Six Questions with Pete Wilder: Author of The Oracle Armchair Treasure Hunt

The Oracle Armchair Treasure Hunt is enjoyed for not only its exciting adventure story of two boys traveling through space and time, but also for the fact that it offers readers an incredible opportunity to hunt for lost treasure worth over $6000 dollars!  Pete Wilder did an excellent job of weaving a tale that takes readers on a journey filled with mystery.  It is educational and thrilling at the same time.

I’m so thrilled to have the occasion to ask Pete Six Questions about this extraordinary quest.  The treasure token for the cash prize of The Oracle has been hidden since 2005, and waits to be found. Let’s ask what his thoughts are about when or IF it might be found…. and more!

Enjoy!

• 1Q) Congrats and Thank you for creating such a creative and fun read!  Although the introduction of the book mentions you were inspired by the Masquerade Hunt, which is considered one of the first armchair treasure hunts ever to be devised, and similarities are noticed throughout the pages to this hunt, what else inspired you to create and provide such an interesting hunt?   

Hi Jenny thanks for asking me to respond to your six questions.  As to what else inspired me?

Quite simply my kids. I was busy building a career, working long hours, I was conscious that time with my children was limited and precious. I wanted to do something interactive, something constructive with them I wanted to create something jointly with them.

Usually we would spend Friday evenings curled up on the sofa watching ‘Friends’ and eating takeaway pizza. These were some of the happiest moments of my life.

So, when whatever season of ‘Friends’ we were watching concluded, I suggested that we should do a project together on Friday evenings instead. It wasn’t long before we decided to create a treasure hunt and the embryo of The Oracle was conceived.

We jointly decided on the format of the book and each week we would think of ideas and pictures to include. I guess it was a couple of months or so and the children got bored with the idea and it was put on the back burner. Something inside me kept nagging away and after a couple of years I decided to resurrect the project and see it through.

• 2Q) The token to claim for The Oracle’s cash prize (approx. $6000 cash US dollars) has been waiting to be found since 2005.  Are you confident it is still able to be physically found? Do you feel any one is close to finding it?  Do you feel it will be found eventually?

This is a great question or should I say, these are great questions?

Am I confident it is still able to be found? Not 100%, there is always the possibility that someone has stumbled across it and disturbed or removed it.

Saying that, I’m not concerned, the token has no intrinsic value and if someone who is not involved with the hunt found it they would probably toss it away as some weird, worthless, curiosity.

I have said this many times before and I will take this opportunity to repeat it, don’t worry about the nature of the token, concern yourself with the location of the token. The token is simply a method of proof, if you physically retrieve the token then you have won the prize, it’s as simple as that. There will be no dispute.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, if you have solved the hunt you will know you have solved the hunt and you will be able to specify the location by whatever means you will. It won’t be necessary to physically retrieve the token, of course you may do if you so choose. You may use Eastings and Northings, you may use Longitude and Latitude, a description or polar coordinates. It doesn’t matter, you just need to specify the location to within a square metre.

Is anyone close to finding it? Fantastic question, yes and no. There are definitely hunters out there who are thinking along the right lines at the same time no one has faced the ‘Truth’.

Will it be found eventually? Inevitably it will, the truth will come out. By hook or by crook I’m sure someone will turn up on my doorstep when I’m least expecting it.

• 3Q) What are you enjoying most about the Treasure Hunt?  What were some of your thoughts about how it would be appreciated by families when publishing?  Are there incidents, methods, or ideas of searchers that surprise you or that you weren’t expecting?

What am I enjoying? I’m really enjoying the recent flurry of activity on the website forum, it’s nice to see the ideas and thought processes going on in people’s minds. It’s also extremely satisfying to see that some treasure hunters have had their eyes opened to new horizons.

I genuinely hoped and intended that ‘The Oracle’ would be adopted by the young and would be enjoyed by families up and down the land, all across the world. I hoped that children would be inspired by the story, would be intrigued by the pictures, would be educated by the poems and enthralled by the hunt.

Am I surprised by the approach of some of the hunters? Definitely, readers are throwing out ideas I had never considered all the time. In a way, this is one of the most enjoyable aspects. Someone told me at the outset this would happen and it’s nice to see this come true. It’s also good to see the journeys readers have embarked on and the fascination that’s been generated.

• 4Q) For someone who is just beginning the treasure hunt, do you feel they are at any disadvantage?  Do you offer any advice on how they could quickly get up to speed, or things they should do? How do you feel anyone should begin looking for the clues to the location of the token in your book?

Are beginners at a disadvantage? I don’t think so, all the information is available to everybody. Yes, they will have to read all the material to catch up and this will take time depending how much effort they’re willing to put in. At the same time they will bring new ideas and apply them to the thoughts of others.

I would recommend that new readers approach the hunt with an open mind, take in all the information, take an holistic view, follow their instincts, think laterally, be bold and enjoy the ride.

• 5Q) You’ve offered many clues over the years towards solving for The token’s location of The Oracle.  Can the hunt be solved without these, or how much do they help? Would you be willing to share another clue now in this Six Questions?  

Can the hunt be solved without the extra clues?

The answer has to be yes. When The Oracle – Lost in Time was first published I sincerely believed there was enough information contained within it to solve the hunt. The clues don’t really give additional location information they’re more about guiding readers as to how to go about solving the hunt.

I have told my readers that I will publish one more final clue. I have been working on this for months and it’s just about ready for publication, am I 100% happy with it? No. Do I think I can hold out much longer? No. The interesting thing is that the activity has really ramped up on the forum since I made the announcement about the final clue.

Would I be willing to share the final clue, interesting, I’ll have to think it through. I have been considering using Twitter. I once tweeted the poems in the book over several weeks. What’s even more interesting is that I heard today about the spat between Piers Morgan and J K Rowling on Twitter. Piers claimed he had not read a single word of Harry Potter so a fan decided to start tweeting extracts from the books, line by line, at him.

• 6Q) Are there any other projects you are working on?  If/when The Oracle is solved, do you think you would create another treasure hunt?  Besides keeping up with the hunt, what are some of the things you love to do or want to do? Do you imagine Time Travel is or will be possible someday?

Am I working on any other projects? I’m working on a creation of mine called, ‘Human Register’. This is a voluntary database for people to register their information on an independent, charitable website. They can decide when and to who they release the information i.e. after their death. This will be an opportunity to leave a legacy for their descendants and will be a great benefit for future generations. Imagine a free service where you can write your own history, tell your own life story, post pictures and videos as a gift to future generations. We will also offer DNA testing and other premium services. I’m currently working with website developers to take this forward.

I am also gathering material and jotting down thoughts for a physics book that I intend to publish one day. I don’t feel I’m ready to commit to the project just yet, I’m still in research mode and currently collaborating with Thad Roberts on his QST theory. Thad has written a great book, ‘Einstein’s Intuition’, he has a great insight into higher dimensional SpaceTime and a theory of 11 dimensional SpaceTime underpinned by the idea that the ‘Vacuum’ is a quantised super fluid.

Would I create another treasure hunt? I’d love to and I promised my daughters that I would. It’s just not top of my agenda at the moment.

What do I love to do, what would I want to do? Well, I am a keen golfer and still trying to get down to a single figure handicap.

Do I think that time travel is or will be possible? What a fantastic question, hmmm.

I don’t like to discount anything in nature, we simply don’t know what we don’t know. The concept of a smartphone would have seemed miraculous as recently as 100 years ago. It’s simply amazing how much technology has advanced in that time, who knows what the next 100 years will bring? I am certain there will be advances we can’t even dream about provided we don’t blow ourselves up in the meantime. Yes, climate change is an issue and we need to become less reliable on fossil fuels and make more use of solar renewables but the biggest issue mankind faces is nuclear proliferation and/or germ warfare. The genie is out of the bottle and I would suggest it is only a matter of time before a madman gets his finger on the button. The question is, can mankind unite for the common good? There has been a recent shift in Europe and America away from globalisation, I hope it’s only temporary and we shift back to a more cooperative and inclusive society.

I guess I ought to get off my soap box and get back to your question. The laws of physics would suggest that time travel isn’t possible, at least not in the way we would imagine it. Yes, there is the twin paradox which allows relative time travel. If an astronaut goes on a long journey away from earth at a significant % of the speed of light and subsequently returns, he/she will have aged less than their twin remaining on earth. Some would say this is a kind of time travel, it would seem like a trip into the future for the astronaut twin and a trip to the past for the twin who remained on earth. That’s the interesting thing about relativity.

The book suggests time travel occurs by turning a few knobs or pulling a lever much like H G Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’. I think that is the type of time travel your question has in mind. I personally believe that the future doesn’t exist yet, some mainstream scientists/physicists believe in the idea of a block universe where all of time already exists, each moment in time, past, present and future is already laid out in a causal, block universe. If you believe that then yes, the future is already determined, we just haven’t experienced it yet. If you take my view that the future doesn’t exist yet then it would seem to discount time travel into the future.

What about time travel into the past? This raises the prospect of the, ‘grandfather paradox’. Simply stated, if you go back in time there is a possibility you could kill your grandfather before your father was conceived, in which case you wouldn’t exist to go back and kill your grandfather. So, that doesn’t seem to be a likely proposition. I think the only possibility is to somehow bend SpaceTime using gravity. I’ve been interested in the possibility of alien life forms for a long time and in my research, I came across an interesting guy, Bob Lazaar. He is not a publicity seeker but has done a few interviews over the years and they’re available on YouTube. Bob claims to have been employed by the US government to retro engineer crashed, alien aircraft. He says they have found a way to amplify gravity and bend SpaceTime to reduce the distance between distant locations and thereby reduce the time taken to travel vast interstellar journeys. I think this is the nearest way we can get to time travel.

Thanks for your wonderful answers to the Six Questions, Peter.  Ok….maybe it was a bit more than Six, but thanks so much.  They are fantastic!

To know The Oracle’s treasure still waits to be found, and encourages families to explore history, science, and more, is such a worthy cause.  I appreciate you creating the hunt and your plan to continue keeping it going for however long it might take.   Very admirable.    

And Wow!  What an amazing new project you are working on.  That sounds just as admirable, if not more so.  Leaving treasures for generations to come!  Awesome!

Thanks again, and I wish all those working on the hunt, or just getting started, the Best of Luck.  And remember to always treasure the adventure! 

The Oracle: Lost in Time PDF can be downloaded for a few dollars on Oracle.net.  It provides all that is needed to sit and work from the armchair of your home to find the over $6000 dollar prize!