Also, the only official source of books is Collected Works Bookstore, but many resellers on eBay and Amazon purchase batches of books and mark them up substantially. The number of TTOTC books sold is somewhat noisy, but that may explained in that the book is beyond it’s tenth printing and is sometimes unavailable while new copies are being produced. Considering searchers often go out in pairs or larger parties and some people go out without the book, it sounds about right. That works out to 3.14 searchers looking for the pie for every book sold.
He said he put particular care into the 65,000 data point, so it may well be that the lower bound envelope is the best estimate of the number of people who have searched. It’s not clear to me if all of these data points are his estimates of BOTG searches or armchair searches. There may well be people searching who are not revealed by any of the metrics above. The Fenn estimated number of people who have searched is the noisiest correlation, but is based on estimates by Forrest Fenn and cannot be known exactly, since nobody is required to disclose whether they have searched for the treasure or not, and the poem is published all over the internet. Google data is continuous, so we can estimate the other sparse metrics using these correlations.
Sources of data are listed at the bottom of this post.Ĭorrelating the various metrics to Google search interest (I have converted search interest to cumulative interest to match the other metrics), we get good to excellent linear correlations: Correlation of cumulative Google “Fenn Treasure” search interest to other publicly available search interest metrics. First, we collect all the publicly available metrics we can: Publicly available metrics for the Fenn Treasure hunt: Google Search interest, cumulative emails received by Forrest Fenn, number of reported The Thrill of the Chase (TTOTC) books sold, searcher estimate numbers from Forrest Fenn, and web hit stats from a popular Fenn Treasure Hunt site. In 2018, I discovered a very intimate relationship between a new branch of mathematics called Bayesian Occam’s Razor and my forensic argument and have continued to develop it.Īs far as I know, mathematics has not been applied to the Fenn Treasure Hunt, but it’s instructive to apply some mathematical analysis to see how it works, if there is a chance it will be found anytime soon, and glean lessons that can be applied to the hunt for MH370. I have argued since two weeks after disappearance that forensics should be applied to MH370 to no avail. The MH370 hunt has been mathematically-based with almost no regard to forensics. The Fenn Treasure is located in a 10-inch square by 5-inch high bronze chest that may or may not be buried, and MH370 is likely located in a debris field on the floor of the South Indian Ocean near the seventh arc.įenn Treasure Hunters arguably apply a forensic based approach to the hunt, decoding the clues left by Forest Fenn in the poem and hints he left in his memoir called The Thrill of the Chase or TTOTC from 2010 where he first disclosed he had hidden the treasure chest. From 2014 to 2017, the ATSB directed some 120,000 square kilometers of subsurface scanning, and Ocean Infinity doubled that in 2018. My estimate of search area for the Fenn Treasure is about 180,000 square kilometers. MH370 searches have generally involved mathematically driven hypotheses based on satellite and debris drift data which drives subsequent underwater search.
Searchers for the Fenn treasure formulate hypotheses at home, then go “boots on the ground (BOTG)” with hopes to find the treasure. The Fenn Treasure was intentionally hidden and most experts believe MH370 was intentionally hidden, perhaps even by one man who went down with MH370. I believe the Fenn Treasure Hunt has important lessons to teach the currently baffled MH370 investigators who have spent well over $185M ( $160M under ATSB-directed search and an estimated $25M for Ocean Infinity) trying to locate MH370 with no success despite a potential finder’s fee prize of $70M instituted in 2018 (but not currently active). There are remarkable similarities and contrasts between the Fenn Treasure Hunt (or “Chase” as it is sometimes called) and the hunt for MH370. It’s yours if you solve a 24-line poem containing nine clues and go retrieve it. In 2009 or 2010, a 79 or 80 year old man named Forrest Fenn hid some 20+ pounds of gold and gems worth between $500K and $3M+ (depending on which estimate you believe) somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.