A Treasure Hunter Just Uncovered the $100,000 Prize Hidden in the Massachusetts Woods

In the woods of Massachusetts, someone has uncovered a treasure: a small, oddly marked spiral of 24-karat gold worth more than $25,000. The statuette was part of a treasure hunt called Project Skydrop, and it contains instructions for accessing an additional $87,600 worth of Bitcoin.

The project’s organizers—video game developer Jason Rohrer and recording artist Tom Bailey—announced the hunt on September 19. Participants could pay $20 to receive daily clues about the treasure’s exact location, which was somewhere within a 500-mile circle in the northeastern United States.

The challenge was scheduled to last three weeks, with organizers revealing a narrower search diameter each day. The project’s website was also regularly updated with new footage from a ground-level hidden camera trained on the golden statuette.

“Many of us spend quite a bit of time watching other people have adventures in movies. We wanted to turn those imaginary adventures into something that people could actually live,” says Rohrer in a statement. “Project Skydrop brings all these elements together to make a real-world experience unlike anything that's ever occurred before.”

Real Gold Treasure in a Shrinking Circle

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The hunt ended on October 1 at 5:19 p.m., when an unidentified individual bent down to retrieve the golden spiral from its woodland hiding place, according to surveillance footage. By that point, the search area had been narrowed to a 27-mile circle inside Massachusetts.

The treasure was found days before the hunt’s planned conclusion. As Rohrer tells NBC10 Boston’s Eli Rosenberg, “A lot of these treasure hunts either go on for way too long and no one ever solves it—or [they are] solved and broken by someone right away, which spoils the whole thing.”

Rohrer is best known for his work on the 2007 game “Passage” and the artificial intelligence chatbot Project December, and he was the subject of the first museum retrospective focused on a single video game artist’s work. When he teamed up with Bailey, the duo wanted to help people feel like they were part of a grand adventure.

“Imagine you’ve got your earbuds on and you’re listening to a John Williams score,” says Bailey in the statement. “You see the golden artifact just ahead of you in the woods. You reach out and grab it. It’s like a real-world Indiana Jones treasure hunt, except your face won’t melt off when you actually look at the treasure.”

What is Project Skydrop?

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The individual who found the treasure, which is made of 99.99 percent pure gold, was was clad in Adidas sneakers. However, they were not filming themselves—a Project Skydrop requirement to claim the Bitcoin prize. As Rohrer tells the Times Union’s Patrick Tine and Mike Goodwin, the treasure’s discovery eight days before the deadline is a “strange mystery.” Some competitors have commented that the finder should be disqualified.

Rohrer and Bailey haven’t heard from the person who found the treasure, and they haven’t yet released the prize money. “We’re not going to send $87,000 into the void,” Rohrer adds.

Rohrer plans to revisit the treasure’s hiding place, which hasn’t yet been disclosed, to collect his video equipment and leave a marker that will last “hopefully forever,” he says. Project Skydrop’s goal was to put on a treasure hunt for its own sake, Rohrer tells the Times Union, to evoke the “feeling of mystery and awe” audiences get while watching fictional heroes uncover hidden objects, as well as inspire participants to go outdoors.

“We are just trying to get people out, out from behind their screens and into the world,” Rohrer tells NBC10 Boston. “Every time we go hiking or out to do something outside, we never regret it, so just trying to bring that experience to people who might not get it otherwise.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.