In 2010, 80 year-old Forrest Fenn hid a fantastical treasure in the mountains north of Santa Fe. The key to finding it lay within a cryptic 24-line poem, spurring a decade-long treasure hunt where people gave up their jobs, their families, even their lives in pursuit of Fenn’s hidden millions. Now, for the community of devoted hunters, this dangerous pursuit of gold has become an obsessive search for the meaning of truth. This doc series will profile something exceedingly rare - a treasure hunt where the treasure is actually found - and the mystery of where it may be hidden again.
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00:00I was at a friend's house. He told me a guy by the name of Forrest Fenn had some treasure worth
00:06about what at the time he was saying one to five million dollars.
00:10I would love to be a millionaire one day. We're rednecks, but not stupid rednecks.
00:16What if we told you there was a treasure chest somewhere in the mountains north of Santa Fe?
00:21Find the treasure chest and it's yours. It's life-changing money.
00:25You have a map and you get to solve it. You get to find it.
00:28Who wouldn't want to be Indiana Jones?
00:31Forrest Fenn hides the treasure more than ten years ago.
00:34And nobody's found it in all these years. But in order to find it, you'll need to solve clues hidden in a poem.
00:41People went nuts.
00:44People started posting their solutions to the puzzle.
00:47Something to do with latitude and longitude. We used the cipher to decrypt the poem.
00:52We're coming, Mr. Fenn. We're coming.
00:54We're coming. Yee-haw!
00:56We had it all lined up.
00:58This treasure hunt became this massive phenomenon.
01:00Forrest became kind of a god-like figure in the treasure community.
01:05And that's a lot of power to have.
01:07He lived in my head for free for 24 hours of the day.
01:11Over 300,000 people took part in it.
01:15People spent years of their lives.
01:17Two years.
01:18Ten years.
01:19We're not gonna stop.
01:20Wait!
01:22It did turn into madness.
01:25The treasure hunters would do anything to get to the finish line.
01:32One of the treasure hunters decided to start stalking my dogs.
01:36At this point, four people have died.
01:39Your granddaughter's being stalked.
01:42People are breaking into your home.
01:44People started asking Forrest, why don't you call off the hunt?
01:47Now that it was a matter of life and death.
01:49Do not call this off.
01:51Shit happens.
01:55If somebody drowns in a swim pool, should we drain the pool?
01:58Or should we teach people to swim?
02:07I know that someone has re-hidden the treasure.
02:13What the fuck?
02:19To Be Continued