Witnesses to FBI hunt for Civil War gold describe heavily loaded armored truck, signs of a night dig

PENFIELD, Pa. (AP) — New eyewitness accounts are raising questions about the FBI’s secretive 2018 dig for a legendary cache of Civil War-era gold. Two men who were near the excavation site in rural Pennsylvania have told The Associated Press they heard loud noises early in the morning. Later, they say they saw a convoy with an armored truck that appeared heavily weighed down. A treasure hunter who led FBI agents to the site accuses the agency of conducting a secretive overnight dig and spiriting away hundreds of millions of dollars in gold. The FBI denies it worked overnight and says its excavation didn’t produce any gold. The treasure hunter is currently suing the FBI over access to records about the dig.

PENFIELD, Pa. (AP) — In the heart of Pennsylvania elk country, Eric McCarthy and his client, Don Reichel, got up before sunrise to scour the forest floor for so-called “brown gold” — a rack of freshly shed antlers to add to Reichel’s collection back home.

One hill over, a team of FBI agents was also hunting for gold. The metallic yellow kind.

The FBI’s highly unusual search for buried Civil War-era treasure more than five years ago set in motion a dispute over what, if anything, the agency unearthed and an ongoing legal battle over key records. There’s so much intrigue that even a federal judge felt compelled to note in a ruling last week: “The FBI may have found the gold — or maybe not.”

Now, two witnesses have come forward to share with The Associated Press what they heard and saw in the woods that late-winter morning, raising questions about the FBI’s timeline and adding plot twists to a saga that blends elements of legend, fact and science – and a heavy dose of government secrecy.

The FBI insists nothing came of the March 2018 excavation in Dents Run, a remote wooded valley about 110 miles (177 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh. But a treasure hunter who led FBI agents to the hillside where an 1863 gold shipment might have been buried is challenging the government’s denials. How could the dig have come up empty, he asks, when the FBI’s own scans showed the likelihood of a buried metal mass equaling hundreds of millions of dollars in gold?

McCarthy, a 45-year-old elk guide, had never met treasure hunter Dennis Parada. But he watched from afar as Parada took the FBI to court and told his story in the media. McCarthy recently decided to share his own story because he thought Parada, who spent years looking for the gold before approaching the FBI with his findings, has been treated unfairly.

“I just felt like I needed to say what I saw, you know?” McCarthy explained. “I have no ties to anybody here. It’s just I felt like they were wronged.”

In an interview at a remote hunting camp about 25 miles (40 km) from Dents Run, McCarthy recalls hearing the unexpected clang of heavy equipment as he worked his way up the mountain in near-darkness, a dusting of snow on the ground from a recent squall.

Later that day, while breaking for lunch, McCarthy and Reichel watched a trio of armored trucks rumble past. One of the vehicles rode low, as if it was carrying a full load.

“They took something out of Dents Run,” McCarthy insists now. “Something heavy.”

Reached by phone, Reichel, McCarthy’s 73-year-old shed hunting client, corroborated his account of hearing early-morning clatter and seeing a loaded truck on March 14, 2018. Their recollections echo earlier statements from residents who told the AP of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including armored trucks.

Parada, co-founder of the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers, views the eyewitness accounts as important because they could bolster one of his main contentions — that the FBI conducted a secret overnight dig for the gold and spirited it away. The FBI’s warrant to excavate the site limited work to 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. each day.

The agency strenuously denies it dug after hours, saying FBI police merely conducted nighttime ATV patrols to secure the site.

“No gold or other items of evidence were located or collected. The FBI continues to unequivocally reject any claims or speculation to the contrary,” said spokesperson Carrie Adamowski.

Indeed, there’s little historical evidence to substantiate apocryphal accounts that an Army detachment lost a gold shipment in the Pennsylvania wilderness, possibly after an ambush by Confederate sympathizers. But the legend has inspired generations of treasure hunters, Parada among them.

Scientific testing suggested he was on to something.

The FBI said in a 2018 court document that its own geophysical consultant identified an underground metallic mass weighing up to 9 tons, with the density of gold, at the site identified by Finders Keepers. A federal judge approved a search and seizure warrant, and the FBI set up camp in Dents Run, later describing it as a possible “cultural heritage site containing gold belonging to the United States government.” Parada hoped to earn a finder’s fee from the potential recovery.

On the second day of the FBI dig, McCarthy and Reichel awoke at 4 a.m. and were on a mountain that parallels the narrow Dents Run valley sometime between 5 and 5:30.

By then, the FBI’s presence had become the talk of the backcountry, with speculation running rampant that agents were hunting for gold. The FBI had shooed McCarthy away from a different part of Dents Run a day earlier. But he was determined to help his client find an elk shed. Splitting up to increase their odds, McCarthy dropped Reichel off then parked more than a mile away.

He said he could hear the distant hum of a running engine as soon as he got out of his truck. The noise grew louder as he made his way up the hill and he heard metal on stone, or metal on metal — what sounded to him like heavy equipment meeting earth.

McCarthy said he got to the top of the ridge and started back down the other side. That’s when he laid eyes on the FBI operation, on the opposite slope, about 400 yards (meters) away. He saw lights powered by a generator. A parked excavator. A smaller piece of equipment, perhaps a skid-steer or quad, moving up and down the hill. A brown-black gash in the earth surrounded by snow. People huddling under a makeshift canopy.

“It looked to me like they were wrapping up a dig,” he said.

Reichel, who was farther away from the dig site, said he heard machinery when he crested the ridge.

“I can hear some machines, or something, clanging and banging and roaring and all that stuff,” said Reichel, a retired manufacturing worker. He said he was too far away to be able to see anything.

An FBI timeline says the search team didn’t arrive at the dig site until 8 a.m. that morning, and an excavator operator arrived even later. That’s well after the time that McCarthy and Reichel say they detected signs of activity.

The pair reconvened for lunch several hours later. It was then, they said, that a convoy of unmarked black SUVs and armored trucks drove by them on Pennsylvania Route 555, heading out of Dents Run. McCarthy and Reichel said one of the three armored trucks seemed to be weighed down — more squat than the other two and lagging behind.

“Eric and I both made the comment that one must be loaded.” Reichel said.

“It was loaded to the gills,” said McCarthy, adding he’s driven overloaded dump trucks and “I know what it looks like.”

Not so, the FBI says. While “appropriate vehicles and equipment” were brought to Dents Run, armored trucks were not among them, according to Adamowski, the FBI spokesperson.

Warren Getler, a consultant who has worked closely with Finders Keepers, argued the eyewitness accounts add up to one thing – a clandestine night dig.

“And why would you do a night dig,” he said, “unless you wanted to remove the gold under cover of darkness?”

Getler, co-author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver, joined Parada in Dents Run for the 2018 dig. But the FBI mostly kept them confined to their cars at the bottom of the hill, showing them an empty hole when the work was done.

The agency subsequently stonewalled Parada’s Freedom of Information Act request for records on the dig, prompting him to file a lawsuit. In 2022, a judge forced the FBI to release a trove of photos and documents.

But the agency refuses to turn over its operational plan for the gold dig — which Parada and Getler believe might include information about an overnight excavation — and other records the government says are exempt from disclosure. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta told the FBI on Sept. 27 it needed to come up with a better justification for keeping the disputed records under wraps.

While Parada pursues the FBI in court, he hasn’t given up his search in the Dents Run area. He recently hired a New Jersey geophysical company that identified several underground anomalies near the site of the original FBI dig, one of which measures 25 feet (7.62 meters) by 8 feet (2.44 m).

Finders Keepers’ own equipment detected metal objects in the same location, perhaps 15 feet down, presumably in a tunnel or cave, said Parada, playing a video that shows a detector emitting a high-pitched squeal as it is swept across the ground.

He’s now seeking to partner with the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, which owns the land, on a new excavation in Dents Run. Parada, his lawyer and top officials from the conservation agency plan to meet later this month.

“It’s a part of our history that’s hidden away,” Parada said, “and I think it’s time that should be told.”

CLEARFIELD, Pa. (AP) — Under court order, the FBI has released a trove of photos, videos, maps and other documents involving its secretive search for Civil War-era gold. The FBI excavated a remote site in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, in 2018 after sophisticated testing suggested tons of gold might be buried there. The government says the dig came up empty, but a treasure hunter believes otherwise. Dennis Parada fought for the release of FBI records on the dig. He’s now gone to federal court to accuse the FBI of distorting key evidence and improperly withholding records. The FBI defends its handling of the records.

CLEARFIELD, Pa. (AP) — The court-ordered release of a trove of government photos, videos, maps and other documents involving the FBI’s secretive search for Civil War-era gold has a treasure hunter more convinced than ever of a coverup — and just as determined to prove it.

Dennis Parada waged a legal battle to force the FBI to turn over records of its excavation in Dents Run, Pennsylvania, where local lore says an 1863 shipment of Union gold disappeared on its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The FBI, which went to Dents Run after sophisticated testing suggested tons of gold might be buried there, has long insisted the dig came up empty.

Parada and his advisers, who have spent countless hours poring over the newly released government records, believe otherwise. They accuse the FBI of distorting key evidence and improperly withholding records in an apparent effort to conceal the recovery of a historic, extremely valuable gold cache. The FBI defends its handling of the materials.

Parada’s dispute with the FBI is playing out in federal court, where a judge overseeing the case must decide whether the FBI will have to release its operational plan for the gold dig and other records it wants to keep secret. The judge could also order the FBI to keep looking for additional materials to turn over to the treasure hunter.

“We feel we were double-crossed and lied to,” Parada said in an interview at his cramped, wood-paneled office, where huge drill bits and high-end metal detectors compete for space with rusty miners’ picks, Civil War-era cannon parts and other odds and ends he’s dug up over the years.

“The truth will come out,” said Parada, co-founder of the treasure-hunting outfit Finders Keepers. Solving the mystery is not his only goal — he had hoped to earn a finder’s fee from the potential recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold.

An FBI spokesperson declined to answer questions about the agency’s gold dig records or respond to the coverup allegations, citing the ongoing litigation. Last year, the FBI released a statement publicly acknowledging for the first time that it had been looking for gold in Dents Run. The statement said the FBI did not find any, adding the agency “continues to unequivocally reject any claims or speculation to the contrary.”

There is little evidence in the historical record to suggest that an Army detachment lost a gold shipment in the Pennsylvania wilderness — possibly the result of an ambush by Confederate sympathizers — but the legend has inspired generations of treasure hunters, Parada among them.

He and his son spent years looking for the fabled gold of Dents Run, eventually guiding the FBI to a remote woodland site 135 miles (220 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh where they say their instruments identified a large quantity of metal. The FBI brought in a geophysical consulting firm whose sensitive equipment detected a 7- to 9-ton mass suggestive of gold.

Armed with a warrant, a team of FBI agents came in March 2018 to dig up the hillside. An FBI videographer was on hand to document it, at one point interviewing a Philadelphia-based agent on the FBI’s art-crime team who explained why the FBI was in the woods of one of Pennsylvania’s most sparsely populated counties.

“We’ve identified through our investigation a site that we believe has U.S. property, which includes a significant sum of base metal which is valuable … particularly gold, maybe silver,” the agent said on the video, his face blurred by the FBI to protect his privacy.

Calling it a “155-year-old cold case,” he said the FBI had corroborated Parada’s information about the location of the reputed gold through “scientific testing.” He stressed the test results did not prove the presence of gold. Only a dig would help law enforcement “get to the bottom of this story once and for all,” the agent said.

Parada obtained the video and other FBI records through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, hoping they would help answer lingering questions about what took place at Dents Run five years ago. Parada was mostly kept away from the dig site while the FBI did its work.

He suspects the agency conducted a clandestine, overnight dig between the first and second days of the court-authorized excavation, found the gold, and spirited it away. Residents have previously told of hearing a backhoe and jackhammer overnight — when the dig was supposed to have been paused — and seeing a convoy of FBI vehicles, including large armored trucks. The FBI has denied it conducted an overnight dig.

Parada and a consultant, Warren Getler, have focused on a handful of FBI photos and an accompanying photo log that have them questioning the FBI’s official gold dig timeline. At issue is the presence or absence of snow in the images and the timing of a storm that briefly disrupted operations. For example, an FBI image that was supposed to have been taken about an hour after the squall does not show any snow on a large, moss-covered boulder at the dig site. That same boulder is snow-covered in a photo that FBI records indicate was taken the next morning — some 15 hours after the storm.

They accuse the FBI of altering the sequence of events to conceal an overnight excavation.

“We have compelling evidence a night dig took place, and that the FBI went to some large effort to cover up that night dig,” said Getler, co-author of “Rebel Gold,” a book exploring the possibility of buried Civil War-era caches of gold and silver.

There are other seeming anomalies in the records, according to Finders Keepers’ legal motion. Among them:

— The FBI initially turned over hundreds of photos, but rendered them in low-resolution, high-contrast black-and-white, making it impossible to tell the time of day they were taken or even, in some cases, what they show. The treasure hunters went back and requested several dozen of the photos in color, which the FBI provided.

— The agency did not provide any video of the second and final day of the dig. Nor did it produce any photos or video showing what the FBI’s own hand-drawn map described as a 30-foot-long, 12-foot-deep trench — which the treasure hunters claim could have only been dug overnight. Government lawyers acknowledged these gaps in the photo and video record but did not elaborate in a court filing last week.

— The consulting firm hired by the FBI to assess the possibility of gold produced a report on its findings, but the version given to the treasure hunters seems to be missing key pages.

— The FBI did not provide any of its agents’ travel and expense invoices, which could shed further light on the dig timeline.

The records released so far “cast doubt on the FBI’s claim to have found nothing and raise serious and troubling questions about the FBI’s conduct during the dig and in this litigation, where it has gone to great lengths to distort critical evidence,” Anne Weismann, a lawyer for Finders Keepers, wrote in a legal filing that seeks records, including the FBI’s operational plan, that she says were improperly withheld.

The Justice Department did not address the treasure hunters’ most explosive claims of a possible coverup in its latest legal filing. The government instead told a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that the FBI had satisfied its legal obligation to the treasure hunters to search for its records of the dig, and asked for the case to be closed.

The judge has yet to rule.

Parada said he will keep asking questions until he gets satisfactory answers.

“I will stick at this until the end, until I know everything that happened to that gold,” he said. “How much, where it went to, who has it now. I gotta know.”