This week on The Curse of Oak Island, the team began mapping the Aladdin’s Cave cavern near the Garden Shaft to see if it is a secret chamber holding ancient treasure.
The Fellowship of the Dig has pivoted its main focus to investigating Aladdin’s Cave, a mysterious void or cavern lying at about 160 feet under the surface in the Money Pit area.
The guys had two primary questions — is there an entrance or exit to the void, and is it a human-made chamber?
They began by popping a high-definition camera down a newly drilled borehole, giving a pretty good view through the murky water of a large open cavity.
However, there was no sign of treasure or human-made structures. Marty Lagina pointed out there was a lot of silt obscuring the view of the bottom and that it was feasible that “treasure might be placed there.”
The next step was to draught in sonar expert Blaine Carr, who placed a sonar detector down the borehole to create a 3D cavern map.
Sonar detects entrance into Aladdin’s Cave in Oak Island Money Pit area
Blaine’s big takeaway from his mapping process was identifying a possible entrance into the cavern. This was big news as an entry is essential to any secret treasure chamber.
The sonar expert also stated the cavern wall may have been carved out of the rock by humans, but he also admitted it could have occurred naturally.
Frustratingly, the cavern floor slopes downward at a 30-degree angle, and the sonar detector couldn’t see what was at the very bottom. The laws of gravity dictate that anything buried there would have obviously drifted to the bottom, so the guys will need to investigate more.
Thankfully, there’s a simple enough solution. The team will drill another borehole about five or six feet away from the first hole, allowing the sonar and the cameras to see right to the bottom. Unfortunately, viewers will have to wait at least a week for that.
A large stone structure found buried on Oak Island’s Lot 5
Elsewhere on Oak Island, the guys are beginning to suspect that a couple of stone structures found on Lot 5 were used as a “staging area” in the late 17th or early 18th centuries for some mass project performed in the Money Pit area.
Last week, archaeologist Jamie Kouba performed a magnetometer survey near the circular stone feature on Lot 5, and she had the results last night.
Jamie said an even larger stone is buried under the circular feature, meaning there is a massive structure or complex underneath.
The archaeologists are also still finding plenty of artifacts dating to the late 17th or early 18th century period. Last night, they found two more artifacts from that time, and the objects matched the chemical composition of previous artifacts related to 17th-century treasure hunter Sir William Phipps.
Phipps was twice tasked with retrieving treasure from The Concepcion, a sunken Spanish galleon laden with loot from the New World. However, the guys suspect Phipps may have squirreled some of this bounty away on Oak Island.
The Curse of Oak Island airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on History.
That rascally island!