![]() ![]() “I regret them, but I don’t think about them very often. “I don’t think those were giant incidents,” Stuef says. He became embroiled in a few controversies early in his career, both at Wonkette, which he left after he made what Poynter describes as “a tasteless joke about one of Sarah Palin’s children having Down Syndrome,” and while freelancing for Buzzfeed, which had to apologize after an article Stuef wrote incorrectly painted a popular internet cartoonist as a hard-line Republican. He graduated in December 2009 and began a career as a writer, both in humor-he worked for the Onion-and in more traditional media. ![]() Over time, those teenage dreams of adventure receded, and Stuef went on to attend Georgetown University, where he served as editor in chief of the Georgetown Heckler, a campus humor magazine. Stuef also got caught up in a book by magician David Blaine, Mysterious Stranger, which combined autobiography with a treasure hunt and offered a $100,000 prize. The treasure hunt immediately brought him back to his youth, when he was obsessed with a 2002 TV series called Push, Nevada, which allowed viewers to try and solve a real-life mystery that carried a million-dollar prize. “I’ve probably thought about it for at least a couple hours a day, every day, since I learned about it,” Stuef says. Stuef first heard about Fenn’s chase on Twitter in early 2018, and couldn’t believe it had escaped his notice for eight whole years. So while he remained guarded about his solve and the location where he discovered the treasure, he now didn’t mind telling me who he really was.Īnd that’s when I learned that a 32-year-old Michigan native and medical student was the person who had finally solved Fenn’s poem. That litigation had advanced to a procedural stage during which the finder expected his name would likely come out in court. One of the lawsuits, filed immediately after Fenn announced the hunt was over, also targets the unknown finder as a defendant, claiming that he had stolen the plaintiff’s solve and used it to find the chest. Fenn had been targeted by lawsuits both before and after the chest was found, by hunters claiming that the treasure was rightfully theirs. Last week, he told me the situation had changed. So despite exchanging dozens of emails with the finder, and discussing the details of the chest and what locating it meant to him, I never pressed him about who he was, and he never volunteered. This past June, Fenn announced that the treasure had been found by a man from “back east” who wanted to remain anonymous-even, once we were in contact, to me. So many people had invested and sacrificed so much in pursuit of Fenn’s treasure that it was possible the finder would face threats, be they legal or physical, from people who resented them or wished them ill.Īnd that was exactly what was beginning to play out. Since the hunt began in 2010, many thousands of searchers had gone out in pursuit- at least five of them losing their lives in the process-and the chase became an international story. Fenn had suggested that the loot was secreted away at the place where he had envisioned lying down to die, back when he’d believed a 1988 cancer diagnosis was terminal. Not long after, he published a memoir called The Thrill of the Chase, which included a mysterious 24-line poem that, if solved, would lead searchers to the treasure. A decade ago, Fenn hid his treasure chest, containing gold and other valuables estimated to be worth at least a million dollars, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. ![]()
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