Clearfield, PA – Father and Son, Dennis and Kem Parada, have spent years in remote Pennsylvania looking for buried treasure but not just any buried treasure. Dents Run is about 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh and legend has it that an 1863 shipment of Union gold was either lost or stolen on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The Parada’s own Finders Keepers, a locate and recovery service for underground metal artifacts, that has focused on what some believe is tons of buried gold in the woods of Pennsylvania.
In January 2018, the Parada’s sophisticated detector had registered a hunk of metal they suspected was the gold but they did not have the resources to excavate it so they reached out to the FBI for assistance according to Fox News.
Within weeks, the FBI hired geophysical consulting firm Enviroscan to survey the hilltop site. Enviroscan’s gravimeter also indicated a large metallic mass with the density of gold, according to Warren Getler, who worked closely with the Paradas and the FBI.
An FBI agent told them the location of the mass was “one or two feet off Denny’s sweet spot,” recalled Getler, author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver. “Then I went to ask how big is it. And he said, ‘7 to 9 tons.’ And I literally said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’”
That much gold would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars today.
The Paradas have previously said they had an agreement with the FBI to watch the excavation but on the day of the dig, they were confined to their car and were finally escorted to the dig site at the end of the second day where they saw an empty hole.
The FBI claims that they didn’t find anything but the father-son duo, who brought the FBI to the site, remain convinced the FBI uncovered something there — and their lawyer, Bill Cluck, is still pressing the case, successfully suing for access to government emails about the dig.
Those documents, which Cluck provided to The Associated Press, show that federal law enforcement was indeed after buried treasure.
“We believe the cache itself is in the neighborhood of 3x5x8 (feet) to 5x5x8,” wrote K.T. Newton, an assistant U.S attorney in Philadelphia, in a 2018 email marked “Confidential.”
On March 16, 2018, two days after the dig ended, Newton emailed Miner that “we are all disappointed and scratching our heads over the several scientific test results.”
It’s unclear what she meant, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia said last week it considers the matter to be closed.
Despite what the FBI has said, the folklore of buried gold has turned into what residents saw those fateful days in 2018. Residents say they heard a backhoe and jackhammer overnight — when the excavation was supposed to have been paused — and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks.
Dennis Parada calls the FBI’s claim “insulting” and “was a slap in the face, really, to think all these people could make that kind of mistake.”
“I gotta find out what happened to all that gold,” Dennis Parada said in a phone interview last week.
The Parada’s have a planned press conference on Wednesday.
THE LEGEND OF THE DENT RUN TREASURE (COINWEEK.COM)
In 1863, Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee were headed towards the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg. At the same time, a shipment of 26 gold bars weighing about 50 pounds (32 kg) each had left Wheeling, West Virginia and was on its way to Philadelphia to be melted down and struck as coins to pay Union soldiers. The lieutenant in charge of the wagon train decided that he would take a roundabout way through the north-central part of the state, in order to avoid the enemy. And just in case, the wagon came equipped with a false bottom in which to hide the cargo of civil war gold.
The lieutenant, the wagon, eight cavalrymen and their guide were last seen in the town of St. Mary’s. They were headed to a point on the Susquehanna where they could float the wagon the rest of the way to Harrisburg and then onwards.
They never arrived.
No one saw the wagon or the men again until the party’s guide showed back up in St. Mary’s about a month later. Interrogated by the military, the guide said that the lieutenant had died of fever and that there was a fight but that he couldn’t remember anything after that. Suspicious, the Army drafted the guide and stationed him out west, threatening to keep him there until he remembered what happened. While on post the guide would get drunk and, it is said, claim to know everything that happened and exactly where the gold was.
The wagon and several skeletons were found years later by Pinkerton detectives hired by the Army. The gold was never found.