity into something more sinister.

Speaker 3 Forrest Fenn, the master monopoly player, had lost control of the game, and it was about to get far grimmer and darker than he'd ever imagined.

Speaker 3 Next time on Cautionary Tales, the quest continues. A grave is exhumed, a stalker haunts the Fenn family, and death comes again to the treasure hunt.

Speaker 3 For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com

Speaker 3 Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fians and Ryan Billy. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

Speaker 3 The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.
Ben Daf Hafrey edited the scripts.

Speaker 3 The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, Kiera Posey and Owen Miller.

Speaker 3 You can support cautionary tales by joining my cautionary club at patreon.com slash cautionary club for exclusive bonus episodes, newsletters, ad-free listening and other exciting perks.

Speaker 3 Alternatively, you can join Pushkin Plus on our Apple show page for continued benefits from our show and others across the Pushkin network.

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