“The teacher was horrified,” recalls Marc Howard, a Santa Fe jeweler who got to know Fenn in the 1990s.įenn took a roguish approach to life and to facts. At his gallery off Canyon Road, according to his memoir, he would invite visiting schoolkids to wash their hands and touch whatever they liked, including, on one occasion, Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington. In his Santa Fe home, he surrounded himself with relics, including what he said was Sitting Bull’s peace pipe and a flask of brandy that had belonged to Jackie Kennedy. His gallery and the garden around it, which was patrolled by Fenn’s pet alligators, Beowulf and Elvis, became a popular stop on Santa Fe art tours.įenn’s bent for self-promotion and his populist attitude toward art chafed the town’s purists. Fenn sold to people like Ralph Lauren, Suzanne Somers, and Michael Douglas. After a career as an Air Force pilot - in Vietnam, he said, he flew 328 combat missions and was shot down twice - he moved to Santa Fe and prospered as an art dealer trading in Native American artifacts and cowboy paintings. Photo: Courtesy of Justin Poseyīy the time the preteen Posey was getting interested in Victorio Peak, Fenn, then in his early 60s, was already a notorious figure in New Mexico. Photo: MWP//MWP Justin Posey with his dog, Tucker. “I figured, How many times in a person’s lifetime are you going to be in a position to hunt for something you’re reasonably sure is actually there,” he says, “ and the person who hid it is still alive?”įrom left: Forrest Fenn.
#FORREST FENN TREASURE FOUND 2020 SOFTWARE#
His childhood interest in puzzles and illusions had evolved into a fascination with ciphers and algorithms he was now a computer scientist working on complex software problems for a tech giant. The poem’s puzzle could theoretically be solved by anyone.īy then, Posey was living in Redmond, Washington. He was still alive and willing to engage with searchers. Fenn, who estimated the treasure to be worth more than $1 million, said he hid it to motivate people to put down their digital devices and get out into nature. The key to finding the treasure lay in a 24-line poem in a self-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase, by Forrest Fenn, the wealthy 82-year-old eccentric who had hidden it.
Hidden in “the mountains north of Santa Fe,” the treasure sounded almost fantastical - diamonds, rubies, and sapphires gold coins, gold nuggets, a 17th-century Spanish ring. Years later, in 2012, when Posey was 29, his wife, Jennie, emailed him a Newsweek article about a different treasure. It consumed the majority of my childhood.” “I felt I could do this, but the physical barriers made it all the worse. “That was the agonizing part,” he recalls. He joined tours of the missile range, cooking up schemes to peel off from the group and sneak away to the treasure site. He learned everything he could about it, even attending a summit held by descendants of Noss. “This concept that there could be, around the corner, a vast fortune with an unimaginable historical context was just enthralling,” Posey says. government seized the whole area, adding it to the White Sands Missile Range. Before Noss was able to recover most of the gold he had seen, the shaft leading to it caved in after World War II, the U.S. When Posey was 11, he became obsessed with the Victorio Peak treasure, a hoard of perhaps thousands of gold bars supposedly found by a hunter named Milton Noss in a hilltop cavern in New Mexico in 1937. He had a book about the Spanish conquistadores and their long-buried treasure, and with his younger brothers, he recalls, he would “forge out on our own across the desert outside of Tucson in search of hidden loot.” He tore apart his mother’s new computer (and put it back together in the face of her fury) and built himself one from off-the-shelf parts.
He collected books of magic and magicians’ biographies and devoted himself to demystifying illusions like levitation, sleight of hand, and escapes, which he performed in his sixth-grade talent show. Posey’s parents were both railroad engineers, and during summers at the family’s cabin in Montana, where his grandfather was a fish-and-game warden, his favorite thing to do was get out in the hills with a metal detector. “Of course, they wouldn’t let me bring it to school.” “I got pretty good with that thing,” he says. “He wouldn’t have any part of it,” his mother, Lorri, remembers. When other kids bullied him, his mother gently suggested he dress more normally. At age 9, he started wearing the archaeologist-adventurer’s trademark khaki pants, Stetson, and leather jacket and carrying a bullwhip nearly every day.
Growing up in Arizona in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones.
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