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howdy folks I'm Hank Sheffer and welcome to another true life story right
here with Larry Hedrick on Mysteries of the Superstition Mountains
years ago when I had my Calvary outfit I owned a couple of army mules these were big
mules these weren't burros these these things stood fifteen hands high and one
night Tom called me and he says hey Larry he says how would you like to go
out in the mountains and bring out some gold bars I thought he was kidding but I
hey it's something to do you know and I he says I'll get back to you I'm talking
to somebody about this now and probably a week or so went by and I hadn't heard
anything from him but up at the Museum at Goldfield this would have been in
early 90s Chuck Kenworthy came walking through the door to museum and he had a
set of Spanish armor that he claimed he found in the superstitions and he was
showing it to me and I looked at it and and I held it in my hands and there was
rust on it you know and I took my hand and wiped on it and the rust come off I
mean you know this this isn't patina from an old Spanish stuff I figure that
he went out and had a set made at the Renaissance deal just like I did for our
exhibit only I put mine and muriatic acid and I really made it look old and
his was just dipped in a bucket of water and he could wipe the rust off and I
don't know what he was trying to do to fool me here or whether he was using it
to fool other people about what he'd found but a day or two later Tom calls
me again and he says he's still willing to go out and bring some gold bars out
of the mountains sure you know I still thought it was a lark but I just
suddenly realized you know Chuck Kenworthy was a deep-sea treasure hunter
and he had had some success he partners with John Wayne at one time and
had found sunken ships I don't know if he had got into a lot of money with the
treasures he found because he was really in the real estate business out in
California but he come out here every year in the wintertime and I run across
him several winters in a row and he actually with Tom he actually got a
helicopter and they flew the superstitions with a magnetometer and
they hit a couple of really hot spots out there in the superstitions and one
of them was Peters Mesa which is a real well-known Dutch hunter area and also the
federal government had run mercury vapor tests and hit some hot spots in the in
superstitions and in some of the discussions I overheard when Kenworthy
was talking to Tom and others he had explained you know when you find a
treasure off the coast of lets say Florida for example the state's gonna
want to take 75% of your treasure or more you know and but if you find it in
the superstitions they only want 50% so if you know you find something as
superstitions you're gonna save 25% automatically and it didn't take long to
put two and two together that this guy had found something that he was gonna
lose 75% on but he was going to find it here and have us drag it out of there
and I think Tom got cold feet when it turned out to be a little more true than
we thought it was because we didn't follow up and do anything about it and
yet no Gold bars everywhere recorded coming out of the superstitions but
that's just another mystery
[laughter]
thank you for watching this episode of Mysteries
of the Superstition Mountains
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