Original subtitles

We have 9,600 feet of flooded cave,

but we still don't have a good entry point.

If we can get into that cavern,

eric thinks we will find precious metal.

You see that? That's natural gold.

But we're looking for buried treasure.

Says right here, "pure gold."

this is where it gets dicey.

That's as far as I can go.

The ranch is part of the most famous treasure hunt that's never been solved.

[charlie] is there any mining clients on blind frog ranch?

[woman] there are.

"rhodes"?

You guys are not gonna believe this.

What is it, charlie?

[charlie] there are some places on earth that just don't seem right.

The land feels different, it acts different.

And this here is one of those places.

Some say the land is trying to hold on to something.

Don't go in the [bleep] cave.

-Aztec treasure? -Holy [bleep].

- Caverns of gold? -Look at this!

Morning...

It'll be a million dollars.

Some even say there's a buried spaceship.

Hell yeah.

Me? I never cared much about those stories.

I just care about finding whatever the hell's in the ground.

-Get outta there. -[yells]

so, charlie boy, you're telling me

that there was a rhodes claim down here on this end of the property?

-Two. Two. -Two?

But now the name "rhodes",

you know, it's the same as the legend

of the lost rhodes mines.

That can't be a coincidence if he comes to this spot

and lost rhodes, I mean, it has to be the same rhodes.

These are all mormon gold pieces

from the lost rhodes mine.

Your ranch is likely one of

the sacred story caverns.

Your ranch is part of the most famous treasure hunt that's never been solved.

It's significant because usually legends are founded on some truth.

This is good stuff. I mean, very interesting.

The story being that in 1519

the aztec king sent 10,000 men north

with gold to start the new colony.

They came all the way to utah and met with their cousin tribe, the utes.

The utes say they had the gold in caves to protect it.

And then, hundreds of years ago, the mormons came to this part of utah

and be-friended the utes, who had no use for this gold.

But the mormons did.

Supposedly, they entrusted one man with the location of the aztec gold,

thomas rhodes.

Suddenly, the poor farmers had more gold than anyone in the world.

And it came from somewhere in these mountains.

Now we know that someone by the name of rhodes was on the property

filing mining claims.

-Last name is same. -It's spelled the same, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

Probably the same family.

You don't file a claim if there's nothing there.

Yeah, you better believe it.

It's just intriguing

and you can't get enough of it.

It's good. This very well could be

the place where this treasure is buried.

You know, I'm not used to chasing treasures,

you know, it's not my deal. Normally, I just...

I go out and I find natural minerals.

However,

there's so many clues leading to this treasure

that I just can't ignore that.

So, I'm committed to doing whatever's necessary

to help duane find this treasure.

It's all kinda coming together on this deal.

Yeah.

Let's try this way here.

Let's see.

So we know that the rhodes family

actually had a mining claim here on the property.

That's the same rhodes that was pulling bags and bags of gold out of the cavern.

We've got a giant box of something

in the flooded parts of the caverns.

So that could be the source of the lost rhodes gold.

Now we just need to find an entrance to it.

We were right in this wide area here.

You see there's a lack of education

and that's the white rocks that we're standing on right here.

Satellite images often don't tell the whole story.

Because there are subtleties in rock formation

that you just can't see from space.

If satellites could see everything I'd be out of a job.

If you can read the rocks,

and know where they're going,

then you can often times interpret them to make, maybe a big find.

It's what I love to do.

That strike in dip is vastly different.

I see that we have some faulting going on right here.

But I don't see it on the map here.

That is very interesting.

Now we can just park it right up in here.

-Right here? -Yeah.

That's good.

The reason I really like this spot

is can you see that outcrop right there?

I think that's an unmapped fault.

And so, that happens to go right across to your tunnel site, too.

-Oh, really? -Yeah.

It looks like there'd be space under that, as much as it's pushed up.

It makes total sense.

We'll go in, if we can get maybe 50 feet vertical?

-Okay. -Can you guys do that?

-Oh, yeah. -Yeah, we'll get the drills.

-And meet you here. -Let's make it happen.

-You're gonna drive it down? -Yeah, yeah.

Geologically, caverns are known to exist along fault lines,

which represent weak portions of the crust.

And for some reason, the features we're seeing at the surface

aren't showing up on my topographic map.

This could lead us to the entrance of the lost ruins of ...

[chad] so, the boring machine comes in two parts.

First you get the big drill with the nozzle on it,

then it has high pressure water pushing back out.

And that gets fed by the second part.

-[honking] -here we go. We're sliding.

...An 800-gallon water tank in the back of my dad's truck.

Don't lose the brakes here. We got problems if we do.

[chuckles]

[beeping]

having eric here, somebody with his technical background

to add to this project is, well, it's priceless.

'cause we could overlook this.

[motor stuttering]

that's the water.

Eric's right. And there is a dry entrance to the cave system.

That could lead us back to the main dig site where I found the box.

But that means we're gonna have to drill through

a pretty serious amount of bedrock, which is hard.

So you can tell on the boring machine when you break through bedrock.

There's no resistance and it'll just keep spinning faster and faster.

-It's hard? -It's rock.

[grinding]

keep going, chad.

It's going.

Everything's working the way it's supposed to work.

It's just that we're hitting some pretty tough luck.

We just have to give it a little.

-Chad, bro. -Keep going.

Right, here we go.

Look at that. Watch how fast that is.

No resistance.

He must've busted through that rock.

Whoo-hoo!

It's gotta be a void.

Hold [bleep] man. There we go.

This is awesome.

Look at this. I don't even have to spin and it goes in.

That's an open hole.

See how far it goes till we get resistance.

[chuckles and whoops]

that's a big [bleep] cave!

Hell yeah.

[chuckling]

it's gotta be a void.

Holy [bleep] man. There we go.

This is awesome.

Look at this.

I don't even have to spin it and it goes in.

That's an open hole.

See how far it goes until we get resistance.

[whoops] it's a big [bleep] cave!

[alarm beeping]

turn it off. Turn the pressure off.

Looks like some of that casting broke on that pressure pump.

It's pretty typical about equipment failure here.

Sometimes, when you're looking for gold,

it fights you at every turn.

When it fights this hard it usually means there's a fortune down there.

Well, duane and chad was working on the rig

and I decided to do some metal detecting.

As I got about, I don't know, 40 foot from the dual rig

I started getting a big hit.

[detector beeping]

hey, guys.

Charlie's got a pretty big hit going here on the detector.

Really?

Listen to the signal.

[detector beeping]

if it is, it's all...

It's all right in here.

Right in here?

From here to here.

Lit bit deeper.

There's something there.

-[bleep] -bedrock.

That ain't rock.

That's a [bleep] drill stick.

Yeah, it is.

It seemed like we'd drilled through the bedrock walls and poked into the cavern.

Instead of digging into bedrock,

it kicked the bed up.

We were just pushing it into the soft dirt.

You know your metal detector works.

[bleep]

we keep poking all these holes and not finding anything.

It's frustrating.

I mean, 'cause we've been at this for a while now.

We have so much at stake here.

The risk is super high

and we're not seeing any reward yet.

Chad's a chip off the old block.

He runs a little hot sometimes just like hid old man.

He needs to get his head right

because we have weather coming in, and we don't have much time

to get this accomplished.

-Hey, gents. -Hey. How you doing?

Nathan rasnick, gpr data.

-Duane ollinger, nice meeting you, sir. -You too.

We used the boring machine

on the un-mapped fault that eric found

but we could not bust through the bedrock.

So, we wanna get some more sophisticated scans to figure out where we need to drill.

Guy ready to do some scans, I guess?

Absolutely.

Well, gentlemen, let's get after it.

So, we have some people coming in that have ground penetrating radar.

These scans will show down about 50 to 60 feet.

The gpr is a very good tool

that helps us find voids or pipelines in the oil fields.

We could work with this, tony.

-So that's the rig, huh? -Yeah.

-Where y'all get one of those, like home depot or something? -[chuckles]

[duane] based on where eric thinks the un-mapped fault it,

we picked up three target zones to check out.

Three spots we like the most and possibly

offer alternate entrances to the cave system.

And the intel we get from the gpr here

will help us narrow it all the way down to the most promising one.

-You all set? Right, let's collect data. -Yeah.

[duane] what kind of data is it collecting?

This antenna is shooting radar waves down in pulses.

When those pulses bounce off something, let's say it's metallic,

it's gonna shoot those radar waves back up to the antenna.

For a void, it's gonna bounce out and disperse.

Both of those are gonna be a high or low amplitude

that I'm gonna see in the data.

Essentially, I can then take all of those data slices

and generate a 3-d image.

Once I've got it in that 3-d image on my computer,

I can see clear whatever we're looking for underground.

It's kinda fun, isn't it?

-It's pretty slick, isn't it? -Yeah, it is. Good deal.

-It's like calibrated. -[device whining]

drag it back over here, tony.

I don't see why the antenna would react this strongly.

There's something highly reflective right there.

Something blocking the signal from the top.

-Something buried? -Yeah, something buried.

But it's kinda coming through the surface as well.

Something highly reflective over in that corner.

I've never seen that before. I've never seen data that looks like that before.

It disappear? What'd it do?

The data just like really blew out.

There was something unusual interrupting the radar waves

that I would expect to see maybe in a city,

where I was around some sort of, like, an electrical substation

or there was a lot of interference going on,

but way out here in the middle of nowhere,

I wouldn't expect to see anything interfering.

Something highly reflective.

Not a sandstone bedrock that you see right here.

I'd like to look at the data and see what that looks like.

But right now, I don't know why it would do that.

Drag it back over here, tony.

[detector beeping]

something highly reflective over in that corner.

Not a sandstone bedrock that you see right here.

I'd like to look at the data and see what that looks like.

I don't know why it would do that.

Side of the pit.

-Yeah, yeah. -Hey, tony.

-Hey, guys. -How you doing? Got some data there?

Yeah.

This is the data here and this are in particular,

it's really high amplitude reflections.

It doesn't continue across the whole pit

but it does continue on about 10 or 12 feet there.

The reflection on that doesn't look like a void to me

and it doesn't look like moisture.

It looks like there's a steel plate

getting in the way of the signal there.

Whatever that is goes on for four feet.

Interesting. Very interesting.

I don't really have a way to explain that

unless there is something buried under there.

There's certainly something that looked different.

To me, this is very good information. Very good.

As soon as he said there's a metal plate about four foot under the ground,

I thought, "hell, maybe it's gold."

we might be right on top of it.

Maybe what's hidden here is a big, wooden box full of gold.

So I'm gonna bring the track ho up here and get it to the surface.

You're down about five feet. Coming right up against the dead rock.

No plates or anything that that ground penetrating radar was kicking out.

Yeah, copy that. I haven't seen anything, any metal objects.

Haven't seen anything strange.

Hey, let eric run his detector over that.

Ten-four.

That's doing it, that one spot.

Anything?

Just, you know, very faint little background noise, nothing...

-Yeah. -By now I've seen some weird things out here.

But I really don't get how we can see something

that shows up like a chunk of metal on the gpr

but when we dig, there's nothing there.

I was hoping this thing would just light up.

I just can't wrap my head around that.

-I think we can backfill now if you're satisfied. -Copy that.

Charlie, is that our drone up there by that tree up there by the door?

Is that our camera guy's drone?

Let me check with him quick.

I don't think they have anything up but let me find out.

If it's not theirs, somebody's damn sure watching us.

-Is that one of your drones up there? -They're watching.

I'll finish filling this hole up.

They're saying negative on theirs, they do not have a drone.

Somebody thinks they need to be watching this project while we're trying to do it.

Anybody that is that interested

that means we're doing something right.

Oh, they're kind of hiding out now, ain't it?

[producer] he's bailing out. Here, here, set it down.

I'm gonna launch it right now. Just take your hands off it.

Hold on. There's something wrong with the controller.

I'm losing it. I'm losing it...

I can't... The controller's all [bleep].

Duane! Somebody's on your property!

Ridin' around on a four-wheeler.

I don't know how far those drones go,

or where the communication to that drone is.

But we're used to people nosing around out here all the time.

It doesn't slow us down.

But it leads to people trespassing.

And they do, they most certainly do.

Is that gold around your neck there?

Maybe you'll find some of that spanish gold.

Them gold mines up in here.

There's no mine.

-There's no mining shafts? -No.

-What about over by that bus? -No.

What is it I can do for you? 'cause we're busy working right now.

I have a grazing permit, you know,

but there's no cross fence for me to isolate them.

-Wide open? -Wide open, the whole thing.

Four pair never come outta here last year.

They fell down a shaft or something.

Eight head of cattle never come out.

Can I see what the cows are coming up against?

I don't know where they are.

Here's the deal. I can assure you there's no shafts

to be talking about like that.

Do you want me to talk to the blm ranger?

-I don't know what to do. -Well, you're more than welcome to talk to him

but this is private property. You know, what's he gonna do for you?

He said he lost some cows in a hole.

The thing is, all these ranches around here,

they're sneaking on the property to see what's going on.

[producer] do you think the cattle thing might've just been an excuse?

In texas, in you're down wind and something smells like a skunk,

and looks like one it's a [bleep] skunk.

What's all these guys doing here?

We gonna be on tv or what?

[duane] I don't have a clue about any of that.

[camera clicking]

you know you're on private property.

Where's the line? Right there? I can stand right there? Okay.

-So, you need to erase those pictures. -Erase them?

But you haven't told me what these guys are doing.

Please let us get along. But erase them.

I'll get off your property.

Can you erase those pictures?

We don't play those games. I don't play those games.

It's very important for us to protect this project.

I mean, we don't want anybody to get hurt,

we don't want equipment to get messed up.

They wouldn't like it if I drove into their house and parked in their garage.

I put game cameras up to try to catch whatever predators

were killing those deer.

But now, we've got trespassers on the property.

So I've gotta rethink the positioning of the cameras and possibly,

adding other cameras in different locations.

It will be miles to come in from the eastern side,

so the access point is gonna be right here.

You might even call it a choke point, I guess.

They're fascinated about this property out here.

We probably have a lot of comparisons to the skinwalker ranch over there

'cause we're so close to them.

The type of people that are gonna be coming through here

especially at night, are gonna be up to no good.

There's been too many decades of strange occurrences, things happening,

investigations on-going constantly.

So there's a lot of folklore to it.

It's gonna bring some people out here.

You know, the curious people.

But you just can't have people just walking around.

Got a good digital image at night.

I really like that.

[producer] uh, what do we do?

Just gotta be vigilant.

We are the prey out here at night.

We're not the hunter, we're the prey.

Look, I'm from texas and I'm no [bleep].

But this land right here is like something I've never seen.

Electronics go crazy.

-[detector beeping] -I've never seen that before.

[duane] strange things happen to equipment.

-Turn it off! -We've had issues with aerial drones.

I know that this sounds crazier than the cat got into the whiskey,

but this whole deal's true.

There's an energy here that's just different.

And I can prove it.

Even though you might not see it, it's always here. Always.

It drains batteries, it does all kinds of [bleep].

Yeah. Well, the biggest deal is it made metal out of dirt.

This metal right here.

I noticed you looked like, "he's a dumbass."

[all laughing]

regardless, it made metal out of dirt.

We've had scientists come in with all these dadgum detectors

and the whole nine yards setup,

their million-dollar worth of equipment.

And they'll test the dirt there,

we'll heat it up in that energy zone,

it makes metal.

They look at it, they load all their stuff up and leave.

Because it's against the theory of how it all works.

If I told eric everything that we know about on this project

and what has happened here right at the front,

I think he would've packed his [bleep] up and left.

But he's a big boy, I think he can handle it.

I wanna see this.

-Can we do that tonight? -Well, let's go.

-Two ounces or two grams? -Two grams.

You can walk in there and it'll give your whole body a buzz.

Something's kicking out a lot of energy.

It's hard to believe or hard to explain what goes on here,

and whoever has not experienced it just don't believe it.

We call it the energy zone.

A few years ago, I had a crucible and it was dirty inside,

so I just took it and hit it on the truck.

And lo and behold, a piece of metal fell out.

What we found out is you can just get regular dirt,

it doesn't matter where it's from.

As long as it's in that energy zone there,

you cook that dirt

and you'll pour out the prettiest metal you've ever seen.

Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just saying that's what's happened.

I watched the whole process from collecting the sample...

That should be good.

...To sieving it...

There you go.

...To putting it in the crucible and heating it up.

I watched every step along the way.

I would expect to see maybe a glass bead come out

because the sample itself is like a dioxide.

It's sand.

If there's a metal nugget that comes out of that

I'm gonna have to rethink everything.

All right, we're ready to pour this bad boy.

That's one hot son of a budge.

Makes a v just like this.

-That's how the hillbillies do it. -[chuckles]

I've read all kinds of books about alchemy,

and that's what comes to mind when this process occurs.

In the middle ages, some people thought that

you could change matter into something else.

They actually thought that they're missing an ingredient

and that's why it never worked.

But what if they were just missing the energy field?

That was the missing ingredient.

There you go.

[chuckles]

question is... I just don't know...

I shouldn't say that. I'm not...

[chuckles] it's crazy.

You know, it just, um...

-Very [bleep] weird. -[all laughing]

I don't see how that can happen.

So, what I'm seeing is a bluish color.

I can't say that they're flakes but it's reflecting.

This morning, we're looking at the sample

that was processed in this "energy zone".

So the next step I'd like to do is do few tests on it.

This is a real sophisticated piece of equipment.

Just put them in there and then crush out more.

I'm thinking, how can I either disprove or prove

this energy field's melting metal?

Oh, this is gonna be good.

I still doubt the process. I have to because I'm a scientist.

But there's a question mark in my mind.

-I think that's a good representative sample. -Okay.

Based on the material that we smelted,

what I was expecting to see was basically glass.

But that wasn't the case.

-Ooh. -[wind blowing]

wind always puts me on edge.

So what I'm seeing here

is like, individual particles of metal.

That is weird.

I'd like to retain this sample.

Because this is pretty amazing.

Having a sample that doesn't show any metal

and yet you have to resmelt it,

it's showing metal.

It's very strange.

This is all, you know,

all stuff that I'm trying to process.

-Sure, sure. -It's completely new for me.

-Let's get the gun and shoot it. -Okay.

The xrf that uses x-ray. Each element reflects the x-ray.

And then it reads out what it is on there.

So, this xrf technology will tell us exactly what the metal

that seems to have magically appeared is actually made of.

[beeps]

oh, that's weird.

That is very interesting.

Got some anomalies here.

I've gotta show this to duane.

What do people know about this property and the surrounding area?

A lot of people just laugh it off.

Duane told me he was finding these energy fields.

Well, if that's the case, duane, let's talk,

show me some pictures, show me stuff.

So when I get up here and actually seen what he was doing,

starting to melt this metal,

no, it's sand, into this special kind of metal,

that convinced me that this may not be

a joke.

Duane is a very serious guy and he don't play around.

That is very interesting.

I've gotta show this to duane.

When I first got here the guys were interested

in looking for naturally-occurring precious metal.

Then we discovered there might be significant treasure

hidden on the property.

And then, they go to making metals out of sand.

There's an anomaly here.

And this alchemy business could be worth more

than the natural gold in the ground.

It's weird.

Makes for an interesting project, that's for sure.

Duane, we got some results back from the smelting project.

It is very significant, I'll just tell you that.

So, we took the sample that we melted, right,

and for some reason,

after you melted it, silver showed up.

And I can't explain that.

So I don't really believe in alchemy because I'm a scientist.

I'm not calling this alchemy.

But who knows, maybe there's something here.

And so I came up with a strategy

to validate those results.

It involves 12 different locations, random sampling,

sending them to a lab, analyzing them by mass...

[voice fading out]

an ounce of gold is 1,800 bucks.

Silver's $20.

It's not that I'm opposed to making money be smelting metal in the energy zone.

Those dollars could help us to move forward in the real search.

But silver, $24 an ounce

just ain't worth the time and the manpower it takes to do it.

So, for now, our main objective is to get into the caverns.

Well, I'll stick to what I do, and the more samples we get,

we'll have more values that we can plot on your map

-and we'll... -Sorry to interrupt. I've been going through the

camp, looking up some stuff.

You ain't gonna believe this.

That's down by mosby creek.

-Right where chad's camping? -Right where chad's camping.

Look at this.

[groans]

[man groaning]

he's going into a trance.

This is a skinwalker.

[man groaning]

you're not gonna believe this.

[man groaning]

that's by your camp.

I gotta call my wife.

My whole family's out there.

[line disconnects]

-I gotta go. -Yeah.

Where is he at?

-Hey! -[loud whirring]

we've been throwing everything we've got to try to get into the cavern.

We're kind of down to the last couple of things in our tool kit.

Good?

Wow, that's significant.

We have to go with what mother nature gives us.

Sometimes, you can work through it

and sometimes you just have to stop.

[groans]

winter's coming in, and we're running out of time.

It won't be long before it shuts us down.

So, we got one more drill, one last shot. We better do it now.

Bring it in!

We better do it fast.

Pressure's on.

It seems like every time we make some progress...

Whoa, whoa, whoa. [bleep]

it's stuck.

...Something else steps up and starts fighting us.

What is this?

I think we got a meteorite.

This could be the element that's causing everything to go wrong.

It can be worth millions. Tens of millions, hundreds of millions.

What?

There you go.

It's gonna have to be a high concentration

before we wanna get into a mining operation.

Is it the final?

Holy...