Late afternoon light was starting to fade on the Western Pennsylvania hillside where Eric McCarthy was tracking a bull elk when a masked man stepped out from behind a tree and pointed a semiautomatic firearm at him. “You need to get off this mountain,” the man said.

McCarthy, a hunting guide, stood still for a beat. It was March 14, 2018, and he’d spent the day following the elk on a wooded slope above Dents Run, a tiny unincorporated town about 135 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The man was dressed entirely in dark clothes, including over his head and face. “All I could see,” McCarthy remembers, “was his eyeballs.”

McCarthy wasn’t used to running into strangers on these forested hills, much less masked, armed ones. He was 40 at the time; he’d been hiking the region’s knobby peaks and mine-scarred crevices since he was 16, first as a hunter and then as a guide, and now as owner and operator of Big Bull Outfitters. Dents Run is partly renowned for its elk viewing area, where in autumn visitors come to hear the animals bugle and watch them spar for dominance. Near the end of winter, elk and white-tailed deer drop their antlers, which are coveted by collectors and taxidermists. McCarthy leads shed hunts—tracking animals for the purpose of claiming freshly dropped antlers—to keep money flowing in during the offseason, when he would otherwise work construction.

Few people know these mountains, or the hunters who frequent them, better than McCarthy, a native of Rillton, a small town near Pittsburgh. During the month of March alone, he drives 4,000 to 5,000 miles in the region and hikes up to 400 miles more. He says he can identify countless minor landmarks from a single photograph. As of that evening, McCarthy had been following the bull—which had a massive set of antlers—for 13 days. He planned to return the next day with a regular client, Don Reichel, to continue tracking. The animal had just stood up after a rest; as McCarthy rose to follow it, the masked man accosted him.

McCarthy wasn’t armed, but he wasn’t about to abandon his tracking without an explanation. “Fuck are you talking about?” he asked. “Who are you?”

The man turned around to show a yellow FBI insignia on his jacket and repeated, “You need to get off this mountain. Now.”

“For what?” McCarthy said. “What’s going on?”

“They’re digging down there,” the agent told him. “They don’t want anyone on the hill to see this.” He warned McCarthy not to return later and told him there were at least a dozen agents fanned out around the hilltop, so it was pointless to try.

Like most everyone raised in the area, McCarthy had long heard stories of a stash of lost Civil War gold in Dents Run. Rumors had recently spread that the FBI, tipped off by treasure hunters, was there, conducting an excavation in search of it. Conspicuous military-type vehicles had recently rolled through the closest town, Benezette. So when McCarthy encountered this agent, he had a good idea what was going on. “There’s [several] small towns in that little community up there,” he says. “One person rides down the street naked on a motorcycle, everybody knows about it.” He later realized that he’d been only about 200 yards from the dig site.

Over the next hour, the FBI agent walked McCarthy back to his car, gun lowered but drawn, and told him not to return for a few days. But McCarthy wasn’t about to sacrifice all the hours of tracking he’d put in. “I had [spent] enough time on this giant set of antlers,” he says. “I wasn’t quitting.”

He returned with Reichel the next morning around 5 a.m., parking on the roadside before the turnoff into Dents Run. “As soon as you got out of the car,” he recalls, “you could see the glare from the light towers, and you could hear machines banging and banging.” It sounded like a major excavation was underway.

A few hours later, the hunters took a break for lunch. They emerged from the woods and hunkered along Route 555, on the south side of the dig site. As they sat there, three armored trucks passed by, escorted by a couple of police cars, heading toward Dents Run. When the vehicles emerged, they headed back past where they were sitting, and McCarthy noticed something different: The middle truck was riding far lower than the others.

“I do a lot of construction work, I drive a lot of dump trucks,” he says. “And the middle vehicle, its fucking mud flaps [were] dragging bad. It was a ton of weight in that middle truck.” The most likely scenario, he says, is that the truck was full of whatever the FBI had just dug up; since they were in Dents Run, he presumed it was probably that Civil War gold.

McCarthy didn’t come forward at first. He didn’t know anyone involved and prefers to stay out of people’s business. But over the course of a few years, he repeatedly heard that the FBI claimed they had found nothing on Dents Run. Word was that the Bureau had dug it up in the night and made off with it, excluding the treasure hunters who found the gold. This left McCarthy fuming. “I had about enough of this shit,” he says, and he decided, “I’m gonna put my two cents in the box here.”

Reichel, a retired manufacturing worker, confirmed that he saw and heard the same things that day. His recollections—combined with the court-ordered release of new documents from FBI archives this past December—raise compelling new questions about the events of those late-winter days eight years ago. As McCarthy puts it, “Who the fuck brings three Brinks trucks into a fucking valley for [two] hours if there’s nothing to get?”

A fog of intrigue and mystery has enveloped Dents Run and its mythical gold for more than a century. The details have morphed through decades of retelling, but the essence of the legend is that in 1863, a group of Union soldiers were hauling a shipment of U.S. government gold by horse-drawn wagon across Pennsylvania, toward the Philadelphia Mint. The 26 bars of precious metal were intended to finance the ongoing defense of the Union in the Civil War.

The unit became waylaid in western Pennsylvania, and the troops made the decision to seek help, lug out as much gold as they could carry, and bury the rest in the hills near Dents Run. But most of the men went missing, and the gold never turned up at the Mint. Though unverified, the story has drawn treasure hunters to the area.

The best known among them are undoubtedly Dennis Parada, of nearby Clearfield; his son, Kem; and Warren Getler, a former journalist and author who has partnered with them in the search. Dennis Parada had been fascinated with treasure hunting—and with Dents Run in particular—ever since he graduated from art school back in the 1970s. In 2004, he and a friend located a cave entrance. Crawling inside the narrow chamber, Dennis and Kem found evidence of prior visitors and an opening into a second interior space. But the cave appeared to be unstable, so they explored its depths from a safe distance inside using a drill and then investigated from above. They spent the next decade-plus recording more than 100 readings using a metal-detection device called a GPL 200. (GPL stands for ground penetrating locator.) They planted stakes connected by wire atop the cave and sent electrical currents through the stakes, measuring the presence of metals and minerals below. The readings are based on how strongly the buried elements oppose—or resist, in geophysical terms—the current. Gold is highly conductive, so it returns low resistivity readings. Each test they conducted delivered the same result: “It all screamed gold in the same location,” Kem told me when I visited the site with them in 2021.

They hired Terence Hamill, founder and chief geophysicist of GeoSearches Inc., an Ohio-based firm specializing in subsurface geophysical surveys, to analyze the site. Hamill detected “a large metallic anomaly.”

“We could see that there was something completely different down there, and it could well be precious,” Hamill says. The property is on state land, and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) gave the Paradas—who eventually formed a treasure-hunting company called Finders Keepers LLC—permission to do exploratory drilling at the site.

But the Paradas’ relationship with the DCNR deteriorated, and the parties couldn’t agree on terms that would allow them to conduct a dig; in fact, in 2014 the agency ordered them to cease all activity there. Three years later, Warren Getler saw postings about the Paradas’ efforts online and reached out. Getler is coauthor of Rebel Gold: One Man’s Quest to Crack the Code Behind the Secret Treasure of the Confederacy, a book about treasure purportedly left behind by the Knights of the Golden Circle, a quasi-military secret society formed in the South and Midwest during the Civil War. The group’s members are said to have raided Union shipments to raise money for the Confederate cause, and Getler theorized that the Paradas’ find was KGC contraband. He and Dennis began talking daily.

As a former Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News reporter, Getler had connections. He contacted the FBI’s Art Crime Team, based in Philadelphia. In late January 2018, a contingent of seven agents met the Paradas and Getler at the site, did their own tests, and later made a follow-up visit with a respected geophysics firm, Enviroscan. FBI agent Jake Archer soon called with astonishing test results: The independent findings suggested the presence of seven to nine tons of gold on the site, much more than the 26 bars in the legend, which combined would have weighed only 1,300 pounds. He then drew up a warrant invoking eminent domain to dig up what they believed, based on the historical record, to be hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. government property. Dennis said he would request a finder’s fee and says Archer didn’t object.

The treasure hunters have spent the past eight years scrutinizing details of what happened in the 36 or so hours after they arrived for the first day of the dig on March 13, 2018. Archer told them to wait in Kem’s Mazda hatchback because the site was too hazardous for bystanders. A staging area had been erected with a makeshift headquarters in a massive tent; the three men estimated that at least 50 agents circled the location.

“There was FBI all over that mountain,” Kem says. “It blew our minds.” It wasn’t until midafternoon, around 3 p.m., that they were escorted to the dig site. An hour later, Archer called things to a halt for the night, asserting that everyone was tired and that they’d resume in the morning. When the Paradas and Getler returned the next morning, March 14, they were again kept from the dig location, this time for another five hours. When Archer escorted them up, he pointed into an empty hole, indicating that the FBI had found nothing.

“No, wait a second,” Dennis Parada told him. “There’s nothing here now. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t something here yesterday or the day before. You’re the one that told me nine tons [of gold].”

Still, Archer shooed the men back to their car and told them not to speak publicly of the matter. Frustrated and bewildered, they agonized over how all their science—and the conclusions of independent experts—could have been so far off the mark.

“I’ve been in this business too long,” Dennis says. “You can have a false reading…If they would have pulled out some scrap metal of any kind, I wouldn’t question it. But to tell me nothing was found? No.”

It wasn’t until the next day that people began asking them: Did you hear what happened overnight on that mountain? And did you see the armored trucks?

Neighbors informed them that the FBI had not halted work at 4 p.m. as they said they would. Cheryl Elder, a longtime local constable who lives in one of the houses closest to the site, said she saw lights flooding the hillside, the beeping of what she believes was a backhoe moving in reverse, and the percussive chatter of a jackhammer in the hours after midnight. Her husband was out of town, and she called him deep in the night, complaining about the clamor that had kept her awake until nearly 3 a.m.

The FBI has never wavered from its statement, made shortly after the dig was completed on March 14, 2018, that nothing was found on Dents Run. But this steadfastness hasn’t changed anyone’s mind in the community—and the Bureau’s behavior in the aftermath of the excavation has only surfaced more questions.

The FBI hasn’t just denied excavating gold; the Bureau has denied doing things that neighbors plainly witnessed, including the overnight dig. When the treasure hunters sought records of the operation using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in May 2018, the FBI initially claimed that it had none; it then conceded that 2,378 pages of records existed, but processing them would take nearly six years. Finders Keepers later engaged Anne Weismann, a former Justice Department attorney who now specializes in transparency and accountability in government and is the former chief FOIA counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Weismann filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeking to force the Department of Justice, which the FBI is part of, to release the material. Over the past few years, the DOJ has gradually produced partially redacted records—but even then, the releases came with caveats and seemingly altered items.

Getler believes that the report compiled by Enviroscan and obtained through FOIA was missing key pages. It does not include the analysis of the central dig target that Parada had zeroed in on, and instead shows and describes potential targets off to the side, Getler says. And the FBI had initially said it had no video footage, until Parada produced images from hidden trail cameras showing an agent apparently recording the dig with a video camera. The Bureau then said there were 17 relevant video files—but released only four, without explanation, all of which had been filmed by Parada himself and given to agents in the run-up to the dig.

The Bureau also produced hundreds of photos, all rendered in low-resolution, high-contrast black-and-white that obfuscates the time of day they were made or even, in some cases, what’s in the frame. Parada alleges they erased the shadows on the backhoe and deleted all the time stamps—and that an accompanying photo log creates more questions. How is it possible that a large moss-covered boulder at the dig site was not blanketed in snow in a photo that was supposedly taken an hour after a snow squall—while the same rock was snow-covered in a photo purportedly taken 15 hours later? Why did the Bureau have no video from the second and final day of the dig? And why could they furnish no photos or video showing what the agents’ own records describe as a 35-foot-long, 13-foot-deep trench? They “gave us junk,” Parada says. “Why? Because they filmed the entire night dig—made video and took pictures. But when they got caught with their pants down, they pulled all those out of the files. Now they had to fill in the blanks.” DOJ attorneys acknowledged gaps in the records but managed to satisfy the court that they’d done enough.

If the Paradas and Getler are right about what happened, there are three possible scenarios. Either the FBI officials failed to document every aspect of the dig while on site; they lost or destroyed some records; or they withheld information they’d been ordered to disclose, Weismann says. “There are real holes in the records and the videotapes and the photographs that don’t really account for what I think was the most critical time period”—the interval when there were no other witnesses, possibly during the night, she says.

In December 2025, the Justice Department released its final tranche—most consequentially, an extensive operations plan, titled “Operation Union Gold.” There are no smoking guns there. But the treasure hunters homed in on a section titled “Coordinating Instructions,” which notes that the treasure, if discovered, would be moved to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The Mint would provide armored trucks for said transport. “When valuables are first discovered at the site,” the document states, an agent whose name was redacted would contact the Mint’s chief of police “and request armored transport vehicle.”

The agent in question, the document adds, “previously requested that a vehicle be ready to depart Phila. within 30 minutes of receiving said notification.”

This revelation deepens the intrigue around the mysterious excavation, raising new questions about what the FBI did and casting fresh doubt on its version of events.

Multiple witnesses in addition to McCarthy offered detailed accounts of sightings of armored vehicles on the second day of the dig, in the hours after the FBI’s apparent overnight excavation. Dave Cuneo, who knows Kem Parada from law enforcement and works at the Johnsonburg Police Department in Elk County, says he was at the Weedville Hotel, about 13 miles southwest of Dents Run, that day. He and the hotel owner saw two armored vehicles and more than 20 “blacked out SUVs, some in front and some behind them, almost like a parade.”

Dents Run neighbor Cheryl Elder said that just before the vehicles passed by, an agent ordered her inside her house. Instead, she loitered defiantly inside her open garage. “I just stood there with my dog watching them,” she says. “Like, what are you gonna do, shoot me?”

Heather Selle, who worked at a restaurant in Weedville at the time, says she saw armored cars that morning headed toward Dents Run on Route 555. “I was getting my daughter onto the school van and that’s when they came by, around 8:30 to 8:45. I was saying to myself, ‘What’s going on? It’s not something you typically see in the area.’”

Meanwhile, Robin Scull and her husband, who then lived in nearby DuBois, both saw the trucks at the Sheetz convenience store in Falls Creek—at least three of them with black escort vehicles. “We just thought, Wow, why would those vehicles be in our town?” Her husband’s grandmother’s family was from Dents Run, and they all knew the legend of the lost gold. “When she was a little girl,” Scull says, “her dad talked about it.” Scull says she’s been following developments at Dents Run for at least two decades.

None of that proves anything, and stories about the armored trucks around Dents Run that day vary in detail based on who’s telling the story; the number of vehicles range from two to 20. But the Paradas and Getler believe it’s significant that the operations report states the vehicles would only be there if valuables were uncovered.

“We know they did a night dig and went as far as they could to recover the gold,” Getler says. “And if they were not successful, as they claim, you don’t bring in armored trucks the next day. Logic says you can’t do that.”

The latest disclosures still fall short of providing irrefutable proof that gold was found. What the records mostly do is answer certain questions while raising entirely new ones. Weismann, the FOIA attorney, says extracting documents from the government is never easy, and she doesn’t rule out the possibility that some records—or photographic or video evidence—were withheld or destroyed. “It shows, in a way, the limitations of FOIA,” she says. “I mean, the absence of some of the records [the Paradas] hoped to find doesn’t mean that they were wrong, or even that they don’t exist…I do not believe that the FBI showed that there was no gold there.”

If anything, the absence of any remarkable disclosures makes the obfuscation even more puzzling. “One of the things that’s never made sense to me,” Weismann says, “is that if the FBI truly found nothing…they would have just opened their files and said, ‘Have at it, you’ll see.’”

There was also what the FBI didn’t do, she points out. “The record clearly suggests that the FBI thought there was gold as well, and yet they never followed up with Enviroscan,” Weismann points out. “They never tried to figure out what was wrong with those analyses…There’s just so many things that happened that legitimately raise suspicions.”

Indeed, rather than quell cynicism, the government’s slow and seemingly incomplete response to the records requests has only fueled the speculation about what might have happened—and in that sense, the FBI itself is partly responsible for the ongoing swirl of controversy. The nearly 800 comments on a Discovery Channel UK video published in 2024 shows unanimity around one notion: The Paradas’ only real mistake was trusting the FBI in the first place—and the DOJ’s behavior only reinforces that argument. Instead of getting answers, the people living around Dents Run are left with a kind of federal governmental reality-distortion field—one in which they are asked not to believe what they’ve seen and heard with their own eyes. “When they fight so hard for documents that…aren’t that particularly surprising, you wonder why?” Weismann says. “They haven’t done anything to allay…concerns that something happened in Dents Run that they’re covering up.”

So the saga continues. The Paradas’ other attorney, William Cluck, says he is reviewing the latest batch of documents to determine whether to appeal any redactions. And at the Paradas’ urging, he filed an FOIA request in January with the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, seeking records on items brought to the facility in March 2018.

If anything, Parada is now more emboldened than ever. “We’ve got a lot more to go through yet, but we’re winning the battle,” he says. “We got the proof. At least we know [the gold] went to the Philadelphia Mint. Now we’re gonna hit those guys” at the Mint.

What that might reveal is anyone’s guess.