Six Questions with The Finders of Mr. Clue’s Armchair Treasure Hunt #1 and The Hidden Treasure of Gold

After Forrest Fenn’s treasure was announced found, Mr. Clue provided a fun distraction and new challenge for many who had been focused on Fenn’s Poem. Mr. Clue created an armchair treasure hunt and had begun releasing Clues on his YouTube Channel. These eventually led ‘the finders’ to the treasure hunt prize of 10oz of 24K Gold.

While simple in appearance, the Clues were very enjoyable, yet cryptic. Mysterious Writings indeed. This didn’t stop ‘the finders’, however. They came up with the solution and the Gold! Let’s learn more about it all!

(While ‘the finders’ want to remain anonymous, Mr. Clue has agreed to help forward the following back and forth- Thanks Mr. Clue)

Six Questions with ‘The Finders’:

1Q) First a huge Congrats to you! What inspired you to take up Mr. Clue’s Challenge? Had you worked on the Forrest Fenn hunt and were looking for something to do or was it something else?

I spent a few weeks in total on the Forrest Fenn Hunt but nothing more than casual searching online, although I am big into the treasure hunting community and came across the Mr.Clue because Cow and Kpro sent me, my wife wasn’t as into treasure hunting as I was.(she is now)

2Q) Mr. Clue’s hunt included some codes and ciphers. Had you worked on other armchair treasure hunts and were familiar with these or how had you gone about solving them?

I’ve never done coding or ciphers before but did find a website that could do it for you, honestly still don’t get it but I now know what site to get help.

3Q)Can you share the thought process of how you worked through Mr. Clues videos and how you put things together to be confident of a solution- in order to go look?

I first found the hunt after Clue 4 came out. I was spinning my wheels looking for famous Wills, I wrote them all down because I wasn’t sure which one would come into play, by clue 6 I was still everywhere and nowhere. I didn’t take the hunt too serious until one day I’m watching ESPN about how the NBA is finishing out their season and it hits me like a ton of bricks. James Naismith started basketball in Massachusetts(im a huge basketball fan), some quick googling with Nic, I got nothing but when I googled nicholas james naismith everything changed, top results in google all say indiana and how Nic brought the game back to Crawfordsville,Indiana.

William Henry Harrison wasn’t even on my list of Wills but i rechecked with Wills & Williams of Indiana and found William Henry Harrison, the first governor of the Indiana territory. So I was now confident the first 2 clues pointed to Indiana. I was stuck on Crawfordsville but my wife who was now into it discovered the Colonel and chemist Eli Lilly connection which then I solved half of Clue 4 with the Mike-indy 500 connection.

My wifes dad has a house not to far from the city so we decided to spend a few days out there as we live in Ohio and it wasnt too far out of our way. We really felt confident that Indianapolis was it but didn’t get the area solved until Clue 10. Clue 10 was everything. We did not get Clue 7 at all, but we got 8 & 9 only after we solved Clue 10 on the day before 11 came out.

There’s a dam (dont mind the leak) on eagle “creek” and on google maps that area has all kinds of eagle names for neighborhoods,and as soon as we saw Westhaven Drive it was non-stop searching. We were already in the area searching when clue 11 came out, we got lunch and spent about 20min on clue 11 which clearly referenced the Eagles and Glenn Frey so we were pretty confident it was at the post office with 2 streets (Glen arm and westhaven) mentioned plus all the USPS eagle logos.

My wife was the one who actually found the paper with the cipher on it. It was not marked with anything that would indicate what it was unless you were searching for it. We solved it and 30min later met Mr.Clue and had the gold. Basically everything started because I was watching ESPN which I’ve now reminded my wife a few times.

4Q) Besides claiming the treasure, of course (was it really 10 oz of 24k gold?!), what did you like most about the Mr. Clue treasure hunt?

It was 10 1oz bars, from various mints around the world, they were really scratched up, but he said that doesn’t matter, which it didn’t. What we didn’t know is that when you sell, it is for less than the actual price, we got about $80 less per ounce than what it was supposed to be worth

5Q) What did you like least about the hunt?

I can’t complain too much because this literally changed our lives but if I had to pick one thing, ciphers are not my thing, when we found the proxy which was a tiny piece of laminated paper I was happy and dreadful at the same time, luckily we had internet service and just ran the cipher thru and got our instructions to get the gold