'The Curse Of Oak Island' Season 8 Episode 2: Why did no one follow up on the tunnels leading to Money Pit?
You would think that discovering secret underground tunnels on an island that everyone believes has some treasure could be knowledge worth following up. In Season 8, we had some surprising revelations in 'The Curse Of Oak Island'. In the previous episode, Oak Island researcher Doug Crowell discussed two historic Barringer surveys previously carried out by two treasure-hunters on the island, Fred Nolan and Dan Blankenship, which were never followed up.
This is despite the fact that the two surveys indicated underground tunnels, including one that leads to the famed Money Pit. One survey also indicated that there are four possible targets of buried non-ferrous metals, which as the team’s metal-detecting expert Gary Drayton points out, could just be gold.
In the latest episode, apart from other excavations on the island, the Fellowship try making sense of this revelation as they believe that there are tunnels from the swamp, Smith's Cove and LOT that could lead to the Money Pit.
The question is why wasn't this followed up before? It has been 30 years since these revelations, and valuable time, not to mention money has gone into scouring the island thoroughly. In the previous episode, the team *almost* got their hands on what they believe to be gold. Diver Tyler Newton went 170 feet underground and found a "gold shiny" object, that slipped through his fingers and fell further into the murky Oak Island depths.
This could have been the key to the legendary treasure that was said to have been buried on the island centuries before and might just be a historical breakthrough. It seems as if the Oak island team is onto something and that they could have just found their way to the tunnels. Yet, that would require more expensive equipment and tools.
In the latest episode, there seems to be evidence of Chinese activity on the island as well as Gary Drayton discovers a coin that later is speculated to be Chinese. The island has many mysteries and secrets and it looks like it will take another couple of centuries for anyone to make sense of it.
'The Curse Of Oak Island' airs on History Channel at 9 pm on Tuesdays.
