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Oak Island has so many stories attached to it that it can take months to ferret out the facts, if any, behind just one of them. One of the most famous of the stories is the booby trap flood tunnels. The legend says that someone buried a fabulous treasure on the island, then excavated tunnels that would flood with sea-water if anyone dug near it. Treasure hunters have been digging holes on Oak Island for over two hundred years. Every hole dug or drilled has filled with water. But, no one has ever found a flood tunnel. Also incredibly, in all those years, no one seems to have realized the obvious. It's not booby traps; it's geology. In 1995, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution did a study of the island. They poured dye into the holes and monitored the perimeter of the island looking for the dye. The prevailing theory was that the water in the holes rose and fell with the tides. So the dye should have leaked out through the flood tunnels by the same route it entered. There was absolutely no trace of the dye anywhere in the waters around Oak Island. Nor did Woods Hole scientists find any evidence of the so-called box-drains that supposedly siphoned seawater into the flood tunnels. They also were not allowed to study where they wanted on the island, but could only go where the then-owners took them. Their conclusion was that there are no flood tunnels. The water in the excavations is nothing more than the natural results of the geology of the island.
Two of the current owners of the island are engineers, Marty Lagina and Craig Tester. Is it possible that neither of them read the geological report? Nor do they seem to understand that if you dig a hole in an island you are going to hit water. Marty's brother Rick Lagina, seems to be the driving force behind the continued excavations, and the obsessive determination to get to the bottom of a borehole identified as 10X. Extensive testing has shown that there actually is a cavern over two hundred feet below. Rick Lagina is determined to get a diver down there (after two or three failed attempts) to see what's in it, and to prove his theory that the cavern is man- made and that man- made tunnels lead into it through which, supposedly, the treasure was carried in and hidden.
This can be classified as a spoiler, so, if you don't want to know what happened on the Season Three finale, stop reading here.
A third or fourth diver was finally able to successfully navigate the shaft and make it into the cavern. He explored the cavern and found that where a box or chest was supposed to have been was there was only a rock, that there was no wooden beam where one was supposed to have been, that the area where human remains were supposed to have been lying on the floor there was, instead, a sinkhole through which the diver could feel water flowing into the chamber, and last, the formations in the wall that Rick Lagina believed to be the entrance to the man made tunnels was a natural opening in the wall of the cavern. Asked point blank if the cavern appeared to be man made, the diver, the man who had actually been in the cavern, said no, it was a natural formation. Despite the evidence, when Rick Lagina was asked if he was ready to move on to something else on the island, he answered "Not yet." He said the only way to prove that there is nothing in the cavern at the bottom of 10X is to drain it. Rick Lagina still believes there are flood tunnels and is determined to prove it. His plan includes excavating an eighteen story hole next to and around 10X, then opening the wall of the cavern to see what's in it. Finally, the scenario at the end of the finale was just a bit too rehearsed to seem credible. Three female descendants of the man who originally found the money pit were on the show and presented an item that they claim was one of the things their ancestor had taken from one of the three treasure chests he and his friends recovered. It was a small gold crucifix that they claim a jeweler said was probably 500 years old. No documentation, no results of any testing, no verifiable provenance as to where the crucifix had been since it was found. Just three women who said their family heirloom proved there was or had been a fabulous treasure on Oak Island. Is that enough?
I'll cover the actual production issues, and there are MANY, in another review, save to say, a majority of the viewers I have discussed them with are almost completely disenchanted with the entire production.
score 2/10
tandrmcdonald 3 February 2016
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3407808/ |
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22-11-2019 10:26:46
