NARRATOR: Rick Lagina and Doug Crowell join Rick's brother
Marty, Craig Tester, and other members
of the team in the War Room.
They have gathered here a scientific report that has just
come in concerning the strange wood sample recovered
two weeks ago during their core drilling operations
in the Money Pit area.
Yeah, guys, as you'll recall in some of our test drilling,
specifically FG-12, we found some very peculiar wood.
And the reason it was peculiar is
because it was at the end of the tunnel that you guys found,
or we think from shaft 2.
The base of that tunnel was consistently at 103 feet,
I believe. Is that right?
Mm-hmm.
And this wood was deeper.
It didn't look right.
It certainly had none of the characteristics
of the head shaft.
So, I mean, it was too dark, looked very old.
So we decided to get it carbon-14 dated,
and Craig here has the results.
Definitely got good results.
It's from 1626 to 1680.
Wow
I like that.
Mm-hmm.
NARRATOR: Wood from the Money Pit area dated
to more than a century before the discovery
of the fabled treasure shaft?
Have Rick, Marty, and the team finally pinpointed the location
where the Oak Island treasure vault lies buried deep below?
RICK LAGINA: It's very encouraging
that the highly likely date of this wood
is quite old, in the 1600s somewhere.
We've got lots of data that says that something substantial
happened here maybe between 1650 and 17-something,
and that-- all that's new.
I was not a believer in that at all.
I wonder what was happening in this area
late 1600s, early 1700s.
Yeah, that's the question.
Can I see it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Huh.
Well, you know what?
1680, that's Dr. Spooner's big date.
Yeah.
1680 he said, with some degree of certainty,
that something went on in the eye of the swamp.
[music playing]
There's the sediment right there.
NARRATOR: Earlier this year, after extracting core samples
from the swamp, Dr. Ian Spooner presented
Rick, Marty, and the team with some astonishing data.
This is quite a provocative site.
NARRATOR: He determined that not only was the swamp potentially
created over 800 years ago, but that significant human activity
took place in the so-called "eye of the swamp"
sometime in the late 17th century.
I'm very confident we're looking at 1680 to 1700
that that disturbance took place.
Really interesting.
That's his date, 1680.
Dr. Spooner said that something of an industrial scale
went on here.
Those dates are bloody fantastic.
RICK LAGINA: Yeah, those are good.
This certainly begs for further investigation.
I mean, those are outlier dates.
There's no question about it.
Well, gotta follow the clues to see where they lead.
Yep.
This is the year.