- If you discover an old treasure map, remember — X marks the spot.
Long-forgotten buried treasures are go-to material in fantasy and adventure movies. Occasionally real-life archeologists get to have their Indiana Jones moment as well, too.
While most of the time they find relatively worthless everyday items, every now and then researchers strike literal gold. And when they do, what they find might just be worth millions.
Here are five times people have discovered a ridiculously valuable lost treasure.
The Hoxne Hoard — $4.3 million
The story of the Hoxne Hoard starts with another lost item. In 1992, an English farmer called Peter Whatling misplaced his hammer.
He asked a friend who owned a metal detector to help him find it. Together, the two men discovered some much more precious.
The Hoxne Hoard, as their find came to be known, is the largest Roman treasure discovered in Britain. Altogether, the hoard contained 14,865 gold, silver and bronze coins, alongside 200 pieces of silver cutlery and golden jewelry.
The original owner of the money and jewelry was most likely a single incredibly wealthy family sometime around 407 CE. Put together, the treasures were worth about $4.3 million in today’s money.
Whether Whatling ever found his hammer, though, we don’t know.
The Saddle Ridge Hoard — $10 million
In 2013, a California couple — identified only as John and Mary — discovered something unusual on their property. They found an old metal can hanging from a tree.
The can was so old that the tree had partially engulfed it as it grew. They also spotted an unusual rock formation, which they named “Saddle Ridge.”
The couple started digging at the site and discovered more metal cans. In the end, they pulled out eight cans, containing a total of 1,427 gold dollar coins dating from mid to late 1800s.
Altogether, the discovery was worth approximately $10 million, making it the largest gold coin cache ever found in the U.S. To this day, nobody knows who buried the coins or why.
The Belitung Shipwreck — $80 million
In 1998, fishermen caught the haul of a lifetime off the coast of Indonesia. They discovered an ancient Arabian merchant vessel.
Having been most likely on a journey to China, the ship sank around 830 AD. With it, it took one of the largest assortments of Tang Dynasty treasures to the bottom of the sea.
The hoard contained gold and ceramic artifacts, such as bowls, spice jars, inkwells, funerals urns, jewelry boxes, and many different kinds of precious stones and jewels. The treasures were worth an approximate $80 million.
Today, the riches are held by the Singapore Tourism Board, after the Singaporean government purchased the sunken cargo.
SS Gairsoppa — $200 million
As WWII raged, a Nazi German U-boat — or a submarine — torpedoed British merchant ship SS Gairsoppa while it sailed in the Atlantic. The ship sank within 20 minutes, taking 85 sailors with it to the depths.
In addition to human lives, SS Gairsoppa’s cargo was also lost. And what a cargo it was — the ship had been carrying roughly 200 tons of silver.
The treasure remained at the bottom of the sea until the U.K. government decided they wanted it brought back to the surface. They hired a private company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, to discover the ship and salvage its cargo.
In 2011, the company found the wreck at a depth of 2.8 miles. As they were hauling up the silver, they had to stop the operations several times due to bad weather at sea.
By 2013, they had recovered 61 tons of the silver bullion. At that time, the salvaged treasures amounted to $200 million in value.
The Black Swan Project — $500 million
A lot of mystery surrounds the Black Swan Project. The secrecy began in 2007 when Odyssey Marine Exploration — the same company that discovered SS Gairsoppa — flew 17 tons of coins from Gibraltar to an unknown location in the U.S.
The company had located a shipwreck, but they didn’t disclose where, when, or how they found it. Neither did they tell anyone what types of coins they found.
Some light on the case came soon, though. The Spanish government claimed that the treasure came from Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a frigate the British sunk in 1804.
A U.S. Federal Court ordered Odyssey to make the location of the shipwreck public. It turned out that the location didn’t match that of Nuestra.
However, after a further five years of lawsuits, Spain won and Odyssey flew the treasure over to Europe. We still don’t have the details, but we know the coins are worth $500 million.