Where Can I Buy The Book The Secret Byron Preiss Youtube

During the pandemic, I rediscovered my honey of an addictive activeness called Armchair Treasure Hunts.

The phrase "Armchair Treasure Hunts" is actually a flake of a misnomer. The hunts may starting time in an armchair, but hunters soon venture out into the real globe with spades and metal detectors, ofttimes digging upwards yards and trespassing and causing all sorts of mischief.

The original Armchair Hunt was birthed by a 1979 British pic book called Masquerade by a big-bearded and reclusive creative person named Kit Williams. I loved that volume every bit a kid, and spent countless hours studying it.

The volume contains a series of detailed and fantastical images—a man with rabbit ears and a violin, the Lord's day dancing with the Moon, so forth. The paintings independent clues to the location of a real-life treasure buried somewhere in England: a gilt rabbit about the size of a paperback book, insured for £100,000.

Well, it drove the world insane—or at to the lowest degree a sure portion of the world.

"Masqueraders dug up acres of countryside, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, wrote tens of thousands of letters to Williams, and occasionally got stuck halfway up cliffs or were apprehended by law while trespassing on historic properties," equally an commodity in the literary periodical Hazlitt puts it.

I never went to England, but I did have my theories. That seagull ways it must be on the declension!

At the fourth dimension, Kit Williams told reporters that all the unexpected attending from Masquerade wrecked his life. People would knock on his door at 3 a.m. He got tens of thousands of letters and terrifying packages, such as a disembodied, blood-covered plastic mitt.

But when I tracked down Kit and chatted with him on the phone, he seemed more bemused and mystified than angry. "People flew from all over, spent their life savings. It was a flake embarrassing … One man wrote me seven thousand words a day. That'due south more than I ever wrote in my life!"

After ii years of ransacked gardens, the rabbit was found. It was dug upward in a park in the county of Bedfordshire most a statue of Catherine of Aragon, underneath the tip of the shadow she casts at noon on the equinox.

The discovery itself was a picayune messy, since the man who plant information technology patently had gained inside information about the general location from an ex-girlfriend of Kit'southward.

But regardless, the smashing Masquerade chase was over.

Or was it?

A British journalist devoted an entire book to the phenomenon called The Quest for the Golden Hare, and he writes:

"Tens of thousands of letters from Masqueraders have convinced me that the human mind has an equal capacity for pattern-matching and self-deception. While some addicts were decorated cooking the riddle, others were more single-mindedly continuing their ain pursuit of the hare quite regardless of the news that information technology had been constitute. Their own theories had come to seem so convincing that no exterior evidence could refute them."

What a scary insight into how we remember! We are not e'er swayed past evidence. We spot a pattern, fall in love with it, and refuse to change. QAnon followers are basically obsessed Masqueraders but chasing a nonexistent cabal of cannibals instead of a gilt rabbit.

While researching a volume most puzzles, I stumbled beyond several other armchair hunts that are still unsolved.

1 in item interested me. It was hatched past a 1982 book called The Secret, not to be confused with the woo-woo self-assistance megahit The Hush-hush, which promises to make every five-foot-5-inch accountant an NBA superstar if he just visualizes information technology difficult enough.

No, this Secret was created by a author named Byron Preiss who buried twelve treasures effectually the United States and Canada—piddling boxes containing precious or semiprecious gems. He hid clues to the treasures in twelve paintings and twelve cryptic poems.

So far, 3 treasures have been plant: one in Cleveland, i in Chicago, and, virtually recently, one in 2019 in Boston. That leaves 9 for treasure hunters to obsess over.

And captivate they do—on websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, episodes of a reality show. Preiss died in a motorcar accident many years agone, simply thousands of fans still endeavor to get inside his mind.

And things can get pretty heated.

There are hoaxes (people pretending to observe treasure) and trolls who are banned from forums. One Secret hunter agreed to e-mail with me, so long every bit I didn't apply his name, explaining: "While 99% of armchair treasure hunters are perfectly normal people, there are a few who are literally insane nonetheless figurer-literate enough to postal service on forums, harass people, etc."

I plant this to be true. For instance, hither's a message on Reddit: "Information technology's a shame the people best equipped to observe this treasure are clowns like you who tin't pull your head out of your donkey far enough to see the goddamn map in the goddamn painting."

After reading several such messages, I retrieve 99 percent might be a flake optimistic.

One of the big names in the Secret quest goes past the handle "the Oregonian." He has a website where he dissects clues and gives his theories. I electronic mail him mid-quarantine and tell him that I'd similar to find the New York–based treasure for my book. He responds that he can help. He believes he knows exactly where it is. He includes an eleven-page attachment dissecting the painting and the verse form.

He explains that the painting—which is of a white-robed, long-haired figure floating above the ocean—has a subconscious 74 in the ocean waves. This is probably the longitude of New York Urban center.

The face up on the hovering figure looks similar the Statue of Liberty's, and then that's some other inkling that it is buried within sight of the statue.

The poem has a line almost New Yorkers speaking of "Indies native."

This likely refers to Alexander Hamilton, who was built-in in the West Indies. That, says the Oregonian, is a hint to a Hamilton-related location (the Oregonian asked me non to reveal said location).

And on and on.

The concluding reply: the treasure is cached under a tree on a side street with some abandoned storefronts (once more, he asked me not to reveal which civic).

The Oregonian admits that this sounds preposterous: "To anyone who hasn't spent some time studying The Secret, this solution is going to sound convoluted and ridiculous. And that's kind of the point. Information technology IS convoluted and ridiculous. The brain of Byron Preiss worked in fairly mysterious ways."

So if the Oregonian knows where it is, why hasn't he dug it up?

Well, he doesn't desire to get to jail. The tree is under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department. A few years ago, he got permission from the department to dig, just only if he hired an internationally certified arborist and used a power tool called an air spade–which he'd never gotten around to doing. I said I might be willing to arrange the rental of the air spade. We contacted the Parks Department. They changed their mind—no earthworks immune.

And notwithstanding … a few months afterwards, the Oregonian emailed me that maybe he'd found a loophole? On the Parks Section's website, he spotted a note to New Yorkers who care about trees that it'due south of import to loosen "the tiptop few inches of soil with a hand cultivator to undo compaction."

"So . . . maybe you could bring a hand tool and dig a footling ways?" the Oregonian wrote. He besides suggested I bring marigolds and plant them to avoid suspicion. He'd do it himself, but he lives far away.

So on a Sun, off I went on my surreptitious horticultural mission with a shopping bag containing marigolds and a trowel. It took me nearly an entire mean solar day. I can study that one tree in New York now boasts a couple of lovely marigolds at its base, merely I can also report that the Undercover treasure is not buried nether that tree—or at least information technology'south more than four inches deep, which is as far every bit I felt comfortable digging.

Words by A.J. Jacobs

Illustrations fromThe Undercover by Byron Preiss

Excerpted from The Puzzler past A.J. Jacobs. Copyright © 2022 by A.J. Jacobs. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Interested in doing an Armchair Hunt of your ain? Endeavor solving the metapuzzles in TANGRAM magazine.

Source: https://www.artofplay.com/blogs/articles/armchair-treasure-hunts

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