The Curse of Oak Island

There's a show on the History channel that Scott and I kind of got sucked into this semester called "The Curse of Oak Island". It's about this team of treasure hunters (for lack of a better word) who are searching for an ancient buried treasure on Oak Island in Nova Scotia. Pirate treasure, Marie Antoinette's jewels, Shakespearean manuscripts, the Ark of the Covenant? It has been speculated that any one of these things can be hidden there, and people have been trying to find out what exactly is on that island for over 200 years. It's very "National Treasure", and they could definitely benefit from having their own Riley.

This particular incarnation of the hunt centers around two brothers from Michigan. One has had a life-long interest in Oak Island the elusive treasure (naturally) and the other is a savvy business tycoon, whose job is pretty much to bankroll the project and offer doubts about the endeavor every time something goes a little bit wrong (because the show wouldn't benefit from overall positivity. There's no dramatic tension in that). Using a variety of tools--ground penetrating radar, scuba diving, drilling, draining entire swamps--the team tries to unravel the mystery using the clues left behind by those treasure hunters who came before them.

So my questions are pretty straight forward: Is this for real, and what can we possibly gain from things like this? The third or fourth suggestion when you Google, "the curse of oak island' adds the word fake. So obviously other people are skeptical. Maybe they're planting this seemingly game changing evidence. Maybe they already found it and the government made them turn it over so the whole thing is a ruse. Maybe they are using real historical investigation methods and tools to find the answer to real historical puzzle.

I'd like to think that it's real, and that they aren't housing this elaborate hoax behind the veil of historical methods and research, but who really knows but them.