How to Find Treasure with a Metal Detector

Step 1) Own a Metal Detector – Okay, I do.

Step 2) Obtain permission to detect from land owners – Okay, that’s possible.

Step 3) Live somewhere with an enormous amount of history – Darn.

There’s a time and place for everything right? Well, I suppose as far as the United States is concerned, New England isn’t a bad place to own a metal detector. Except for the fact that anywhere worth detecting is strictly off-limits or privately owned.

Ever since I was a kid I’ve read magazine accounts of people out west and in the Appalachians digging up coffee cans full of silver dollars. In the less populated areas of the country you have more freedom to find interesting areas and detect un-disturbed.

Imagine metal detecting in Europe, where the history extends back thousands of years instead of hundreds. Well then you might imagine this:

Real gold Saxon treasure

Terry Herbert recently dug this up in a cultivated field in Burntwood, England. Amazing find. The stuff of dreams. Real honest to goodness treasure.

Amazing treasure at that!

If you read the original article, you’ll see a statement from Mr. Herbert that I must address… as it appears to be a fine example of Occam’s Razor. Here’s a quote from Mr. Herbert.

“I have this phrase that I say sometimes; ‘Spirits of yesteryear, take me where the coins appear’, but on that day I changed coins to gold,” said the Herbert, who took up metal detecting as a hobby 18 years ago.

“I don’t know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it…”

Really?  That’s your explanation?  A spirit magically directed your hand on that day for reasons unknown using mechanisms unknown?

How about the more likely possibility that thousands of metal detectorists have been hunting for decades over millions of potential outing, and your find was the lucky 1 in 100 million?

Occam’s Razor informs us that when confronted with 2 competing explanations, the one that introduces the least amount of new information is usually the correct one.

Explanation number 1 invokes a spirit entity that intervened using a currently unknown mechanism that, if it exists, would require our understanding of physics to be entirely re-written.

Explanation number 2 invokes probability theory which has been thoroughly studied and verified for the past 500 years.

Which explanation is most likely to be correct?  You decide.

Note: There could, of course, be other explanations.  I am knowingly committing the logical fallacy of False Dichotomy in my example.