Adventurous treasure hunters are going for gold, trekking through the Northeast in search of a golden statue worth a fortune.
The treasure hunt is dubbed “Project Skydrop” and aims to lead searchers to a golden statue hidden in the woods.
Once someone finds the statue, they could immediately be $25,000 richer based on the worth of the statue itself. The statue also is also engraved with a code to unlock a Bitcoin wallet and the possibility of a life-changing fortune.
“Every morning, I get up and check, ‘Oh my gosh, the treasure’s still there. It hasn’t been taken yet,’” said project co-creator Jason Rohrer “And then finally one day we’re going to get up and look and it will be gone.”
The statue is somewhere on public forest land within a 500-mile radius covering parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and Connecticut.
For a $20 entry fee, treasure hunters receive aerial photo clues to the statue’s location. Each day, the circle showing where the statue might be will get smaller, shrinking continually until the circle spans just one foot.
Roughly 2,000 people are currently searching for the treasure.
“Over the course of the three week hunt, they’re gonna get 21 of those clues,” Rohrer said. “The final clues that come toward the end on the last days are showing a huge amount of landscape around the treasure which will make it solvable, essentially.”
Rohrer and fellow co-creator Tom Bailey said some people have been using drones and other technology to refine their search.
Ultimately, though, they said winning will require critical puzzle-solving skills.
“I think in the end, it’s just gonna take a keen eye to look at these aerial photographs,” Rohrer said.”…Figuring out where that puzzle piece fits on the surface of the Earth is gonna be the real key to success here.”
Half of the money from each entry fee in Project Skydrop goes to an additional cash bounty that will grow as more people join the hunt.
As of Wednesday, the bounty had surpassed $25,000.
Learn more through the Project Skydrop website.
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