Is "Curse of Oak Island" totally fake or just partially fake?

[zeebo]

...They next bring in 3 women who are related to the teenage boys who first saw the lights that started all the treasure talk. They get a tour of the island. The sisters claim that 3 chests were found by their relatives and they produce a gold cross they claim has been dated back 500 years...

Wtf really?  I've never heard any stories like that surrounding Oak Isle.  More likely they picked up that gold (plated) cross from the pawn shop.

[zeebo]

... Ol' Dan calling "Crown time!".  ...

haha lol

[pate]

The real treasure of Oak Island is the ad revenue generated by viewers who keep coming back week after week to watch a well drilling rig, cockamamy theories from amateur "researchers", a half dozen guys traipsing around an island that's been intensely inspected for generations, and Ol' Dan calling "Crown time!".  Methinks the Lagina Bros. have found their treasure too...a TV show about digging holes that's going to three seasons.

Just wait for the Movie deal!

There was the 2003 hit Holes, but having seen that one I believe it is a parallel dimensional time eddy from an alternate brane where the treasure of Oak Island was uncovered in 2002 that resulted in a major motion-picture in our timeline.  Clearly, there is gold in the hole in at least one parallel dimension, and very probably in most timelines to include this one.  The main question about 'our' particular dimension is whether it is tangible real gold, or as you point out, the theoretical and chimerical advertising gold.

I am now curious to know if Ed Dames has been contacted to remote-view the island;  or if he has, on his own initiative, remote-viewed the island?  My conspiratorial mynd leads me to believe that he has done just this, and this is the reason for the show continuing.  There must be some behind the scenes wrangling between the Lagina brothers, Ed Dames and Art Bell over who gets how much of the gold.

I haven't seen many episodes past the first season, I intend to 'catch up' someday.  In the meantime I, too, enjoy the occasional updates here.  Thanks!

[Brody]

So on the "Drilling Down" special after the finale they bring back the sonar expert who mapped out 10x and he informs everyone that a "Montreal engineer" has robotic camera images from inside of 10x that clearly show a box made of wood, a locking mechanism and a curved top.

Rick, Marty and Dave B. all claim to have no knowledge of these images existing.

Huh.

[Juan Cena]

The real treasure of Oak Island is the ad revenue generated by viewers who keep coming back week after week to watch a well drilling rig, cockamamy theories from amateur "researchers", a half dozen guys traipsing around an island that's been intensely inspected for generations, and Ol' Dan calling "Crown time!".  Methinks the Lagina Bros. have found their treasure too...a TV show about digging holes that's going to three seasons.

You mean "Gold Rush?" 😄

[zeebo]

You mean "Gold Rush?" 😄

Or maybe "Jungle Gold" or "Legend of the Superstition Mountains" or "Treasure Quest: Snake Island".  Hey, I just realized these all sound like World of Warcraft expansion packs.

[scottydawg]

If you like this you'll love, "Billion Dollar Blowjob Wreck" that they run on Friday nights! Even when I try to watch it on my History Channel app on my cellphone a few days later it's a clusterfuck of commercials! It's gotten to the point I'd rather wait to watch it on Netflix or Hulu.
On Netflix "Pawn Stars" episodes are only 15 to 20 minutes long!

[the_peeve]

I am not sure about anyone else here, but I really need them to find something substantial underground in next season, rather than rely on people bringing stuff to them. Or I am going to turn it off.

Chatterton's analysis of 10x was excellent but extremely disappointing. But he explained it very well, even the depression in the soil where the supposed  body was seen in pictures. I gained a lot of respect for Chatterton for explaining how sunken soil can give an impression of a body. It softened the blow and did not make Blankenship look like a fool. I respect him for that.

I would love to hear Chatterton on MITD sometime, because I am sure he has many stories, and he is bloody crazy to do the stuff he does.

[Brody]

Dan's supposedly got pics of a disembodied hand floating past the 10x camera back in the 70s

[Centurion40]

Dan's supposedly got pics of a disembodied hand floating past the 10x camera back in the 70s

I've seen the video and the stills.  It was headline news over here, back in the day.  But you can't see shit.  It's just like in the show when they broadcast an image of nothing, then draw-in a box to illustrate where the box can be seen.  But it really can't be seen without great leaps of vivid imagination.

[Papa Lazarou]

I've seen the video and the stills.  It was headline news over here, back in the day.  But you can't see shit.  It's just like in the show when they broadcast an image of nothing, then draw-in a box to illustrate where the box can be seen.  But it really can't be seen without great leaps of vivid imagination.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

This 10x video thing reminds me of the TIGHAR group, which has been looking for Amelia Earhart on a tiny Pacific atoll for the past 20 years. A few years ago they sent a remotely operated vehicle down the edge of the atoll, but couldn't find anything. Luckily they were able to conjure up all sorts of shit from the still images later on. You know, to keep those sweet donations flowing in.



One of their investors took it too far though, imagined artifacts like Earhart's banjo and toilet paper rolls into the video, and sued TIGHAR for finding the plane wreckage and "covering it up".

http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/09/27/Amelia-Earhart-lawsuit-partially-dismissed/5371380305850/

[pate]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

This 10x video thing reminds me of the TIGHAR group, which has been looking for Amelia Earhart on a tiny Pacific atoll for the past 20 years. A few years ago they sent a remotely operated vehicle down the edge of the atoll, but couldn't find anything. Luckily they were able to conjure up all sorts of shit from the still images later on. You know, to keep those sweet donations flowing in.



One of their investors took it too far though, imagined artifacts like Earhart's banjo and toilet paper rolls into the video, and sued TIGHAR for finding the plane wreckage and "covering it up".

http://www.upi.com/blog/2013/09/27/Amelia-Earhart-lawsuit-partially-dismissed/5371380305850/

Your mentioning of the Amelia Earhart case reminded me of a story about someone finding a jar of some sort of cosmetic stuff on an island, I just Goggle'd it and found this:

http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/amelia-earhart-freckle-creme-jar-120530.htm

That may be the very article I recall reading a few years ago, it is a three-pager and some of the narrative from pages 2 & 3 seem to strike the old memory chord.  I assume this is the site where they are poking around in the coral reef for remains of the aircraft?  Don't know a thing about it, although the absence of bones is not mysterious if this was the final resting place for Amelia, apparently sea-life uses lots of calcium for their shells/bones and much like deer antlers (deer shed them every year and the rodents eat them for the calcium content, I think) sea life quickly destroys any bones laying around.

I thought it was a neat story at the time I read it however long ago, especially the bit about the freckle cream jar...

that's about all I have to say about that...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otm4RusESNU

[bsbishop]

I've been binge-ish watching this over the last few weeks via History's app.

Much like the OP (from 2014) I've heard of Oak Island and am intrigued by the mystery of it all. Treasure, tunnels, booby-traps, etc.. That's just awesome all by itself.

I heard about the show on History from a guest on Darkness Radio. I thought it sounded cool and figured I'd check it out.

Looking at their app on my Apple TV I saw three season. I knew one thing right away: Nothing was found in Seasons 1 or 2.. I also was 99% certain of one other thing: Nothing will ever be found as these types of shows are, essentially, the search for nothing.

I watched, anyway.

First thing: The repetitive commercials are torture. You can't skip through them. Sometimes you'll see the same commercial back to back and they eat up a lot of time. This is far worse than just recording it on a DVR.

Second thing: Like all shows on Discovery/History/etc., they spend more time telling us what happened or showing us repetitive graphics of what they plan to do, than just letting us see what's happening. I estimate that 1 hour of viewing amounts to 20+min of commercials, 20 mins of, "Back in Season 1..." (cut to footage you've already seen again and again and again) and the various CGI bits of showing a the drilling and the filling of the hole with water and animated divers making a the plunge into the 27" hole in 10X, with whatever leftover time (less than 20min of said hour) being the actual people doing the work.

The third thing is that they entertain everyone's theory on what's underneath Oak Island. All these pie in the sky assurances that the Knights Templar stashed the Ark of the Covenant there or it's Portuguese Gold or Aztec Gold or whatever. Each person that comes has a more ludicrous story than the person before.

The last thing is just how dumb all of it is. They'll drill a hole and then realize that they needed to drill a larger hold. They'll get an excavator and realize they can only go down so far and need a bigger excavator. They'll hire divers to go down 10X and realize, "Oh, we didn't clear out the bottom of the shaft!" They'll drain the swamp and find nothing.. and then drain it again..

For the amount of money they've spent they could have just built a small hotel with a great view. They could have gone exploring for oil or whatever.. Instead they spend money to find nothing.

I think I've given up on it at this point. Between the repetitive commercials, repetitive graphics/"last time.." crap, and them really not finding anything, it's just a waste of time. I'm sorry I started with it.

[zeebo]

An excellent summary bsbishop.  Another time-filler I'd add in is all of the (probaibly manufactured) human drama/conflict .. e.g. "He's always like this!" or "You can't give up now we have too much invested!", etc.  Somehow the camera is always around to catch these clashes.

[coaster]

It's on the "History" Channel. This is a channel that has brought us such gems as Four Fat Dudes and a Pawn Shop. Pawn Stars. That fake bs has been on since 2009. They have no interest in realism or history.
Oak Island is a very interesting story, but once again History has to put their diarrheal spin on it.

[bsbishop]

An excellent summary bsbishop.  Another time-filler I'd add in is all of the (probaibly manufactured) human drama/conflict .. e.g. "He's always like this!" or "You can't give up now we have too much invested!", etc.  Somehow the camera is always around to catch these clashes.

Yep, someone says something, the musical chord sounds, and there's the head turn of someone else and then the steely-eyed stare between two people, usually Marty and Rick. I swear they're cutting in the same footage of the steely eyed stare when there probably wasn't one.

Also, Rick appears to be the crazy treasure hunter. I don't think there's anything that would convince him that there's not treasure under the swamp or at the bottom of 10X. No matter what was not found, he'd just say something like, "it's hidden under the silt. We have to drain the ocean so we can send someone down deeper to dig and then we'll know for sure!"

It also was odd that they bought the CAT equipment. They really hadn't found anything but suddenly there they are, buying the CAT equipment. It felt more like they bought it because:
A) The show needed something
B) It would be a lot of fun to push dirt around.

The History Channel could have had a pretty good mini-series on Oak Island detailing the initial discovery and the work of each of the explorers/hunters over time. Each could have been an hour show giving you something along the lines of about 5 hours of documentary. Nope. That would have been interesting/educational and people would have wanted to watch it both now and in the future. Far better to create cheap, throw-away TV with repetitive nonsense.

Someone in the thread mentioned the Weather Channel. That channel is unwatchable now. I happened to catch about 5min of one show which was about paranormal investigators who claimed that UFOs set off tornados in Oklahoma. That's pretty much bottom of the barrel nonsense right there.

It's pretty rare when I see actual weather on TWC now. Mostly it's something akin to "Tornado Stories" or paranormal weather nonsense.

When my current deal with cable is up, which was a pretty good deal compared to where I lived before, I'll just go back to locals (OTA) and streaming.

It's so bizarre to watch an industry cut it's own throat with reality programming.

[ziznak]

did they actually make this yet?

[pate]

Heh.

Shrimp-Pawn should be next...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhfK98f5S00

[Brody]

did they actually make this yet?

They had that Cajun Pawn stars show already. 

[scottydawg]

If your into eternal but never finished handjobs by a crazy hooker that won't shut the fuck up, this show is for you!

[Brody]

If your into eternal but never finished handjobs by a crazy hooker that won't shut the fuck up, this show is for you!

Leave my mother out of this

[zeebo]

Is there a new season of this show yet?  Have they found anything worthwhile?  What is the most prominent treasure theory these days - Blackbeard the Pirate or the Knights Templar or what? 

[Brody]

Is there a new season of this show yet?  Have they found anything worthwhile?  What is the most prominent treasure theory these days - Blackbeard the Pirate or the Knights Templar or what?

As of a week ago they were still working due to the nice weather.     A trailer for the show's November debut is already released.

Rumor is a diver went down 10x again.

[Lilith]

Nonetheless, I will be watching season IV.

[zeebo]

As of a week ago they were still working due to the nice weather.     A trailer for the show's November debut is already released.

Rumor is a diver went down 10x again.

Thanks, it's been quite awhile since I actually watched an episode.  I might have to catch up on the latest.  Some of the tangential history that comes up is actually kind of interesting on it's own, even if none of it seems to help these guys. 

[onan]

We have finally discovered the treasure of Oak Island.

[Brody]

First episode was a great tease. Then this week's was a big dud.

The well they explored was already explored by "America Unearthed"

[Brody]

So on the "Drilling Down" special after the finale they bring back the sonar expert who mapped out 10x and he informs everyone that a "Montreal engineer" has robotic camera images from inside of 10x that clearly show a box made of wood, a locking mechanism and a curved top.

Rick, Marty and Dave B. all claim to have no knowledge of these images existing.

Huh.

And no follow up....

[zeebo]

And no follow up....

These guys are classic.  I love the titles of the episodes - each one sounds so compelling, like the big reveal is about to happen:  "The Breakthrough", "X Marks the Spot", and literally "The Big Reveal" haha.

[Brody]

Spoilers are claiming some significant artifacts were found but no treasure...