Easy Ways To Make A Million Dollars!
Imagine buying a picture frame at the thrift shop for four dollars only to have it fall apart in your hands at home. It happened to an anonymous shopper in 1989 Pennsylvania whose only bonus was a nice copy of the Declaration of Independence. He tossed it aside until several YEARS later a friend insisted he have it looked at, that it might be real. Guess what? The paper sold at a Sotheby's auction for 2.4 million dollars! Think this can happen only once, that all the copies are found. It happened again in Nashville in 2007, only this time the old yellowy copy was sold for $2.48! Remember, the original copies DO NOT have signatures.
Ty Paulsen had been hunting treasure and metal detecting for years when he made an astounding find; a gold nugget that weighed fifteen pounds! He held onto the nugget at his run down little trailer trying to decide what to do with it. Fearing it might be stolen he buried it for several months. I know- bank vault, auction, something more logical owuld be smarter!
Paulsen refused to say where he found the nugget, only saying if your drew a circle around the Mojave Desert it was in there. From that point on the nugget was called the Mojave Nugget. Eventually it was sold for an undisclosed price. The gold weight alone was worth $75,000 but experts say a collectible nugget that large might be worth up to $500,000! Visit the gold nugget site for more information on this and other huge finds.
Oak Island lies off of the coast of Nova Scotia and has been a treasure mystery since 1795 when three young friends found a depression and damaged limb on the island. Thinking buried treasure they began to dig. A 13 foot wide pit became evident, and at ten foot intervals of depth there were oak boards blocking the way. At 40 feet the oak boards had charcoal on them, and at 50 feet it was putty. Ten more feet and there was coconut fibers. Obviously something was buried here and the burial was a major engineering project. More mysteries have occured over the years including an inscribed stone, spruce wood pieces, three gold chain links, a concrete vault. Unfortunately the pit is deviously tied into the beach with underground tunnels and it flooded. Cameras have supposedly even detected a human body. All the engineering and money used here has bought up no treasure and six lives have been lost. Of course the legend is that the pit wants seven lives before giving up it's gold! This is one of the best treasure tales.
Why stumble blindly hoping to find something worth a million dollars. Steve Arnold loves meteorites and he knows where to look. In Kansas there is an area known as the Brenham Field, a field being a large area known for meteorites from the same fall. Many had been found here and farmers sometimes plow them while working the crops. Arnold signed contracts with local farmers to search their fields while they were unplanted. He attached a series of high power metal detectors to the rear of a three wheel vehicle and criss-crossed the fields. Soon enough he uncovered a 1,400 pound monster stone that should sell for $1,000,000!
If all of that work on the farm tires you perhaps it would be easier to do things the way Michelle Knapp did in 1980. She bought a Chevy Malibu from Grandma and parked it in front of her home. Nature hurled a meteorite down and severely damaged the car! Lucky her, the Peekskill stone, named for the town, allowed her to sell the car and meteorite for over $30,000, some reports claim. The Malibu automobile now tours the world, stopping in at gem and mineral shows.
Sometimes it might just be best to not fine something great. Pete Larson paid local native Americans for the right to search for fossils on their land, and was lucky enough to fine a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil. Of course the locals sued, the federal government claimed an interest, and the poop hit the fan! In a story much too contorted to complete here federal marshalls raided the small museum, seized Sue, as the T. Rex was called, and handed out charges left and right. The fossil's finders, the property owners, and America got screwed, and Sue is now beautifully displayed at Chicago's Field Museum. If you visit be sure to notice the reeking stench of politics near the display!
If ever you should run across a small, papery copy of a book titled "Tamerlane" don't pass it up. A man in New Hampshire stopped in a roadside antique stall and bought his for $15. This small book is the first printed work of Edgar Allen Poe. Self-published, the credit says "By A Bostonian", so don't bother searching for Poe's name. Only about a dozen have been found but several hundred may have been printed. Not a million dollars, but turning $15 into $2-300,000 is a good day's antiquing.
One last memory is the treasure of Thomas Jefferson Beale. In the early 1800's Beale is said to have traveled west and amassed a fortune in gold. After several trips back east to hide the treasure, he and his team left a locked box with a trusted inn keeper and headed west, never to return or be heard from again. Years later the inn keeper opened the box where he found three coded papers and a letter. The letter promised a key to break the codes but the letter had never arrived. After years of effort by the inn keeper and another man they used the Declaration of Independence to solve the code, which told how much treasure was buried and the area it was in. The other sheets would tell the parties names and the exact location. Of course they were never solved.
The gold would be worth tends of millions of dollars so over the years here had been intense interest in the story. American National Security Agency computers were used and they indicated the code was real, but failed to solve the code. Because the code has different letters representing A to Z, the key is a must to solve it.
Personally I feel it must be a devious hoax, but who knows.
