TV show, Treasure Quest, season three: The Jesuit treasure of Sacambaya

[deducer]

Don't know if any of you are watching the 3rd season of Treasure Quest, a show aired by the Discovery Channel and now airing on the SCI channel, every Sunday night at 9pm EST.

This show follows a small group of professional treasure hunters as they attempt to discover the vast hoard buried by the Jesuits at Sacambaya, prior to the explusion. Naturally they get the history wrong, and some of the details are erroneous, but still an interesting show, nonetheless.

When I have time I'll try to put together some of the history behind Sacambaya.

For now, a summary from Prodger's book. Prodger was an Englishman who mounted a giant expedition to try and find the treasure. He did find and then blow up the giant egg-shaped rock, but failed to find the "roof of the cave."

CHAPTER VII

THE CABALLO CUNCO TREASURE : FIRST ATTEMPT

WHILE I was stopping for a week at Jura baths, on my return from Challana, Morosini, the proprietorof the hotel, came up to me one day and told me there was a lady staying there who wanted to have a talk with me – Dona Corina San Roman, daughter of the late General San Roman, a former President of Peru. Morosini presented me, and after a few minutes' conversation she showed me an original document left by Father San Roman to his brother, the Prefect of Callao, and handed down to her by her father, which gave particulars of a large treasure that had been hidden by the Jesuits. She told me that as I had been
into Challana, and got back safely, I would be just the man to go and look for it, if I cared to do so, and she made me two alternative offers. If I tried
to find the place with the help of the data she would give me, she would pay me £80 per month for the six dry months of the next year, which was as much
as I was getting from Mariano Penny for training his racehorses, and if I found it she would pay all the expenses of unearthing it, and give me ten per
cent of the full value found. The other suggestion was that I was to take the copy of the document, and go myself, paying all my own expenses, and
give her ten per cent of the treasure if I found it. I accepted the second proposition without hesitation.

The document gave no indications as to how to find the place, but simply described the kind of place, and mentioned that it was near the banks of
the River Sacambaja. It ran as follows : " If you find a steep hill all covered with dense forest, the top of which is flat, with long grass growing, from
where you can see the River Sacambaja on three sides, you will discover on the top of it, in the middle of the long grass, a large stone shaped like
an egg, so big that it took 500 Indians to place it there. If you dig down underneath this stone for five yards, you will find the roof of a large cave,
which it took 500 men two and a half years to hollow out. The roof is seventy yards long, and there are two compartments and a long narrow
passage leading from the room on the east side to the main entrance two hundred yards away. On reaching the door, you must exercise great care in
opening. The door is a large iron one, and inside to the right near the wall you will find an image made of pure gold three feet high, the eyes of
which are two large diamonds; this image was placed here for the good of mankind. If you proceed along the passage, you will find in the first
room thirty-seven large heaps of gold, and many gold and silver ornaments and precious stones.

On entering the second room, you will find in the right-hand corner a large box, clamped with three iron bars; inside this box is $90,000 in silver
money and thirty-seven big heaps of gold. Distributed in the hollows on either side of the tunnel and the two rooms are altogether a hundred and
sixty-three heaps of gold, of which the value has been estimated at $60,000,000. Great care must be taken on entering these rooms, as enough
strong poison to kill a regiment has been laid about. The walls of the two rooms have been strengthened by large blocks of granite ; from the roof
downwards the distance is five yards more. The top of the roof is portioned off into three distinct esplanades, and the whole has been well
covered over for a depth of five yards with earth and stones.

When you come to a place twenty feet high, with a wall so wide that two men can easily ride abreast, cross the river, and you will find the church, monastery, and other buildings." Corina San Roman told me that the monastery spoken of in this document was built by the Jesuits in 1635 and abandoned in 1735. The treasure, accumulated from eleven years' working of the i'amous gold mines of El Carmen, and the Tres Titilias, and from the gold and diamond washings
carried on near Santa Cruz by 2,000 Indians under Fathers Gregorio and San Roman and seven other priests, who died, was all hidden under the hill
indicated in this document with the exception of £70,000 for each of the priests. Out of the 500 Indians employed in burying the treasure 288 died
of an epidemic of fever in the last three months of the work.

Corina San Roman also told me that her father used to send £25 every Christmas to an old Indian named Jose Maria Ampuera, who, he said, knew
where the hill was. He used to send Macedonia Zambrana, one of his own men, who lived near Cochabamba, with this money and several pounds
of tea, sugar and other things. The Indian was paid this to keep the secret, to visit the place from time to time, and to notify him if anybody started
exploring there. He used to say he had a good enough income himself, and did not care to risk getting malarial fever in looking for it. He kept
the paper himself and gave it to his daughter shortly before he died ; she put it inside one of the books in the library, and after his death she could
not find it, but her uncle, the brother of the General, who was a priest and lived at Cochabamba, had a copy, which is the one I saw ! Many expeditions had been fitted out to look for this treasure. One had been sent by Malgarejo, the President of Bolivia, another was fitted out at Valparaiso in 1895, but both were unsuccessful. Dona Corina told me that her uncle had died in 1896, that Zambrana had not been heard of for the last eight years, and that if the Indian was still alive he must be over 100.

 

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[deducer]

Tales of Glitter or Dust, by Daniel Black:

AGE-OLD STORIES OF JESUIT GOLD BURIED AT SACAMBAYA, BOLIVIA, SPARKED THE IMAGINATIONS OF TREASURE HUNTERS AS LATE AS THE 1960S

Mark Twain was commenting on human nature, not geology, when he said that a gold mine is a hole in the ground alongside which stands a liar. Tales of legendary riches seem to gravitate to auriferous mines, open or closed. A case in point is the fabled lost Jesuit gold treasure at Sacambaya, in Bolivia's eastern Andes. Folktales and supposed colonial documents have fed the Sacambaya legend since the 1800s, but no one has found the treasure.

The only person to have ever profited from the Sacambaya gold was a wily gentleman named Saavedra, who persuaded Bolivian dictator Mariano Melgarejo that he knew the location of the gold. Melgarejo, who ruled from 1864 until his overthrow in 1871, was a corrupt tyrant nicknamed the "scourge of God" by his enemies. He was not a man to be trifled with, let alone cheated. One historian marveled that Saavedra "must have been a great liar." Stimulated by Saavedra's treasure tale, Melgarejo provided him with eight thousand pesos and a squad of soldiers to dig up the gold. A day after arriving in Sacambaya, near Cochabamba, Saavedra disappeared--along with the eight thousand pesos. Another version has "a half regiment of soldiers," led by Melgarejo himself, marching off to Sacambaya, where the locals refused to divulge the treasure's location. Whether these stories were true or not, Bolivian interest in the treasure faded. By the early 1900s, Sacambaya had become a distinctly English passion.

The first Englishman to take up the challenge was Cecil Herbert Prodgers. A man who carried 265 pounds on his six-foot flame and had a drooping walrus moustache, Prodgers had fought in the Boer War and raced horses in Peru before coming to Bolivia to recruit rubber tappers. While in Peru recuperating from his exertions in the rubber country, he was visited by Dona Corina San Roman, the daughter of a former Peruvian president. She possessed a document that had supposedly belonged to her grandfather, reputed to be a Jesuit himself, named Father San Roman, which "gave full particulars of a large treasure that had been hidden by the Jesuits." Dona Corina surmised that the indomitable Prodgers was "just the man to go look for it." Prodgers agreed with her assessment and undertook the quest. He would cover his own expenses and give her 10 percent of whatever he found.

The document Prodgers held in his hand as he made his way back to Bolivia said only that the treasure was in a cave on Caballo Cunco, a "steep hill all covered with dense forest ... from where you can see the River Sacambaya on three sides." On the flat crest of the hill would be "a large stone shaped like an egg," and underneath the stone would be the roof of a large cave "that took five hundred men two-and-one-half years to hollow out." Inside the cave, hidden in a maze of rooms, compartments, and hollows booby-trapped with "enough strong poison to kill a regiment," he would find $90,000 in silver money and sixty-seven "heaps of gold," not to mention many gold ornaments adorned with diamonds and other precious stones. The treasure's total value was said to be $60 million, the equivalent of about a billion dollars today. According to the document, more than half of the five hundred Indians who had labored to hollow out the cave had died of fever. Of the nine Jesuits involved in secreting the treasure, only two had survived: Father San Roman and Father Gregorio. (In other versions of the tale that surfaced later, Dona San Roman was the daughter of the prefect of Callao, 288 Indians were murdered, and only one Jesuit survived, Gregorio San Roman.)

With a handful of workers, Prodgers set off in March 1905 for Sacambaya, which is located on a sandy floodplain at the junction of the Ayopaya (also called Cotacajes, Sacambaya, or Inquisivi) and Khatu rivers. The Ayopaya runs north along the border between the La Paz and Cochabamba departments before joining the Upper Beni. Prodgers quickly found the egg-shaped stone, which was about fifteen feet in diameter, and blew it to smithereens with dynamite. Using hand tools, he began burrowing towards the cave's roof, but was soon forced to quit by the onset of the rainy season. Prodgers returned the following year and resumed digging in the same spot. After a couple months of laboriously picking and shoveling, he punctured what he thought was the cave's roof with a bamboo rod. Several of his workers were overcome by "a very powerful smell," and promptly quit. He continued his excavations with a new crew, but they were also struck down by toxic vapors, as was Prodgers, whose fingernails turned blue. After consulting Symptoms and Treatments of Poisons, which he had had the foresight to put in his kit, Prodgers hastened to England to recuperate. In April 1907 he returned to Bolivia but could find neither enough local laborers to finish the dig nor any investors willing to finance a larger excavation.

English explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett heard about the treasure stow a few years later. At Sacambaya, Fawcett was told, were the ruins of a Jesuit mission and a gold mine, one of thirty-eight worked by the priests. Learning of their impending expulsion from Latin America (which took place in 1767-68), eight Jesuits had reportedly employed six Indians for more than a year excavating an elaborate tunnel with "thirty-eight alcoves," one for the treasures from each of the mines. The Indians were said to have been killed after the task was completed. Upon the Jesuits' return to Rome, they were reportedly imprisoned and all but one executed.

According to this version of the tale, the surviving priest was later set free and returned to Bolivia, where he had a mistress and a daughter. The daughter took up with an Englishman and spilled the Sacambaya secret to him. The story passed down through the family to some descendants, who went to Sacambaya, where they "identified the clues, found the skeletons of the six Indians," and tried to find the treasure. A Cornishman came upon the scene and "managed to force himself into a partnership" with the priest's descendants, who later departed after quarreling with the Cornishman. He continued excavating alone and claimed to have "found the tunnel, with clear traces of lime, charcoal, and bits of monks' clothing. Then his funds ran out."

Fawcett's confidant for this tale was the Cornishman, whom Fawcett had met in Cochabamba in 1913. Although "suspicious of these tales of buried hoards," he stopped at Sacambaya on his way to La Paz. He reported having found "broken walls [that] represented what was once the Jesuit mission" and several holes nearby that appeared to have been filled in. "My opinion is," Fawcett declared, "if a treasure really exists there, that the attempts to find it have not been carried out very intelligently. Anyone who knows all the clues would find it a simple matter to settle once and for all if a tunnel was there or not."

However simple it might have been, Fawcett didn't bite. Sacambaya "disappointed" him. "It didn't `feel' as though treasure was buried there, and I am inclined to give some weight to my impressions." Fawcett later disappeared in the Mato Grosso while searching for "Z," a lost city of "clothed natives of European appearance."

Some years after Prodgers's final expedition, he passed his Sacambaya documents to Edgar Sanders, a Russian-born Swiss citizen living in England. Sanders was one of an irregular stream of treasure hunters who turned up on the doorstep of Alicia O'Reardon Overbeck, an American who was living in a mine camp in Pongo, high in the Quimsa Cruz range, on the road to Sacambaya. Sanders arrived in 1924, and Overbeck later described him as "a squarish man with conspicuously high cheekbones and hard slate eyes." She said that he "was not talkative, and if he found anything, he didn't tell us."

A year later, Sanders reappeared with a small team of argonauts. Their "condescending attitude and their calm assurance of success" annoyed the mostly young American miners in Pongo, though Overbeck allowed that perhaps "we annoyed them; for the boys, never too tactful, were not above coolly asking [Sanders's crew] if they really, actually, honestly expected to find anything, and then relating in great detail the failures of other parties that had made a stab at the treasure."

Upon his return to England, Sanders announced that he had excavated a "manmade cave," inside of which he had found a crucifix and a parchment. The ancient document, written in Spanish, warned, "You who reach this place withdraw! This spot is dedicated to God Almighty and the one who dares to enter, a dolorous death in this world and eternal condemnation in the world he goes to." The document was reportedly authenticated by a London scholar, and in no time at all a prospectus was written, offering $125,000 in stock in the Sacambaya Exploration Company and promising a 48,000 percent return on investments. "Back in 1927," Overbeck observed less than a decade later, "people didn't quail and nm for cover when threatened with unduly large dividends." The stock sold quickly, and in early 1928 Overbeck found Sanders once again parked at her doorstep, this time with twenty men and a caravan of trucks loaded with two hundred tons of gear--mining equipment, suction pumps, compressors, gas masks (for the fabled toxic vapors), provisions, and an array of weaponry.

In spite of Sanders's elaborate, well-financed investigation, which also included aerial reconnaissance by kite-mounted cameras flying over the Sacambaya zone, he had no more success than Prodgers had had with picks and shovels twenty years earlier. After several months of fruitless exploring and excavating, Sanders was forced by the rainy season to shut down. His plans to return were dashed when a prank he had committed backfired: Suspicious that Bolivian officials were opening his mail, he wrote a spurious letter indicating that he was plotting to overthrow the government, using a cache of mustard gas that he claimed to possess; he was right about his mail being opened, and he was promptly arrested and allowed to leave the country only after paying a fine and turning over all the expedition's equipment.

Sacambaya apparently lay undisturbed until the 1960s, when two more Englishmen, Mark Howell and Tony Morrison, set off to crack its secret. Howell, a geographer and archaeologist, and Morrison, a naturalist and filmmaker, reached the area during the rainy season, no small feat. Morrison's "slight suspicion of the Sacambaya tales," he later wrote, had been "replaced by the conviction that they were grounded in solid fact." He persuaded Howell to head for the eastern Andes in spite of the looming rainy season "with the prospect of a near-authenticated Jesuit treasure as the golden carrot before him." Careening their Land Rover over soupy mountain roads, they got as far as Inquisivi, where mules replaced their not-so-all-terrain vehicle. How did they intend to succeed in their brief visit where more extensive expeditions had failed? They were armed with "field distortion locating equipment," which was essentially a metal detector capable of penetrating at least twenty feet of soil or rock. If they made any promising finds, they intended to return with a well-financed, full-scale team.

Howell and Morrison hauled their metal detector to several locations: The riverbank and hills sloping down to Caballo Cunco hill and an "ancient chapel," among other ruined buildings. Their only significant discovery was a four-pound, trapezoidal piece of copper plate with three holes drilled in it, which conceivably could have been from the machinery abandoned by Sanders in 1928. Howell and Morrison planned to return in the dry season. They never got around to it, although Morrison has not given up hope. Reached recently at his home in England, he says that "there are excellent but still unproven reasons for the existence of a treasure," but surmises that they "could be in any one of thirty places." Morrison believes that even if the Jesuits had no "full-blown mission" at Sacambaya, it "was clearly an outpost."

It is perhaps not surprising that fortune hunters would be drawn to Sacambaya. Bolivian history books, especially those on mining history and geology, make frequent reference to lost mines and legendary treasures. Writing in 1895, Manuel V. Ballivian, president of the Sociedad Geografica de La Paz, and Jose Zarco insisted that the tale of the Sacambaya treasure is itself "evidence of the abundance of gold" in the zone. They pass on an anecdote about "an inscription said to be on a rock at Sacambaya referring to the burial of 7,575 quintals of gold," which works out to almost 1.7 million pounds of gold. At gold's current price, $285 per ounce, that would be a $7.5 billion jackpot.

In a 1910 survey of Bolivia's mining resources, Pedro Aniceto Blanco remarked on the "frequency of stories of the riches of the miners passed down from the colonial era," particularly of the gold mining of the Jesuits. After the Jesuits had been notified of their expulsion, Blanco wrote, quoting from an unidentified document, "`they couldn't transport the immense quantity of gold they had mined, so they buried it near the Sacambaya mine,'" and that subsequent attempts to locate the abandoned mines had failed for lack of capital.

The problem with all these stories is that although there is a history of gold mining in the eastern Andes near Sacambaya, not to mention elsewhere in the country, there is no real evidence that the Jesuits were seriously involved. Moreover, Bolivia has thousands of abandoned mines. One survey in the mid-1800s calculated that for every working mine, there were a hundred abandoned ones. In four mining districts alone, there were thirteen hundred deserted gold works and only thirteen that were open.

Jesuit historians have been more skeptical of the treasure stories, in part because they had a better command of the historical documents and also because they sensed in the Sacambaya legend, intentional or not, an attempt to darken the order's reputation. In 1934 Ruben Vargas Ugarte, S.J., poked several large holes in the story of what he termed the "supposed treasures of the Jesuits": There is no church record of a Jesuit named San Roman during the period in question. Second, the 1767 directive to expel the Jesuits was executed with such velocity that there was no time for them to do anything but pack their bags--they certainly had no time to round up treasures and excavate a maze of secret, booby-trapped tunnels. Third, there is no mention in the chronicles of the era of Jesuit missions in the zone. The missions, all well documented, were much further east, in what is now Santa Cruz and the Beni.

The only Jesuit link to Sacambaya is that they held title to property there, perhaps a hacienda, where livestock were raised. (That hacienda was still functioning in the mid-1800s, long after the order had been expelled.) In any event, it is highly unlikely a single Jesuit, let alone eight or nine, actually lived at the hacienda. There were only a few dozen in the entire mission system in Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia).

After a particularly provocative account of the so-called Jesuit treasure of Sacambaya was published by the Elks's Magazine, an American Jesuit, Wilfrid Parsons, stepped forward to discredit the tale further. Having obtained a copy of Sanders's supposedly ancient parchment, Parsons stated that it was not written by a native Spanish speaker. "Besides the palpable mistakes in grammar," he pointed out, "it contains purely English idioms transferred unchanged into Spanish." The Sacambaya legend, Parsons summarized, boils down to this: "An eighteenth-century Jesuit who never existed left behind him an account of gold mined by Jesuits where no Jesuit or gold was and a plan of its hiding place in a monastery which did not exist and protected by a document which certainly was written in the twentieth century."

As for the ruins ransacked by the various treasure seekers over the decades, they probably are the walls, terraces, and canals of pre-Inca settlements recently uncovered at Sacambaya and in nearby valleys. In a series of National Geographic-sponsored expeditions in the 1990s, American botanist Marko Lewis found extensive rains of the Cotas, an agricultural people who cultivated coca and traded with neighboring tribes between 1150 and 1450 A.D.

Howell and Morrison's guide, Juan Oroya, came as close as anyone to deciphering the Sacambaya mystery. "Why has no one ever found the treasure?" Howell asked Oroya. "You live here. You must have heard stories and have your own ideas."

"It's a gringo treasure," he replied.

 

[gollum]

While I dont have any experience with that Production Company, I do have a long history in dealing with Reality TV Production Companies. Out of about three pitches a year, I only ever agreed to work with two. One was for a friend that was already in, and the production company made a TV that in no way was like what they pitched. The second was a shopping agreement that they couldn't get bought.

Here is one pitch that was kind of typical of the lot: "Even if we don't really find anything, we will put gold paint on bricks so you find something every week." (cue Wheel of Fortune loser: whah whah whaaaaaaaaah).

I watched one episode where they find the Inti "Mask" in the waterfall. Looks like something they found in a market. Look closely. Both eyes of the "mask" are inlaid with some kind of stone. If that had been sitting in a stream of running water for three or four hundred years, does ANYONE REALLY think those eye stones wouldnt have been washed out?

Another big loser to me was how he kept saying how the water was so fast and dangerous, but when they did a pullback, my garden hose puts more water out than the flow there.


Here is another clue for you all........the walrus was Paul (oh wait, not that); when they find ONE Nazi Coin, or ONE Spanish Coin, or ONE of ANYTHING.........it was most likely a plant. The only thing they found multiples of were miniballs. Notice how shallow they were. REALLY? Sitting in soft ground where it rains incessantly much of the year. Too shallow and no white coating on the lead. Talk to some of the Civil Wars Relic Hunters how many miniballs they have dug that weren't white;

Barry'd Treasure Civil War Relics

Those have only been buried since the 1860s. Buried lead ages like bread, not wine. It doesn't get better with age.

Mike

 

[UncleMatt]

I've watched the show, but not impressed. Obvious reality show scripting, with exaggerated drama right before every commercial.

 

[jeff of pa]

While I dont have any experience with that Production Company, I do have a long history in dealing with Reality TV Production Companies. Out of about three pitches a year, I only ever agreed to work with two. One was for a friend that was already in, and the production company made a TV that in no way was like what they pitched. The second was a shopping agreement that they couldn't get bought.

Here is one pitch that was kind of typical of the lot: "Even if we don't really find anything, we will put gold paint on bricks so you find something every week." (cue Wheel of Fortune loser: whah whah whaaaaaaaaah).

I watched one episode where they find the Inti "Mask" in the waterfall. Looks like something they found in a market. Look closely. Both eyes of the "mask" are inlaid with some kind of stone. If that had been sitting in a stream of running water for three or four hundred years, does ANYONE REALLY think those eye stones wouldnt have been washed out?

Another big loser to me was how he kept saying how the water was so fast and dangerous, but when they did a pullback, my garden hose puts more water out than the flow there.


Here is another clue for you all........the walrus was Paul (oh wait, not that); when they find ONE Nazi Coin, or ONE Spanish Coin, or ONE of ANYTHING.........it was most likely a plant. The only thing they found multiples of were miniballs. Notice how shallow they were. REALLY? Sitting in soft ground where it rains incessantly much of the year. Too shallow and no white coating on the lead. Talk to some of the Civil Wars Relic Hunters how many miniballs they have dug that weren't white;

Barry'd Treasure Civil War Relics

Those have only been buried since the 1860s. Buried lead ages like bread, not wine. It doesn't get better with age.

Mike

I guess Tomorrow night they Finally get Trapped in the cave
So Far I do like the show. but it is Running a bit Slow.
too much Talk.



Notice what ever they Air Tomorrow night in the first 15 Seconds, Won't Air on the show for 2 weeks.
They have a Very strange Idea of What "Preview of tonight's show, so stay tuned" Really Means

As far as hearing from Production companies, I lost Count.
I've been asked if I wanted to research for them & I've been asked if I wanna
Treasure hunt for them. I never respond back.

Back in 2000 I was Treasure hunting a Drained lake, and finding lots Of gold rings.
And returning some every Week.
and a Couple News Agencies Caught on & did stories for their Papers. all of a sudden a TV crew shows Up & starts Following Me around. Because I dig everything, I as digging small foil bits, lead Etc.
I said "You'r Probably not going to Catch me Digging a good signal. It ttakes allot of digging"
the reporter said, "No worry ! We;'ll Have you Bury a ring to find before we Leave"
That Immediately turned me off & I walked away swinging Faster. leaving them in My Tracks.
got in my Car & left til they did.

Friggin' Fake News Back then already !

 

[deducer]

While I dont have any experience with that Production Company, I do have a long history in dealing with Reality TV Production Companies. Out of about three pitches a year, I only ever agreed to work with two. One was for a friend that was already in, and the production company made a TV that in no way was like what they pitched. The second was a shopping agreement that they couldn't get bought.

Here is one pitch that was kind of typical of the lot: "Even if we don't really find anything, we will put gold paint on bricks so you find something every week." (cue Wheel of Fortune loser: whah whah whaaaaaaaaah).

I watched one episode where they find the Inti "Mask" in the waterfall. Looks like something they found in a market. Look closely. Both eyes of the "mask" are inlaid with some kind of stone. If that had been sitting in a stream of running water for three or four hundred years, does ANYONE REALLY think those eye stones wouldnt have been washed out?

Another big loser to me was how he kept saying how the water was so fast and dangerous, but when they did a pullback, my garden hose puts more water out than the flow there.


Here is another clue for you all........the walrus was Paul (oh wait, not that); when they find ONE Nazi Coin, or ONE Spanish Coin, or ONE of ANYTHING.........it was most likely a plant. The only thing they found multiples of were miniballs. Notice how shallow they were. REALLY? Sitting in soft ground where it rains incessantly much of the year. Too shallow and no white coating on the lead. Talk to some of the Civil Wars Relic Hunters how many miniballs they have dug that weren't white;

Barry'd Treasure Civil War Relics

Those have only been buried since the 1860s. Buried lead ages like bread, not wine. It doesn't get better with age.

Mike

Oh, it's absolutely doctored. But still fun to watch! No? At the very least, hopefully it puts some life into an old topic. This part of the forum has pretty much been left for dead.

I watch to get ideas and to see what new technology has come out. Last night's show featured a portable GPR unit that didn't have wheels and could be used over rocky, uneven terrain to locate voids and tunnels.

The team "broke" into a tunnel at Sacambaya, below the Plazuela monastery. That tunnel was probably well-known for some time and leads nowhere, but it's fun to imagine a scenario and what one would do in such an instance.

 

[jeff of pa]

lol the hairpin turn they went around with the heavy equipment last night looked Very Familiar.

Looked like the Turn the Ice-road Truckers went around Regularly on the Death-road Truckers
series.
I think they made things more Dangerous with the Trees. Even tied together it wouldn't have taken much for the Connection to break & The logs
to Roll under the tires.

Apparently My TV's preview Description Lied.
They were never Trapped last Night.
Just Blocked from Moving Forward.
they were still able to exit the Tunnel
where they Entered.
I Do Not call that Trapped unless your playing a video game that has no reverse.
even Pac-Man could Turn around

 

[Radman]

Just like the ghost hunter shows etc. These shows all have to fabricate things to make "good TV". I still enjoy watching it.

 

[South Sea mariner]

Hola Amigos

While these TV shows are fun to watch and entertaining. You cannot take them serious. Like a soap opera wanting to know what happens next after the next ad break. Producers are not interested in telling the real story for many it might be boring and do not get ratings. They use these real locations as backdrop for there soap opera's creating fiction presenting as fact (reality )

Nothing wrong with creating fictional movies, TV series etc. But we have today a generation of TV producers who want to blur fact and fiction wrapped in a package as so called reality?


However are these realty TV shows may be doing more damage to serious researchers of treasure legends than any government? Because of the public perceptions created by these TV shows portraying these adventures as real searches when they are nothing more than scripted drama. Yet their actions and high jinx may give false impressions to governments already paranoid about treasure hunters to clamp even down further on such legitimate projects to go ahead. Thus genuine researchers will be shut off from searches because of a scripted antics of a TV producer.

Whats next do TV reality TV show with game precipitants doing pretend armed robberies and present them as real? There is some thing terribly morally wrong presenting fiction as fact. Because it destroys credibility in everything. For example Are the football games seen on TV already scripted? betting agencies make a lot n money of bets, do they dictate the outcome of matches? Could all TV and even your news is already scripted and written by producers only interested in ratings than truth?


To me viewers must question the moral effics of such shows that do not show clear distinction between fact and fiction.

Sadly for many its turned a serious subject for many here no doubt into a mockery.

Mal

 

[deducer]

Hola Amigos

While these TV shows are fun to watch and entertaining. You cannot take them serious. Like a soap opera wanting to know what happens next after the next ad break. Producers are not interested in telling the real story for many it might be boring and do not get ratings. They use these real locations as backdrop for there soap opera's creating fiction presenting as fact (reality )

Nothing wrong with creating fictional movies, TV series etc. But we have today a generation of TV producers who want to blur fact and fiction wrapped in a package as so called reality?


However are these realty TV shows may be doing more damage to serious researchers of treasure legends than any government? Because of the public perceptions created by these TV shows portraying these adventures as real searches when they are nothing more than scripted drama. Yet their actions and high jinx may give false impressions to governments already paranoid about treasure hunters to clamp even down further on such legitimate projects to go ahead. Thus genuine researchers will be shut off from searches because of a scripted antics of a TV producer.

Whats next do TV reality TV show with game precipitants doing pretend armed robberies and present them as real? There is some thing terribly morally wrong presenting fiction as fact. Because it destroys credibility in everything. For example Are the football games seen on TV already scripted? betting agencies make a lot n money of bets, do they dictate the outcome of matches? Could all TV and even your news is already scripted and written by producers only interested in ratings than truth?


To me viewers must question the moral effics of such shows that do not show clear distinction between fact and fiction.

Sadly for many its turned a serious subject for many here no doubt into a mockery.

Mal

I don't think anyone on here is taking the show seriously. Pretty much everyone knows that reality shows are scripted, and those that deal with treasure are fakes- objects are planted and then "found." On and on- but it's fun to watch, anyway. Harmless. I don't think any real damage is being done.

But when news becomes scripted and biased, . now that's dangerous.

 

[sdcfia]

... But when news becomes scripted and biased, . now that's dangerous.

I've realized since 1963 that "news" was scripted and that politics was a "reality" presentation steering peoples' beliefs. History too, for that matter. Humans are like a hoard of hungry monkeys jumping from one shiny trinket to the next. Makes these fake treasure hunts rather harmless fun - even for those who believe them.

 

[Ryano]

TV is the business of cultivating audiences for advertisers to sell to. For the most part, I try to stick to newspapers and foreign press for news and "read between the lines". Our libraries are full of books explaining "what really happened" thousands, hundreds, decades and years ago and it's apparent that living "in the now" we only get a glimpse of the story.

 

[gollum]

I don't think anyone on here is taking the show seriously. Pretty much everyone knows that reality shows are scripted, and those that deal with treasure are fakes- objects are planted and then "found." On and on- but it's fun to watch, anyway. Harmless. I don't think any real damage is being done.

But when news becomes scripted and biased, . now that's dangerous.

Maybe no one on here, but there are plenty that do, I promise. "Legend of Superstition Mountains" wasnt a huge success in the US, but it brought tens of thousands of people to Apache Junction and Goldfield.

.......and yes, the Sacambaya Treasure as known was a hoax. Do you know what Caballo Cunco means? HAHAHA One of our old friends on TNet did a load of investigation into it. I am still going through all the research he sent me. I dont know if he wants his name out there, so for now, it will come from me.


Mike

 

[jeff of pa]

Maybe no one on here, but there are plenty that do, I promise. "Legend of Superstition Mountains" wasnt a huge success in the US, but it brought tens of thousands of people to Apache Junction and Goldfield.

.......and yes, the Sacambaya Treasure as known was a hoax. Do you know what Caballo Cunco means? HAHAHA One of our old friends on TNet did a load of investigation into it. I am still going through all the research he sent me. I dont know if he wants his name out there, so for now, it will come from me.


Mike

gollum, Every Treasure out there is known as a "hoax" to someone.
Until it is found.

Honestly, I don't know on this One.
& there are a few I Do consider Hoaxes also.
Like the Hole on the Island. & the the Beale codes.
the only one I'm 100% confident is a joke is Oak Island.
simply because I don't believe in people with Magical powers,
that can tunnel under water.
Beale may Surprise me.

I'm Sure There were a few Investors who started Doubting Fisher.
and a Few afraid to Invest, Thinking he was a Nut !
But Just saying.

 

[deducer]

Maybe no one on here, but there are plenty that do, I promise. "Legend of Superstition Mountains" wasnt a huge success in the US, but it brought tens of thousands of people to Apache Junction and Goldfield.

.......and yes, the Sacambaya Treasure as known was a hoax. Do you know what Caballo Cunco means? HAHAHA One of our old friends on TNet did a load of investigation into it. I am still going through all the research he sent me. I dont know if he wants his name out there, so for now, it will come from me.


Mike

Please share what you can with us, of his research. I'd like to know more.

 

[gollum]

First..........

Caballo Cunco means Horse's Cun*, and as Deducer noted, the man that told the treasure story ran off with the money he was given.

Let me get through what was sent and I'll post what I can.

Mike

 

[gollum]

Personally, I think most of the Gold and Silver from the 23 or so mines along the Sacambaya River went in two directions:

1. North to Columbia. Here, it looks like the Jesuits bought slaves from known slave traders.

2. East to Brazil. Based on the huge treasure hoard find at Rio de Janiero in 1891.

Mike

 

[deducer]

Personally, I think most of the Gold and Silver from the 23 or so mines along the Sacambaya River went in two directions:

1. North to Columbia. Here, it looks like the Jesuits bought slaves from known slave traders.

2. East to Brazil. Based on the huge treasure hoard find at Rio de Janiero in 1891.

Mike

This one?

 

[deducer]

Last night's episode was a whole lotta bout nuttin'. They're not even trying.

 

[Ryano]

$70M in gold value in 1900 (~$21/oz) = 3.3M oz.

That's more than a metric ton of gold ! That discovery must have made some people extremely wealthy.