The Autobiography No One Has Read

Forrest Fenn flew 328 combat missions in Vietnam in 348 days. He was shot down twice. He came home, opened an art gallery in Santa Fe, and sold paintings to Jackie Onassis and Gerald Ford, grossing six million dollars a year. He kept pet alligators named Elvis and Beowulf in the gallery.

Then he got cancer and decided to die beside a box of gold.

The plan was specific. He filled a twelfth-century Romanesque bronze chest with gold nuggets, pre-Columbian artifacts, gemstones, and loose rubies. He wrote a 20,000-word autobiography, printed in text so small it required a magnifying glass, rolled the pages tight, sealed them in an ancient olive jar with two of his own hairs, and dipped the jar in molten wax three times. He would carry the chest into the Rocky Mountains, lie down next to it, and wait. Whoever found the gold would find him.

Then he beat the cancer. He sat on the chest for twenty-two years.

In 2010, at eighty, he hid it anyway, without the dying part, and published a poem with nine clues. Roughly 350,000 people went looking. Five of them died. One does have to admire a man who planned his own archaeological discovery and then, somewhat inconveniently, survived it.

A former BuzzFeed writer found the chest in 2020 near Yellowstone. The jar sold at auction for $48,000. The buyer still hasn't opened it.