Hidden in “the mountains north of Santa Fe,” the treasure sounded almost fantastical - diamonds, rubies, and sapphires gold coins, gold nuggets, a 17th-century Spanish ring. Years later, in 2012, when Posey was 29, his wife, Jennie, emailed him a Newsweek article about a different treasure. It consumed the majority of my childhood.” “I felt I could do this, but the physical barriers made it all the worse. “That was the agonizing part,” he recalls. He joined tours of the missile range, cooking up schemes to peel off from the group and sneak away to the treasure site. He learned everything he could about it, even attending a summit held by descendants of Noss. “This concept that there could be, around the corner, a vast fortune with an unimaginable historical context was just enthralling,” Posey says. government seized the whole area, adding it to the White Sands Missile Range. Before Noss was able to recover most of the gold he had seen, the shaft leading to it caved in after World War II, the U.S.

When Posey was 11, he became obsessed with the Victorio Peak treasure, a hoard of perhaps thousands of gold bars supposedly found by a hunter named Milton Noss in a hilltop cavern in New Mexico in 1937. He had a book about the Spanish conquistadores and their long-buried treasure, and with his younger brothers, he recalls, he would “forge out on our own across the desert outside of Tucson in search of hidden loot.” He tore apart his mother’s new computer (and put it back together in the face of her fury) and built himself one from off-the-shelf parts. He collected books of magic and magicians’ biographies and devoted himself to demystifying illusions like levitation, sleight of hand, and escapes, which he performed in his sixth-grade talent show. Posey’s parents were both railroad engineers, and during summers at the family’s cabin in Montana, where his grandfather was a fish-and-game warden, his favorite thing to do was get out in the hills with a metal detector. “Of course, they wouldn’t let me bring it to school.” “I got pretty good with that thing,” he says. “He wouldn’t have any part of it,” his mother, Lorri, remembers. When other kids bullied him, his mother gently suggested he dress more normally. At age 9, he started wearing the archaeologist-adventurer’s trademark khaki pants, Stetson, and leather jacket and carrying a bullwhip nearly every day. Growing up in Arizona in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones.

The best notes the fox in the forest