NEW Oak Island Excavation Leads to Groundbreaking Discovery!

If it is indeed a tunnel, there’s a top, there’s a bottom, there are sidewalls.
>> Ridiculously easy.
>> Oh, really?
>> We are not oscillating. That casing is just going >> dropping. It’s just dropping.
>> Yes.
>> Everyone is obsessed with the curse and the idea that seven must perish. But while everyone was looking for tragedy, the [music] team found a receipt. Not a paper one, but a geological one. The soil samples from the latest bore hole in the garden shaft [music] contained high traces of silver and gold particulate. This is not natural background radiation. This is evidence of a decaying horde. But here is the catch. The depth of this deposit is far deeper than anyone thought humanly possible to dig in [music] the 1700s.
Someone had technology we do not understand. The 1500 platform.
For the longest time, the swamp on Oak Island was just an annoying muddy obstacle. People thought it was just a natural bog where debris collected over centuries. But the latest excavation has flipped that idea on its head. During the filming of season 13, specifically in episode 5, the heavy machinery hit something that stopped the entire operation cold. They were digging near the southeast corner, an area that had been flagged by ground penetrating radar years ago, but never fully explored.
>> These rocks, it lines up exactly with the anomaly, so it is the anomaly.
>> The excavator bucket scraped against a hard, flat surface buried under 15 ft of muck. When they cleared the sludge, they did not find random rocks. They found a structured wooden platform. This was not a few scattered planks. This was a deliberate engineered floor. The team immediately brought in the archaeologists to analyze the wood. The preservation was incredible because the swamp mud seals out oxygen which stops decay. They took samples for dendrochronology, which is just a fancy word for tree ring dating. The results were shocking. The wood dates back to the early 1500s. To put that in perspective, that is decades before the money pit was supposedly discovered in 1795.
It is before the primary colonization of the area. This means that 500 years ago, a massive group of people was on this island building heavy duty infrastructure in a swamp. You do not build a platform like that for a temporary camp. You build it to move heavy cargo. But here is the catch. The platform was reinforced with iron spikes. These were not modern nails.
They were handforged squareheaded spikes consistent with medieval marine technology. The layout of the platform suggests it was a wararf or a docking station. But why would anyone build a dock in the middle of a swamp? The working theory now is that the swamp is actually man-made. Scientists like Dr.
Ian Spooner have suspected this for a while, but this platform is the smoking gun. If the swamp was created artificially, it was likely done to hide something. The theory is that they sailed a ship into a natural inlet, offloaded heavy treasure chests onto this wooden platform, and then intentionally sank the ship or sealed the inlet to create a bog on top of it.
The excavation also uncovered a cluster of artifacts around the platform.
[music] They found leather scraps, likely from boots or bindings, and pieces of shaped timber that looked like parts of a crane or a hoist.
>> How do you know this is Samuel Bull connected? This might have been here a long time before. I mean, look at the stuff we found. We found tools that were used for tunneling. Really [music] old tools.
>> This paints a picture of a major industrial operation. This was not three guys with shovels burying a pirate chest. This was a military-grade engineering project. The sheer scale of this find implies a massive workforce.
You would need dozens, maybe hundreds of men to move this much earth and timber.
And they did it all without leaving a written record. That is the part that scares historians. A project of this size usually leaves a paper trail. The fact that there is none suggests absolute secrecy was the main goal. What [snorts] makes this even more intense is the connection to the money pit. The distance between this new swamp platform and the money pit is significant, but the depth align. The platform sits at a level that would have been sea level 500 years ago. This suggests the entire hydraulic system of the island connects these two points. The team also utilized a new washing plant to sip through the spoils from around the platform. They found traces of charcoal and burnt wood.
This could mean the creators destroyed their ships or their equipment before they left to eliminate the evidence. It fits the timeline of a secret mission perfectly. Everyone is obsessed with the gold, but the wood is the real treasure here because it gives us a hard date. We are looking at the early 16th century.
This puts the Knights Templar theory on shaky ground unless they had successors, but it lines up perfectly with early Portuguese expeditions.
The excitement on the island is palpable. You can see it in the clips.
Billy Ghart and the Lagginina brothers know they have hit a home run. They are no longer guessing if something happened here. They are now standing on the floor where it happened. They are walking on the same wood that the original depositors walked on. This discovery changes the strategy for the rest of the season. Instead of just drilling random holes, they are now expanding the swamp dig to uncover the rest of this structure. If this is a wararf, it has to lead somewhere. It has to lead to the vault. The implications are huge. If there is a ship buried in that swamp or if this platform is the back door to the money pit, the game is over. The treasure is not lost. It is just waiting for someone to knock on the right door.
And with this platform, they just found the porch. But what they found stuck in the ancient wood was even more disturbing. Drilling through history.
While the swamp was giving up its secrets, the money pit was getting a violent wakeup call. The team deployed the Caesar rig. This beast is not your average drill. It is a massive piece of machinery designed to go deeper and wider than anything they have used before. The goal was to pierce the bottom of the garden shaft and see what is really down there. For context, the garden shaft is a structure discovered deeper underground that was believed to be a searcher tunnel. But as they dug, they realized it was original work. The Caesar rig was set up to drill directly through the bottom of this shaft, pushing past the 100 ft mark where previous attempts had failed due to flooding. The operation was tense. When you are drilling that deep, you run the risk of collapsing the very tunnels you are trying to find. But the Caesar rig uses a casing oscillator, which twists a steel pipe into the ground to protect the hole. It is slow, grinding work, but it preserves the layers of history. At about 120 ft, the rig started crunching through wood, a lot of wood. This was not just a stray branch. The torque readings on the machine spiked, indicating it was cutting through thick seasoned timber. When they pulled up the hammer grab, it was full of hand cut oak beams. This is massive because natural wood does not grow horizontal at 120 ft underground. Someone placed it there.
The team sent a camera down the casing.
The footage was grainy, but you could clearly see the walls of a tunnel or a chamber. This confirms that the garden shaft connects to a deeper network. The wood samples were rushed to the lab. The results came back consistent with the swamp platform mid to late 1400s or early 1500s. This connects the two sites. The people who built the dock in the swamp were the same people digging tunnels 12 stories underground.
But here is the deal. The depth is the crazy part. Digging a tunnel at that depth in the Middle Ages is an engineering nightmare. You have to deal with water pressure, air supply, and structural integrity. The fact that these timbers are still holding up 500 years later proves these builders were masters of their craft. The Caesar rig continued to push down. At 150 ft, they hit a void. The drill string dropped a few feet instantly. This happens when you punch into an open room. The team scrambled to get a sonar device down the hole. The sonar mapped out a cavity that is roughly square. It is not a natural cave. Nature creates round, irregular shapes. Humans build squares. This chamber is located right in the zone where the Chapel vault was rumored to be. For years, treasure hunters have chased this vault, but nobody could pin it down. The Caesar rig might have just punched a hole in the roof. They also recovered material that looks like pudding stone, a type of concrete that was used in ancient construction. It is a mix of clay and gravel that hardens like rock. If the depositors used concrete, they were building something meant to last forever. The debris coming up also contain traces of charcoal and coconut fiber. The coconut fiber is a classic island clue. It was used as dunage or packing material on long sea voyages. Finding it this deep suggests it was used to filter water or cushion heavy objects. The drilling crew described the smell coming from the bore hole. It smelled like stagnant water, but also distinctively organic. It is the smell of a time capsule being opened. So, here is the deal regarding the technology. The Caesar rig allows them to send a person down. They are preparing to lower a diver or a camera operator into the casing to get eyes on the target. This has been the dream for 10 years. No more guessing with drills.
actual visual confirmation. The data from this bore hole is changing the map of the underground. They now know there is a lateral tunnel running from the garden shaft towards the baby blob, which is another high probability target. It is all connecting. The underground implies a labyrinth, not just a single hole. The precision of the dig is key. They are inches away from the target. If they are slightly off, they miss the gold and hit mud. But the Caesar rig is accurate. They are confident they are right on top of the anomaly. The mood in the war room was electric when the wood chips came up.
Marty Lagginina, who is usually the skeptic, looked genuinely shook. This is physical proof of a structure at a depth that should be impossible. It validates millions of dollars spent and years of frustration. But the real shock came when they analyzed the metal traces in the water. The Templar alternative.
It is not just about digging holes. It is about connecting the dots. And the biggest dot this season is pointing straight at Portugal. In episode 3, a researcher presented a document that blew everyone’s mind. It was a ship’s manifest and a set of coordinates that align eerily well with Oak Island. This ties back to lot 5, a specific plot of land on the island that has been yielding weird surface finds. They found coins and lead seals that are distinctively European, but not British or French. They are Portuguese. The theory is that the Portuguese Order of Christ, which was the rebranded Knights Templar after they were outlawed, made secret voyages to the New World long before Columbus. We are talking 1400s.
They had the maps, they had the ships, and they had a reason to hide their wealth from the Vatican and the King of France. The lead researcher pointed out that the stone markers found on the island form a geometric pattern that matches navigational charts used by Portuguese sailors. The marker stone discovered near the garden shaft has symbols that look exactly like the mason marks found in convents in Tamar, Portugal. Basically, this rewrites the history books. If the Portuguese were here in the 1400s digging tunnels, they were doing it to hide the most valuable artifacts in Christrysendom. We are talking about religious relics, the ark, the manora, the grail. It sounds like a movie script, but the physical evidence on lot 5 backs it up. [music] They found a circular stone structure on lot 5 that looks like a watchtowwer foundation.
Carbon dating on the charcoal underneath it hit the mid300s.
This is way too early for pirates.
Pirates bury loot in shallow holes. They do not build stone watchtowers and deep hydraulic tunnels. The connection to the main dig is the engineering style. The box drains in Smith’s Cove, which were discovered years ago, use a filtration system that is identical to salt works found in ancient Portugal. It is a specific way of layering rocks and coconut fiber to stop sand from clogging the drains. This means the blueprint for Oak Island might be sitting in a library in Lisbon. The team has sent a delegation to Europe to cross reference the symbols found on the stones. If they find a match, it is game over. It proves the origin. What most people don’t realize is that the Portuguese were the masters of the sea at that time. They had the technology to cross the Atlantic and they were secretive. They had a policy of silence regarding their trade routes. Hiding a treasure on a remote island in the North [music] Atlantic fits their modus operandi perfectly. So, do you think the silver traces are just leftovers from a robbery that happened 500 years ago? Or is the main horde still waiting in the dark? Are the lagginas finally about to break the curse, or is the island baiting them into another money pit? Hit that like button if you want them to send the diver down, and subscribe so you don’t miss the update when they finally breach the vault.