7,000,000,000 people on this planet would like to find a buried treasure on their property.

IT HAPPENED TO ME!

My life was at risk on a daily basis for five years. During the summer and fall I spent nearly every day digging exploratory holes and then tunnels as deep as 36 feet below ground in my own backyard using a mini jackhammer and a variety of shovels and wrecking bars. I escaped numerous deadly tricks designed to prevent anybody but Drake from recovering the treasure.

These included flooding tunnels, collapsing rooms triggered by pressure sensitive stones, sand and quicksand tricks designed to trap and suffocate and a false ceiling waiting to crush any unsuspecting treasure hunter. There is a reason that pictures of Pirate Treasure are always surrounded by skeletons! During the winter and spring months, I read everything I could find about Sir Francis Drake, the Miwok Indians and technologies that Drake learned about over the course of a lifetime at sea.

A history buff, citizen-scientist, daredevil and lover of the high seas from an early age, Robert L. Stupack also prided himself on his skill with numbers. After graduating from Penn State in 1978, he began a profitable career in the financial sector, where he worked for such prestigious firms as Price Waterhouse and Smith Barney. After spending a year and a half as a trainee on the Bond Trading Desk in Manhattan, he moved to San Francisco, where he serviced small and medium sized banks throughout the western US.

As luck would have it, he was in Manhattan on Black Friday, October 16, 1987, when his 100+ year-old firm went bankrupt overnight, as depicted in the famous scene from the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street. At age 30 Stupack bought a house on scenic Greenbrae Ridge in Marin County and was thriving in his chosen profession, though soon thereafter he began to feel somewhat restless.

At age 44, his life changed radically when he discovered evidence that Sir Francis Drake might have buried plundered treasure under the very property he owned.

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