Hi Dave, I like your story about a treasure hunt in your back yard but I have a few questions, Could the coins have been planted and who could of done that. Why are they there. When was this done. I am sure you found the coins but did anyone see you dig them up and could I have their name. You said you live in a house built in 1931 and you own a metal detector but how do we know this is true. My point is its easy to be negative on stories posted here, the hard part is posting any story here. You had a great find but if you think more positive you may find something bigger. Good Job
I suppose that one or more of them could have been planted. I saw no evidence of this (and can see no reason why someone would want to do something like that) but anything is possible. If the coins were planted, they had been in the ground for some years, as even the nickels and quarters were pretty toasted.
I think that you misunderstood the point of my story. It wasn't about my finds because - and let's be honest here - there's nothing great about finding a few bucks in clad, even on a lawn as tiny as mine. The point was that I can't assume that the coins and the home are from the same time period simply because they're next to each other. They
might be related but, as I hope I've proven with my example, there's no guarantee that they are without further proof. In my case, the majority of the proof is on the side of my house being from 1931, and the coins being dropped there later.
This is logic, not negativity, and while it is indeed easy to be negative, it is much more difficult to be meaningfully criticial as I believe that I am. I don't call BS on people or make fun of them. I find and point out problems with evidence and logic, and when those problems can't be addressed, I investigate why they can't be; sometimes I'll offer up my own theories of why this is.
I have posted a treasure legend on Treasurenet. While I can't prove without a doubt that it existed or that it's still there, I couldn't debunk it either. I've heard several other local treasure tales but they fell apart under even a cursory investigation, which is why I did not bother posting them.
Likewise, I am not completely without hope and faith, but I reserve these for religion and I openly admit that I'm behaving illogically in doing so. Everything else must make sense and be supported by facts. That is my problem with the Money Pit: it doesn't make sense and it's not supported by facts. It's supported by stories that have changed over time, with some of them being almost definitely false. As the years went on and the theories changed, so did the "finds," as most or all of them were fabricated by the finders to support whatever theory was in vogue at the time, and now new theorists are faced with the unenviable task of crafting a theory that can utilize all this conflicting, and probably false, evidence; alternatively, they can discard some of the evidence as being fake, but then they're forced to admit that the evidence that they've cherry-picked to support their theories - which is just as valid as the evidence that they've discarded - might also be false.
Is this negative, or rational? My intent is not necessarily to discourage. My intent is to get people to think the problem through critically and to fact-check the evidence. There were areas where this wasn't happening, so I began doing it. Someone had to, right?
While I won't apologize for presenting facts or pointing out logical flaws in a theory - "plot holes," so to speak - I will indeed apologize for the wall of text that I just wrote. Let it stand as a summary of my position for the new arrivals to this thread.
(force fields, Shakespear, An untrained brother puts on the headphones and control the uber detector while the trained professional looks on, gimme a break).
