The Curse of Oak Island

Tonight on The Curse of Oak Island...

Guys, we're in the Eye of the Swamp now.

There's definitely metal here, and it's iron.

Any sign of wood or any sign of flat rock,

it might be a sign of some kind of waterway.

Here we go. Let's get after it.

If we're gonna hit a flood tunnel,

it's probably gonna be right here.

See the peaks for iron?

So these could be evidence

of a large-scale operation on Oak Island.

At least some of the answers are in that swamp.

The data says it might go back 300, 400 years.

There is an island in the North Atlantic

where people have been looking for an incredible treasure

for more than 200 years.

So far, they have found a stone slab

with strange symbols carved into it,

mysterious fragments of human bone,

and a lead cross whose origin may stretch back

to the days of the Knights Templar.

To date, six men have died trying to solve the mystery.

And, according to legend,

one more will have to die

before the treasure can be found.

After learning that the mysterious ship-shaped anomaly

that lies at the center of the Oak Island swamp

might, in fact, be a tunnel...

We very much look forward to what you're about to tell us.

-Gentlemen. Welcome.

-Good morning. -Doctor.

Rick Lagina and members

of the team gather in the war room

for a highly anticipated report

by Canadian geoscientist Dr. Ian Spooner.

Before you, uh, give us your presentation, Doctor,

we'd like to get my brother and Craig on the line.

Certainly. -Doug, if you'd be kind enough

to bring them up.

-Hey, guys. Hey.

Hey, Marty. Craig. -Hi.

So, all the usual suspects

are around the table right now,

but we have Dr. Ian Spooner here.

He's come to give us his initial report.

Great.

So, anyway, I-I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Spooner.

Dr. Spooner, what exactly do you do?

So, I'm an environmental geoscientist,

and my focus is primarily on wet environments.

And not necessarily on rock, but on sediments.

And when I was contacted to take a look at the site,

you know, there were some pretty specific questions.

How old is the swamp?

Can we take a look at

what kind of environments, uh, existed there through time?

That's the kind of work I do.

Come on, baby. Be something good.

One week ago,

while conducting a core drilling operation

in an attempt to identify

a mysterious 200-foot-long anomaly

that was discovered in the swamp earlier this year...

Here's the first core right here.

...Rick and Marty enlisted Dr. Spooner

to examine the extracted materials.

It was their hope that Dr. Spooner

would find evidence, not only

that the anomaly might be a sunken ship,

but that the swamp itself could be man-made.

You're saying that whatever time that interface is,

-it was sea bottom. -Yeah.

So, by looking at the sediments, you can tell

kind of how the swamp formed over time.

How it filled in.

-What the nature was. -Yeah.

There's all sorts of techniques.

I look for cores that have a high sedimentation rate.

So the sediment's coming in rapidly.

That means that as I work my way through the core,

every centimeter represents maybe ten years.

And so it's like having a book.

Yeah. I go back in time,

but I use the records that wetlands and lakes capture

to rebuild that story, that history.

Okay. Well,

what did this book say?

We got some initial data,

and what the book so far says,

it's some kind of depressed feature

-in the landscape. -Right.

The longest core we possibly could get

really suggests to me that it's fairly young.

It might go back maybe 300, 400 years.

-Okay. Aren't you suggesting, then,

that that's man-made?

That could be the case.

-That would be great. -Yeah.

The Oak Island swamp?

Just 300 to 400 years old?

Could the team have finally found scientific proof

that the swamp is man-made?

It's pretty intriguing

that Dr. Spooner's observations are that

the swamp here on Oak Island is actually

quite a bit younger than he thought,

maybe 300 to 400 years old.

Right around the time frame

when the swamp may have been manipulated

for some purpose associated with perhaps

original depositional work in the Money Pit.

Nothing you've found yet is inconsistent

with this thing being created,

say, between zero to 500 years ago, right?

That's true.

I'm sure in your career you've looked

at lots of things like this.

Is this an oddity?

Yeah. It is a bit.

It's kind of fascinating to me because it's, um...

it's just not what I expected.

And so,

the thing that I've seen here is it's much different.

It-it's more complex.

And I think that some of that has to do with the geology,

or it's something that people manipulated.

-Absolutely. -And so,

if we went back 300 years,

I just don't think you'd have this triangular feature,

and that might have been just terrestrial vegetation.

So there's no chance this could have been two islands?

Uh, at one point, I think it might have been

at least two drumlins.

Yep.

But what intrigues me about it,

what got me excited was, at the top of the triangle,

we saw that oval feature.

In addition to the core samples collected

in the swamp just one week ago,

Dr. Spooner and members of his team

recently returned to extract additional samples,

as well as probing the swamp's muddy bottom.

We were probing around that circle,

and we started hitting rock on the perimeter of that feature.

-So it's like a circle of stones? -Yeah.

It's an interesting scientific problem

because a circular feature like that

in this kind of environment is not something we'd expect.

And it's defined by vegetation.

So something's going on here.

Something's stopping vegetation from growing?

In-in there. Right. Exactly.

If there's this rock feature

in association with that water area

that has not changed whatsoever.

The swamp has changed,

but that feature has not.

It's probably associated

with some sort of human intervention.

Okay. Well, I-I think this is great data.

Very interesting. I'd like to see your,

you know, as you continue, uh, please stay in touch.

And, you know, Rick, we don't have any problem

with him having full access, right?

-Absolutely not. Yep. -No issue there.

Anyway, good. So this is good, this has been a great session.

-Let's go back and get at it. -All right. See ya.

-See you. -See you guys later.

The following day...

Here we are, guys.

-The swamp. Marty Lagina

has arrived on the island to join his son Alex,

along with metal detection expert Gary Drayton

and surveyor Steve Guptill, at the swamp.

They are eager to follow up on Dr. Spooner's report

of a mysterious rock formation

that lies beneath the swamp's northern point,

an area also referred to as "the pond."

The objective is to delineate this structure.

-Yeah. -We need to find out what it is,

and we're trying to see if it's man-made.

-Right. -If it's got answers, I want to know

-what they are, so let's get going. -I'm gonna hand you that one

-so you get the oars in there, and I'm gonna get ready. -Sure. Yep.

I'm gonna get the probing rods.

Let's put this in the boat.

I find the most significant thing

about Dr. Spooner's observation

that the pond area, which is sort of at the top

of the triangle of the swamp,

by kind of probing around the edges of it,

he thinks there might be a rock wall encompassing it.

There you go.

Go ahead and get in.

Avast!

Here we go.

See that little clump right in the center there?

-That island of bottom debris? Yep.

-Let's stay to the west of that. -Got it.

Gary has volunteered to actually go in the swamp.