For Over a Decade, They’ve Been the Face of the World’s Most Entrancing Treasure Hunt. Have They Finally Solved Oak Island’s Mystery?

7 min read“Hundreds of thousands of dollars and the wits of the cleverest American engineers and college professors have been vainly spent in trying to solve the mystery of the Money Pits of Oak island and its sheltered haven, Mahone bay, Nova Scotia.”Those words appeared in the pages of Popular Mechanics 100 years ago, in the March 1926 story “Hunting Hidden Treasures.” In the century that followed, the amount of money and wits expended on the mystery of Oak Island has only grown.Since 2014, the public faces of the Oak Island mystery have been Rick and Marty Lagina, the stars of HISTORY’s long-running series The Curse of Oak Island. Across more than 250 episodes, audiences have followed along with the brothers’ success and setbacks, their obsession and their frustrations. When they began, via an investment in Oak Island Tours in 2006, they were pursuing a quixotic dream inspired by an old magazine article, joining a pantheon of prospectors that included Hollywood stars like Errol Flynn and John Wayne, and at least one U.S. President (Franklin D. Roosevelt, who kept tabs on the developments on Oak Island throughout his life).Now, heading into their fourteenth season (debuting on November 10 on the History Channel), the siblings from Michigan are striking a more retrospective tone, reflecting on their role in this centuries-long quest for answers and the colleagues they’ve lost along the way (the season premiere pays homage to the late Dan Blankenship, a longtime partner of the Laginas who spent more than 50 years searching Oak Island before his 2019 passing). Now, there’s a question that’s become just as pressing for the two men as the Oak Island mystery itself: “After all these years, what was it all for?”History ChannelCraig Tester, Marty Lagina, and Rick Lagina meet inside legendary treasure hunter Dan Blankenship’s house to discuss the year of treasure hunting ahead of them on Oak Island in the season premiere of The Curse of Oak Island.Ahead of the new season, Rick and Marty Lagina sat down with Pop Mech to reflect on fourteen seasons of television, how treasure-seeking has changed over the centuries, and what keeps them, and audiences, returning to Oak Island and its mysterious Money Pit year after year.Although the marketing for Season 14 has leaned heavily on a new discovery through which the Laginas’ “lifelong quest has finally paid off,” the brothers kept the details of the coming episodes close to the vest. (Pop Mech was able to preview only the season premiere.) Otherwise, they were as candid and at times as self-effacing as they’ve been throughout fourteen seasons of television.In fact, Rick is quick to dispel what he feels is the biggest misconception fans of the show often have. “We’re portrayed on some level as experts in every field, and we’re not,” he told us. “That’s why we have such a large tent of people helping us, because we’re not experts in every field, every arena.”“It’s a very complex mystery,” he adds, “and we need everybody under the tent, if you will.”That tent doesn’t just include the various experts who appeared on the program over the last decade, but also the centuries of treasure hunters who came before them. “Rick holds those prior searchers in this huge, high regard,” Marty says of his brother, “and thinks about them all the time.”Google BooksThe Yarmouth Herald, February 19, 1863If one believes the account published in The Yarmouth Herald in 1863, that list of prior searchers stretches all the way back to 1795. That’s when a young farmer named Daniel McGinnis arrived on Oak Island via canoe, propelled by a piece of folklore which claimed that Captain Kidd had buried millions of dollars worth of treasure on the island. As he searched, he came across a depression in the ground that seemed deliberate, and called together a small team to dig on the site. As they excavated to a depth of 30 feet, they found remnants of a previous presence at the site (some accounts say flagstones, others oak platforms), and that led them to think they’d discovered the location of the buried treasure—or what’s long been referred to as the “Money Pit.”In the early 1800s, the Onslow Company reportedly paid a visit to the same site, and they dug deeper into the Money Pit than McGinnis ever dared to go, roughly 80 to 90 feet deep. The Onslow Company found further indications that the pit was deliberately dug to store something, though their evidence was far more destructive. Their dig set off a booby trap that caused the Money Pit to flood with seawater up to the 33-foot level. The Onslow Company was unable to bail out the excavation site at the time. To make matters worse, Marty would note, later attempts only exacerbated the problem.“There was almost certainly a flood tunnel that caused the initial booby trap,” he told us, “And people will come up to you and they’ll say, well, why don’t you shut off the water this way or shut off the water that way. The problem is there’s been so much pumping over the years by other people that the water is coming in from other places.”Marty, who possesses an extensive engineering background in both petroleum and renewable energy, is both enamored with and exasperated by what’s been left behind by the treasure hunters who preceded him.“From an engineering standpoint, I’m always astonished, absolutely astonished and in rapt admiration for what those people were able to do with picks and shovels,” Marty says of those earlier excavators. “I mean, you can’t believe it. If you were out there, and you saw these hand hewn timbers come up from 180 feet down. They had nothing. They had horses, you know? I mean, it’s just really amazing.”History ChannelAlex Lagina, Laird Niven, Craig Tester, and Gary Drayton unearth a mysterious metal artifact while investigating the slipway on the shore of Lot 5 in the season premiere of The Curse of Oak Island.Impressive as that work was for its time, it left modern-day diggers with consequences of their own.“One of our scientific consultants, Ian Spooner, is a PhD geologist. He calls it Chutes & Ladders,” Marty says, before quickly adding, “He actually calls it Snakes and Ladders, because that’s the Canadian thing.”“We have so many interconnected passages now that have been made by other people that we have to decipher all that,” he laments, “And every time a timber comes out, I mean, almost every time, you have to say, is this an original worker’s timber or is this a searcher’s timber? And we have to run the scientific analysis on that.”In the show’s ninth season, water samples from the site turned up trace amounts of gold, a discovery that showed just how badly booby traps and centuries of earlier digging had muddied the trail.“If you followed [the show], you know there’s gold in the water, which has kept us coming back for years,” Marty continued, “Now it’s there, it’s real, it’s coming from a source. And if the water was just moving geologically, like I’m used to in my prior business, we could trace it back, but the problem is it’s all interconnected, so it’s difficult.”Have past attempts to solve the mystery actually further obscured Oak Island’s secrets? Did stories stoking the hunger for treasure actually, if unintentionally, contribute to the partial destruction of the Nova Scotia island?If so, it’s a guilt that Pop Mech partially shares.At one point in our conversation, Marty cuts in to jokingly ask, “By the way, can I do a quick commercial for Popular Mechanics?” to which this author, never afraid of a little self-promotion, gleefully assented. “Growing up, I loved that magazine. Absolutely loved that magazine,” he says, “And Rick will attest, we kind of had a hard time getting our hands on actual magazines. But I mean, I would read those from cover to cover.”“There is one connection to Popular Mechanics too, aside from our interest in the magazine,” Rick chimed in to add, “There was an article in Popular Mechanics about Oak Island.”As it turns out, there was more than one. But if Rick recalled an Oak Island story from one of the magazines he and Marty read cover to cover, it was likely the one published at the exact mid-point between 1926’s “Hunting Hidden Treasures” and today.The rumored treasure at the bottom of Oak Island’s Money Pit was depicted on the cover of the September 1976 issue of Popular Mechanics.Fifty years ago, the September 1976 issue of Popular Mechanics ran with the cover story “7 Great Quests of Man,” and the mystery of Oak Island’s treasure was discussed alongside such cryptic quandaries (and just plain cryptids) as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, ancient aliens, and Noah’s Ark.But if such outlandish company makes the Oak Island mystery feel like a fantasy, the work the Laginas have done over fourteen seasons has pulled things back into the realm of reality. While a literal pot of gold at the end of this proverbial rainbow would be a satisfying conclusion, Rick says that the true value of these excavations extends beyond the potential payday.“When you talk about story, the science and technology has pushed the timeline of what happened on Oak island, or at least when something started to happen on Oak Island, to me, has been pushed back, literally, into the latter part of the 13th century,” he noted, “We have core samples from wells, we have carbon dates from old walls, we have archaeo-astronomical alignments. I don’t see any other explanation that some of these structures, including Nolan’s Cross, given the alignments contained within them, were of that time frame. So what happened long, long ago, well before Europeans were supposed to be on this continent, to me, that’s a story in and of itself.”Perhaps, in that sense, the treasure has served as the profit motive, the lure that funded centuries of expeditions, which may finally be uncovering the site’s true history.“Marty has always said that the mystery of Oak Island has endured because of treasure, because of that component, and he’s absolutely right,” Rick concluded. “But at this point, I think the treasure and the story are somewhat aligned in terms of importance, and I hope that we can push forward on both agendas.”The new season of The Curse of Oak Island premieres on the History Channel November 10 at 9/8c.Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.