JM
Greetings podcasters. This month we have a very special episode for you. Over the past several months, we’ve had a lot of guests, veteran hunters from our team, whom you all know from their online work and years on the hunt. Two episodes ago, my co host George went over the puzzle in his hometown of St. Augustine, Florida. Other than my commentary on other people’s stories and some theories I’ve dropped here and there regarding Chicago and some other places. No one has really heard my take on one of these at least not fully. This month, we are going to talk about the portion of the puzzle I am most familiar with Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A great place on a great lake is what they used to say. The home of Summerfest, the world’s largest music festival. It’s the home of the Brewers, a surrogate home for the Green Bay Packers. Well, all of Wisconsin is really its happy days and the Fonz, Laverne and Shirley. It’s the birthplace of how we Epstein Les Paul, the bodines over in waka Shah. They’re the violent femmes and Liberace Gene Wilder was born there, as were the Zucker brothers and Dan Harmon. The movie Major League was filmed in Milwaukee at the old county stadium where the Brewers used to play Dwayne Wade, Dan Janssen and Tony Romo all were born in Milwaukee. Most famously though, Milwaukee is known for being the birthplace of Miller, Papst and Schlitz beers, nobody forgets that famous line. What made Milwaukee famous made a loser out of me. The real truth is, Milwaukee is the biggest small town that you’ll ever visit. I spent most of my life there and I remember it all too well. In this episode, we’re going to focus on how I broke down Milwaukee. And the progress I’ve made so far on that puzzle. I’m not going to give away the ending, you’ll have to figure that one out on your own as the cask is still in the ground. But this episode will give you a lot of things to think about regarding this specific city, and the puzzle in general. I’m going to cover all of the things they didn’t tell you and probably didn’t even know about on Expedition unknown. I’ll tell you ways to solve the clues, which gets you to the correct area and all the confirmations that go with it. I’ll even show you the surprise Indiana Jones type twist at the end of the puzzle. Hopefully from all of this, you’ll be able to pick up some knowledge which you can use on your own quest. In addition, we’re going to have one of our team members several with us doing a live boots on the ground walkthrough of the puzzle while we talk about it just for fun, and because you guys asked us to do it. Welcome to the show. George, welcome back. And we got an exciting one for everybody here this month.

George Ward
Do we? It’s Milwaukee, when it’s wonky ever been exciting. Like I said the most depressing place. I

JM
know. I’m from there. So I I know the pain all too well. It’s not. There are fond memories. But as I think we’ll find out, it really only gets about five months worth of sunlight and then the rest is dark.

George Ward
That fact explains so much about you.

JM
All right. Do you have your image out? Let’s talk about this image here.

George Ward
Okay, I feel like jjp was tasked with painting an image about Milwaukee. And he was like, I can’t find anything interesting. So I’m just gonna pay to do juggling. And that’s what he did.

JM
That is certainly one explanation for it. I mean, it’s not a particularly exciting or it does capture Milwaukee quite well. I’ll just put it that way.

George Ward
Yes. A morose man doing.

JM
Yeah, right. Just really not into it. Juggling

George Ward
is looking the other way. It’s like, I’m not even interested in this activity that I’m doing right now.

JM
I’m just paying the bills, man. Just juggling to pay the bills. You know, I juggle nine to five gets his stuff from art SmartStart Mart over there. I’m Brady. Anyways, so let’s go over this image and see what we can find here in this somewhat morose painting of Palenque cars. I’m just gonna cover some of the well known, these aren’t groundbreaking things just yet. We’ll get into some of that stuff. But for now, let’s just go over the stuff that we know there’s a map of southeastern Wisconsin in the lower left side of the image. If you turn it to the right 90 degrees, you’ll see the shape of Wisconsin with the Green Bay Peninsula sticking out a little bit there. There is a map of Milwaukee, the city from an overhead map view hidden in the Head of the juggler, and I’ll post a image of that on the Facebook group. So you can see that there’s a map of Lake Park in the hand, if you look in the hand, you’ll see this kind of Horseshoe like, semi circle shape in the hand there, that matches up perfectly to Lake Park, if you look at it on a map, and again, he did he use maps and a lot of these, we’re finding all kinds of ways that he used maps and different ways that he clued you in to places that you could find by looking at a overhead map map of the city or we have Google Maps now. But back in the day, you’d be up in the library studying some Atlas or something or in your school library. Maybe you buy one encyclopedia, whatever. There’s a large looming building outline in the image, it’s towering over in the background behind the juggler. So we have this building, we have the hand of the juggler pointing in some weird kind of way, another shadowy figure kinda to the left of the other shadowy building, it’s slight, but there’s something in there, we’ll get to that a bit. There’s the gold collar and the pattern in the neck area there. Of course, everybody knows now about the Rebus code that’s inside of the objects that are being juggled. And we’ll get to that as well. The two T balls, the gem, flower, and then the the millstone, the key and the walking stick. There’s two trees that we know about one inside of the cape, and one which makes up the top of the cape. And then there’s some darker objects on the right side of the face, which we’ll get to a little bit later on. Do you see anything else in there George that I missed? Just crippling depression. Right? A lot of brown.

George Ward
That’s very blah.

JM
Okay, so let’s talk about this image for a minute. There’s not much in it. And that’s exactly what I want to talk about. It’s unlike the other images in the sense that it does not contain any printed numbers that we’ve been able to find. It contains a JJ P, there are no numbers hidden in the background, not in the hair, not in the cape. Nothing like we’ve seen in the other 11 images where there’s clearly numbers present. He’s gotten us used to looking for coordinates so that we can know what city that he gives us in in every other image. So we assume here that he’s asked to be giving us the name of a city somehow. It’s just not in numbers. Apparently, we have 11 of one. And then this oddball,

George Ward
Robert Fox made a interesting point the other day, about the latitude and longitude for Milwaukee being really, really close to the latitude and longitude for Chicago. And it might have been left out just so people weren’t confused by those two, because I mean, his latitude and longitude coordinates, they’re rounded, you know, a good bit, they’re not exact to each city, they’re, you know, maybe one number up or one number down. It’s possible that he didn’t add it because he didn’t want people to get confused.

JM
certainly a possibility. I mean, Boston and New York are quite close. And you know, there wasn’t any mix up there. Who knows who knows the real reason, but we know he did it, it’s in the puzzle. It had to have been planned out. It took a while you had to paint all these images in a perfect circle, and just the right way, and he had to actually theme the whole thing around the juggling, which we’ll get to in a little bit. He’s gotten us used to looking for these numbers. What I believe he’s doing is sort of showing us how to look a little deeper into the puzzle. He’s clearly made it known that you get the city from a clue inside the image. This doesn’t change, but I’ve stated before the delivery method of the clue changes throughout the puzzle. He gives us the name of the city, but he does it using a picture word puzzle called a Rebus puzzle. For those of you playing along at home. This is a puzzle where you combine the first syllable of the different pictures inside the puzzle to form a new word. For instance, if there’s a picture of a cracked plate, and then a picture of a cow, and then a picture of a flagpole, but no flag, just the pole, and then a picture of an arrow pointing to an island surrounded by water. And you would put those together as Krakow, Poland, and so on and so forth. So that’s how Rebus works. It’s a picture two word syllable thing and you use the first syllable of the word, and you combine these things to make new words. That’s what’s going on there. In the image, you see a juggler and that’s going to be important down the road as well. The items the jugglers, juggling appear to be two red balls of flour, a key a walking stick and a millstone and the jewel the amethyst. If we take away the jewel in the flour, which we know are in all of them, we have two red balls, this key stick in the stone. Through trial and error. You can make as many Baa Baa, or ball ball names as you want, but the two red balls just don’t fit in there. So if you remove those two red balls, then you Have the other three objects, which when put together, you get mill stone walkingstick and the key Milwaukee. So here he’s given you the name of the city. And he’s also showed you that there are other ways of getting information out of the image other than just numbers. Other things going on.

George Ward
I’ve done a lot of rebuses That’s key walk mill. I mean, he’s completely reversed it and mixed it up something.

JM
Yeah. Oh, key walk mill, Oregon. Eight, eight years I wasted in this part.

George Ward
If I were you, I would say this Rebus is all mixed up, because it’s a clue that you have to mix up the

JM
scrambled scrambler exactly right. Now that we have Milwaukee as the city, we could look at the image. We know there’s a building in the image. But it’s not a recognizable building. It’s not the Brooklyn Bridge, I don’t know. It’s just a building. If you weren’t from Milwaukee, you probably have no idea what that building is. At this point, we can start looking through the verses and try to apply the verse to get some kind of help on where to go in Milwaukee. And to save a lot of time going through and making comparisons which don’t work to isolate the verse and try and figure out which one it is. I’ll make it easy and let you know that the verse corresponding to Milwaukee is verse number eight. And as we go through it, you’ll see how it works with this city. You got your first decoder ring on George.

George Ward
Yes.

JM
Are you ready? I’m trying to make it as exciting as possible. I know. It’s I mean,

George Ward
it’s Milwaukee man.

JM
Why do you think that people drink so much beer?

George Ward
Have you ever heard anybody? Super excited? We’re going on a family vacation. Oh, where are you going? Milwaukee? No, nobody wants to go to Milwaukee. People in Milwaukee don’t want to go to Milwaukee.

JM
Alice Cooper loves Milwaukee. Wayne’s World wants to go to Milwaukee. No, no, no. It was something back in the age of you know grunge in the stuff back when we were kids. Okay, it was a hoppin place, man.

George Ward
No, it was never hopping. It was never a happy place.

JM
All right, so here’s our verse. It starts off with view the three stories of Mitchell. Now you can talk to several different camps on what this means and how you should approach and while I was in one camp for a while, more recently, I’ve come to understand what I believe this actually means. The three stories of Mitchell, my interpretation, here we go. The Mitchell domes are a nationally recognized landmark and tourist attraction in the 1980s. As a kid, I remember a large billboard, it was like a wall advertisement or one of those, like painted on the side of a building kind of thing. That was like a permanent thing. It was always there. It was on Water Street because I took the number 15 bus as a kid to go all around the city. It I saw this thing all the time, I think it was in the safe house parking lot like on the building. There’s a new building constructed there now. But there used to be a parking lot adjacent to water and wells. And then there was a building next to it. And I think this is where this thing was painted. But it was basically a sign that said, view the Michel domes or come see the Michel domes, and it had this picture of the three domes and Mitchell Park. It’s a unique, nationally famous piece of architecture from the 60s. Each one of these domes had its own story. And it gives us a way to match up the verse to Milwaukee in sort of a national a big way. Like, if you didn’t really know much about Milwaukee, you would have known about the the domes, the brewers and beer were like the three big things. I might even have some like magazine articles, which show this or whatever. But the advertisement, the view of the domes on that is very similar to the structure that you kind of see adjacent to the big building. It’s kind of a unique shape, I’ll post a picture of it. I think that’s what this is referring to actually, and I think it’s just a way to match up the city. But I could be wrong. You know, I don’t. I’ve walked from ninth and Mitchell from the Mitchell mansion, all the way down to Water Street. You don’t start seeing anything till you get near the theater. So we’ll get into that a little later. I really think the vet first line is just a way that we can. Once we know the city, we can match this verse to it.

George Ward
And then the other camp is the three story building

JM
Mitchell hall right the other camp is Mitchell Hall on Kenwood Avenue, which runs directly into basically the corner of Lake Drive. Lincoln Memorial Drive and Kenwood Boulevard is a three way intersection where Lake Park is one corner of Lake Park is. So the other camp is he’s referring to Mitchell Hall. And there’s some kind of strange explanation about three different streets and a painting that’s kind of obscure. There’s another camp that believes you enter from Mitchell Hall and come down Kenwood Boulevard, there’s a few different interpretations of it out there. Once you get into Lake Park, none of that first part matters or does it? I don’t know, we’ll see remains to be seen. If we go off how the solve puzzles work, then we need to find the building in the image like we did in Chicago and Cleveland. Maybe if there weren’t a building in the image to go by. The verse might be telling us something different. Maybe this is where we go find Mitchell hall or Mitchell, some Mitchell building, we have a building to go find. It’s just how do we get there. It’s not unlike the way the other puzzles work, find the icon in the city. And I did actually go to the Mitchell domes, George, I took a trip out there. Mitchell Park is very lovely. There are 86 steps out there in their gardens. The interesting part about it is you go up on top of the hill, you walk by this tree that has a bunch of giant letters carved into it. So they’ve been there forever. And then you get up to the top of the hill. And there’s this thing called the view monument, named after this guy named view V i EWX or So VI e u x or something, some French name. It’s called the view monument. So you can stand up the view monument and view the three stories of Mitchell. But I spent a whole day day and a half out there went back a third time just to confirm some things and never really found anything but it’s a great place to visit. It’s not what it used to be. It used to be a lot more maintained and lush and beautiful. But it’s kind of like many things fall into the wayside. Like the original fountain of youth. That’s kind of what it’s like,

George Ward
please don’t mislead our listeners. It is not a great place to visit.

JM
It’s a great place to visit just not to stay. All right. All right. I’ll give you that three days. Give it three days. You’ll love it. Okay. All right. So our next line as we keep going through the verse is as you walk the beating of the world. Now this is fun, because we get to talk about a friend of ours with this one. This is a riddle, folks. It doesn’t mean go find a bunch of World War Two monuments on Wisconsin Avenue or by market. It’s simply a riddle. He’s trying to give you a name of the street you’re supposed to go to just gives us the name of a street. He doesn’t make it hard. It’s only one block over from the main drag Wisconsin Avenue downtown. And the riddle is solved like this. HG Wells spelt w e l l e s wrote a book called War of the Worlds this book was redone in radio format by Orson Welles W E L L S Well st in Milwaukee is W E ll s anyway Orson Welles is a southeast Wisconsin native he’s from right down the road and Kenosha Orson spells his name the same as well Street in Milwaukee, the book and the play link, Orson and hg together with the area and the funny kind of wording of the riddle. And you just switch one word around instead of beating it’s war, as you walk the War of the world or as you walk well, street, that’s how you solve it, George. I know it’s complex feel

George Ward
like that’s a pretty big stretch. It’s not I feel like you’re about to put the image into Photoshop and start talking about vectors and hidden images. And

JM
I know you might say that, but and this is why okay, because I can’t take credit for that. That’s not me. I agree with it. Because I see, there’s at least six of these riddles that he gives us in this verse. And they’re just like this. It’s like replace a word with another word. I’m alluding to one thing but you don’t know until you see the sign. And this is just another one of his things. But I didn’t come up with this. Credit for this actually goes to our friend Eric, aka urban Smurf, aka Eric seer. You know, when I first read about it, I laughed at it too, because I was it look, if you know our friend Eric, he has some very creative theories at times, but as I became accustomed to how many riddles are going on here, he’s hiding all this info, this direct info and riddles, I became more and more convinced that Eric might have actually stumbled onto something here. And I don’t think that if it had the Kenosha Orson Welles connection in it, I would be so attached to it. But right now, there’s just a lot of contextual evidence and wordplay going on that just fits the puzzle for me. So

George Ward
I don’t know you don’t have to just change one word you got to change to it’s not war of the world. Its world the world see. So you got to completely change one word and then pluralize another one. Seriously, the only thing these two phrases have in common are three words the of the like, come on. Well,

JM
you’ll have to take it up with Eric. It just seems like a stretch to me. Well, it puts us out well Street and ironically, ironically, that’s where we end up finding that building. How crazy is that?

George Ward
I get it. The only other option is it’s a reference to an old Kenwood ad and that equally as stupid, but I don’t know. I just, I don’t

JM
get it. It’s all right. You don’t have to get it you just play along. It’s color by numbers. Okay, I’m gonna I’m right there with you, ma’am. Our next line is at a distance in time. How do we measure time? Well, you could measure with a clock, but you measure it in seconds or hours or minutes. Okay. All right, what would apply here is second, we can stand at an intersection. Now we have second and wells. Well, that makes perfect sense. And ironically, second in Wells is where we find the Germania building, which could be our cultural reference here to let us know that we’re on the right track. Now there’s nothing specifically German about Lake Park at all. But at second and wells, there’s a Germania building. And let’s right now, let’s check in with several who is down on second and wells right now and ready to go on this walk through the puzzle. Several, what do you see down there from second and wells?

Savral
Well, I’m standing in front of the Germania building. Nice tall buildings got the green domes on the top of it Germania is on the front of the building, very prevalent.

JM
Okay, and from where you’re standing? Can you if you look towards the east, can you see the building from the image we’re looking at?

Savral
Do I see the building exactly what you’re talking about? From there?

JM
Okay, so what why don’t you take a couple pictures of the Germania building while you’re there, so people can see the front of it, and we’ll post them up online? And why don’t you head down in the direction of that building? Just keep walking down wells in the direction of that building? From the image there? I hear Mr. Barrett’s got the street a little torn up. Is there a trolley going in or something?

Savral
Yes, we’re going into the future with our new trolley that’s on electric tracks.

JM
Oh, so they’re tearing up everything. It’s good that we’re doing this now. So hopefully, a lot of these landmarks will be intact. And we can get through this as several makes his way down the road. There. We go on to our next verse line, which is from three who live there, Georgia. This is my exciting new Find of the Week that I wanted to unveil right here on the podcast. I don’t think I’ve talked about this anywhere before. I don’t think it’s been said anywhere before. It might not even be right or true. But I found it. And I think it’s interesting. So I’m going to bring it up is an interesting line. And I don’t think we’ll ever know the answer to it. Really. The intersection of water and wells streets in downtown Milwaukee is the original meeting point of the first three settlements, which made the City of Milwaukee now there was a 1980 issue of National Geographic, which was popular back then, which featured Milwaukee and all of its attractions. Some think it could be a reference to the three beer brewers who made Milwaukee famous Miller Schlitz and paps. However, that clue is fairly ambiguous and it doesn’t really give us any information that we don’t already know. He already told us Milwaukee was the city Miller, Schlitz and Papst combined as a clue doesn’t really give us anything. The meaning of the three settlements is interesting geographically, it’s where we’re at at second and Wales and then moving down the road, just across the river to the west of downtown on second and wells Street. I don’t know. It could be the three settlements. I thought it was for a long time. That was the evidence I had showing. I couldn’t figure it out, you know, but recently, I stumbled on to an interesting fact. And I knew this, it wasn’t anything new to me. It was just kind of like I was looking through some old material and the Oh yeah, that’s right. And I thought about it for a second. I’m like, Well, this might be this might tie in. In 1910 Emile Seidel was elected in Milwaukee’s first socialist mayor. Six years after that Daniel Hone, was elected the second socialist mayor, and he served for 24 years. They named a bridge after the guy. It’s in our image. It’s the big bridge in Milwaukee that they blow up at the end of the Blues Brothers movie. It’s, you know, it’s this famous bridge is Daniel home bridge. In 1948, Frank Zeidler took office as Milwaukee’s third socialist Mayor making Milwaukee the only city in the US to elect three socialist mayors. And they all held office at City Hall. 200 East well Street. I think that this socialist mayor’s thing might be an interesting tie in because it actually gives us a location. It ties us into a location where we’re standing and a building, the home of the mayor City Hall. What do you think, George? I’m gonna guess that you’re not buying it? No,

George Ward
I’m sorry. It’s not Simple enough to me, it’s too much of a stretch. No, no, I’m glad you like it. I’m glad you like it, but it’s just glad I like it. I’m glad you like it. I don’t

JM
like it so much I’ve given it’s eight years of my work, and I’m giving it away here, I have to finally get this out of my system. So I could rest at night, maybe one will turn up, you know, maybe some, some personal go, you know, go find it with permission,

George Ward
I feel like it’s important to be able to say, I don’t know yet. This doesn’t make sense to me. But just because I don’t have another option doesn’t necessarily make it true. Does it make sense?

JM
I agree. And when you do those first four years, that’s really how you got to follow it. But once you’ve been through every option and exhausted every option and tried to, you know, you’re always looking for the simplest, easiest connection that makes sense that just gets you going from one place to another. And I’ll be honest with you, the beginning of this verse, is one of the harder ones to decipher and figure out when we get down the road later into the park. It’s not as hard but the beginning part of this is very cryptic and strange. So

George Ward
there’s a lot of parts of these different verses that really don’t apply at all to the hunt. You know, their descriptions of cities or their descriptions of areas or their you know, repetition of something that’s already been said, so, I’ll give you like the first half of it. It may be cryptic and just doesn’t matter at all. I’ll give you that

JM
it’s full of riddles. Here’s another one coming up. And the next line is at a distance in space. How do we measure space? You measure

George Ward
space with a ruler dude? Inches feet

JM
inches feet ruler? You measure it light years? Yes, you can measure it with time? Yes, you measure it with time at a distance in space. We then walk to the next light from second and Wales we come to water in Wales where we find the paps theatre and City Hall directly across the street which is the building in the image that you see and then we have from woman with harpsichord silently playing is our next line another crazy riddle What is he saying here? Are we is he confirming a location Believe me it’s it’s difficult it’s not like I’m saying hey, this star here is right there with the same four dots right here. This is this is a little bit of interpretation that has to be done here and I don’t like it you know I believe me I don’t

George Ward
you know, who can tell you how to measure distance in space, right? The aliens for more of the world’s

JM
the aliens from War of the Worlds may know if they came from another dimension.

George Ward
I mean, they know how to measure distance in space and time.

JM
I’m glad that we finally got to talk about aliens on the podcast from woman with harpsichord silently playing the paps theater is where the light is the next light from the Germania building. So across the street from that city hall and the Papst sometimes referred to as the grand old lady. And there are some other interesting features going on with the building as well. Let’s check in with several who should have made his way to the next light by now through the Mayor Barrett construction zone and let’s see what he can see with boots on the ground and let me just say the reason that we did that last little boots on the ground segment so quickly is because several parked at the George Webb parking lot if you’re from Milwaukee, you know what that is, and he just threw his flashers on. And it’s like construction may have downtown and he got out of the car and standing on this little triangular island in between three streets tried to do this recording hoping he’s not gonna get a ticket. So we weren’t trying to brush past that part at all. We’ll post some pictures and and whatnot. You’re standing now by the bridge correct the well Street Bridge or is the bridge?

Savral
No, the bridges way up in the air with a tons of different construction machinery next to it. I’ll send you a picture after I’m done.

JM
Oh, fantastic. You’re standing by our good friend Henry Winkler Yes. Yes, sir.

Unknown Speaker
The fonts, the font.

George Ward
I love the just normal Milwaukee background noise of police everywhere.

JM
It’s always police. It’s always police. That’s awesome. All right. So you’re standing by the bronze funds, as we call it. And right behind the Fonz and really all along the whole bridge designed railing of that well Street Bridge, which has been the same way since you know, well before 1980. What do you see on that railing behind the Fonz there

Savral
behind the Fonz is a pattern, which is very close to the one that’s in the neck.

JM
It’s actually like a singular version of the repeating pattern that you see in the neck. Is that correct?

Savral
Yeah. And it goes all the way basically up and down this whole strip.

JM
You know, I’m not a buff on Milwaukee history or architecture, but I assume that well st probably had more of that architecture. As you’ll see when you head down towards the lake east. There’s a parking garage that’s been there from the 60s that has that same brick design. I’ve seen a lot of that brick design out in Los Angeles as well. It seemed to be a brick that they would use art deco style back in the 60s. So you do see that pattern in a number of other places, one of which, I’m going to have several go check out right now. Can you walk down, you know, 50 feet there to the paps theater, so that you’re standing in front of the paps theater,

Savral
going past the China gourmet. And of course, the ever popular safe house. If you’re here in Milwaukee, please go visit it. And no, I will not tell you the password.

George Ward
You’re asking a lot of Sarel to have him walk down a public street in Milwaukee like he’s putting his life in danger for you right now.

JM
Okay, you’re right across the street from the paps theater, my old stomping grounds and you see a balcony Do you not? I do. Okay, so underneath that balcony are the entrance doors, the wells Street entrance doors to the paps theater for concerts and such when you go attend to show there. And they are giant ornate doors. Several I want you to look at those doors and tell me if you see anything that looks interesting.

Savral
First and foremost, right on the bottom of the door. It’s like one of those things that if you walk past the store, you probably miss it 100 times it has another representation of the pattern in the collar,

JM
that same art deco pattern that we find in the collar.

Savral
And the top you got like a golden half circle with the Pabst Theater logo in it.

JM
And does that half circle not look exactly the same color as the half circle in the image? Yeah,

Savral
absolutely. Exactly the same.

JM
That’s what struck me about it. It’s, I mean, you could say it’s almost the same shape, same color, everything. It’s a dead on match to me. And with that image down there. The riddle ties it all together with well Street. If you look up at the theater from above that porch, you’ll see some ornate things. Now if you had to describe to somebody what you were seeing what was on the facade of that building, how would you describe it?

Savral
You got the obviously versus the Pabst Theater and it is very ornate halfway. In the middle of the building, you have a woman sculpture of a woman’s face, you can pretty much say it looks almost like a little heart.

JM
Right? It’s a liar is what it is. It’s a harp with two pieces coming down one on each side. Correct that line? I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out that that line what the riddle is to that thing, but I’ve always matched it up with exactly what Savr was looking at right now, which is all of these things that you see on the side of the Pabst Theater that are all together. And why would we be standing right there? Because several of you look to your right, just a little bit across Waterstreet there. What do you see?

Savral
It looks like Tom Barrett’s home. It is maki City Hall.

JM
Yes, definitely. As I was talking about the three who lived there it is Milwaukee City Hall. It’s the building inside of our painting our image, the shadowy building, Gothic ish building in the background. Can you see the the archway the the stone archway entrance to that building? Again, there’s been some talk, George, have you heard or seen on the wiki, maybe some other places where they say that there’s a representation of a locust in the image?

George Ward
Man, I’ve heard about so many animals, and so many of these alligators and locusts and wolves and the number seven and vectors. Yeah, no, I can’t say that. A locust strikes me is that just like a random like somebody had a thought that there was a locusts?

JM
Well, it was actually a popular theory for a little while. I think there’s a section on the wiki about it, where they show a picture of a you’ll see a picture of a bug and then a picture of this archway. And I’ve been trying to tell people for a long time, and maybe several can concur with me. That is a giant humongous stone archway, these are easily 1000 pound blocks that are making this thing up. Is there any doubt in your mind? Several that that’s that’s what it is? I mean,

Savral
I actually agree with you. The archway is,

JM
yeah, you’re a tiny person when you walk through it. There’s three of them. There’s one on each side of the entrance

Savral
way. Yeah, that’s correct. And yeah, it’s pretty much the nice cornerstone and underneath where the tower is. So yeah, I agree with you.

JM
Now, I want to ask you something because there’s another theory on the wiki that people say that there’s a little loop of hair in the jugglers hair. I’ll get to what I believe it is but people say that this is a sculpture that’s located in the back of the Performing Arts Center, which is kitty corner on the other side of City Hall. Over there is there any way at all that you could have seen this sculpture walking from second and Wells from Germania up to where you’re standing now? No you would have to physically walk over there and then go behind the building and and like seek it out almost or take the riverwalk all the way down right yeah,

Savral
you’d have to take the river walk all the way down there at this

JM
point several has been placed in the city on a street heading in a certain direction let’s continue walking in this direction and see what we find and till we can’t walk any further we know there’s a lake down there somewhere Let’s keep walking down well Street in the direction that the puzzles put us walking and see what we can find and why don’t you give me a ring when you get down to the end of Wall Street down there several Okay, we’ll do it. All right, George. Well, several is walking to Juneau Park. Our next line is step on nature. And again, it’s another riddle right here. Just throw it like three in a row. Bam, bam, bam. Riddle, riddle riddle.

George Ward
It’s not a riddle, man. Just walk on the grass. Yeah, walk on the

JM
grass. As we will encounter many of these along the way. It’s another riddle. It’s a clever way to call out the oak leaf Trail, which is a 26 mile trail that spans Milwaukee’s lakefront the 1980 brown and green Woods sign for Juno Park. And really for all of the parks in the Milwaukee park system that had the trail going through it also had a small plaque underneath it in brown and green or whatever that said, Oak Leaf trail, but you could take it from the north side of town all the way to the South side of town along the lake and then along the river system. So if you’re into bike riding or hiking or whatever, it’s a

George Ward
great little getting murdered in the woods.

JM
Step on nature don’t get murdered in the woods, then cast in copper. When several gets down there. We’ll talk about this LM D or this week called Lincoln Memorial Drive our shorthand for it? Or is it the bronze relief statue that we’re going to talk about with several here at the Juno statue when he gets down there? Either way, it doesn’t matter. I like

George Ward
Lincoln Memorial Drive. Like if it’s that, that’s super creative, and I’ll give Bryce props for that because that is a super creative.

JM
So the riddles that you like are riddles, but the ones you don’t

George Ward
like, I don’t know if it’s true or not. But if it’s right, it’s creative as shit and I love it.

JM
All right. All right. So cast in copper. And there’s a general consensus really online and even when I was in my infancy stages, just reading posts, everybody seemed to grasp on that as well. After stepping into the park, which we’ll go through with several in a minute, you get out of the oak leaf trail the next thing you see against the sky over Lake Michigan is the outline of Solomon Juno he’s one of the founding fathers of the city. And if you examine his statue on the south side of it, where the path from well street leads you in is a bronze relief which pictures Juno delivering a proclamation on the shores of the lake, holding a book in one hand and the other reaching out in a 3d kind of relief with a very strange like two finger point that you see on the hand of the juggler in our image. It’s the exact same. I mean, to a tee, you’ve seen this comparison, right, George? I’m not lying. That’s matches perfect, right? Yeah. Okay, I’ll give you that. These two instructions can be interpreted two ways when you’re thinking about where should I go to both interpretations are okay, both of them gets you to the next step, or steps we should say. So you can pick up the oak leaf trail here and take it nor through Juno Park, and then McKinley Back Bay Park area coming out by McKinley Marina, but at McKinley Marina, the oak leaf trail forks and then one path leads you kind of northwest towards the river into the northeast side of town. It eventually loops back around on the north side and catches back up to itself along the lake, and then follows the lake all the way down to the south side of the city. At Back Bay McKinley where the oak leaf trail does this. It has a natural split or a V, if you will, and you can take Lincoln Memorial Drive there. What George is referring to is the back of the US Penny is the Lincoln Memorial and it’s cast and copper. You can split off to Lincoln Memorial Drive there and continue north. Or there’s these well worn paths, which we’ll talk about that lead down the hill behind the statue, which puts you directly onto Lincoln Memorial Drive. And you can only go in one direction several I think should be down by the end of Wall Street. Let’s check in with him.

George Ward
I really feel like Byron price actually wanted to bury 13 tasks but he got to Milwaukee and was just like I can’t do this anymore. So horrible.

JM
All right, several so you are At the end of Wall Street now, correct?

Savral
I am

JM
at the

Savral
light, I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I’m on the way over here. There’s a parking garage off from Waukee. Right? It’s got the same pattern on the garage, as well.

JM
That’s the parking garage I was telling you about. It’s been there from the 60s, and you probably saw maybe some, if the stage isn’t up at Cathedral Square Park, there’s an interesting fountain there. I

George Ward
mean, playing devil’s advocate here, that’s a pretty common pattern. I mean, we’ve got that in St. Augustine.

JM
I mean, it’s obviously some architectural brick, but it does, you know, the the golden arch matching the paint exactly in the same thing that I mean, that’s not a common thing. And then you have that logo right underneath it. And you can disagree with with any or all of my theories. I mean, this is just one guy’s take on this. But I’m trying to make connections between the image and the verse in the riddles that we’re solving and what we’re seeing along our path here. And

George Ward
I don’t disagree with that being an actual clue in the puzzle. I’m just saying that’s a that’s a pretty common like architectural break.

JM
That right, there is a good example of how you should actually not look for things. It’s better to try and stay on track, because you’re trying to find a specific spot in a specific city. So if you happen to just be in, you know, Montana somewhere and see something that reminds you of the puzzle, you know, that’s a great fine, but there’s a lot of common architecture out there in different cities. And this is one example of it. Is it in the puzzle? Yes, it’s in the puzzle. Is it specific to one thing? No, it’s all over the place. George is right about that. It’s not a specific glue, where you can say, hey, this is this right here, in this location seems like more of a hint to the Pabst Theater than anything else. But you do find it everywhere. Matt has brought up his path theory before where you go from the iconic image to the park taking one path. And I you know, I’m I have mixed feelings about that. And he came up with a different path to take to Lake Park. In the who knows he’s always reworking things, but in the past he’s come up with a different path to get to Lake Park and we’ve split hairs on Cleveland and some other things too, because I have this theory that you just stay on wells street you don’t move you don’t turn you don’t do anything. And the reason why is because there were several standing right now on the corner of what is it is it prospect? Where are you at?

Savral
Well, I’m right in the corner where it’s overshadowed by the new Northwestern Mutual building but it as well as in prospect. Yes.

JM
A city on the rise. It is okay so at wells in prospect that’s basically where well street ends and then across the street is Juno Park. You know, when it’s safe. Why? Walk across the street? Let me know what happens when you get the other side of the street. What you see, we’re gonna

George Ward
be waiting a really long time for it to be safe in Milwaukee.

Savral
Just turn walk sign for me. All right, look

JM
at the beer. Okay, so you walk across the street, basically. And then you’re in Juno Park. And what do you have for choices of walking

Savral
or just going across the street and right now? Basically, there’s the oak leaf trail,

JM
right? And it’s kind of split up into a bunch of different little paths right there. All these paths lead to the slalom and Juno statue that standing against the skyline there in the

Savral
back of the park basically go east and then it leads you right to the general statue, a street down.

JM
There’s another path that branches off that leads right to the statue that takes you from Kilbourne or whatever street you come in to that area. And there’s like three of them. Yes. The wells one. Why don’t you walk down that path and it’s going to take you to the south side of the Juno statue there. There’s always a bus going by somewhere in Milwaukee.

George Ward
There. They’re running from the police.

Savral
I’m just glad we did this today. It was 43 degrees, I think on Monday.

JM
Oh yeah, it snows in the summer there too.

George Ward
You guys have crippling depression, snow in the summer and violence. Like why would anybody want to live in Milwaukee? Hey, it’s

JM
a great place. Not a great lake, man.

Savral
It is.

JM
Okay, so you should be standing in front of what we’ve all come to see in articles online and posts online, which is the relief on the south side of the Juno statue, which shows the hand it’s like a three dimensional hand sticking out, which is an exact match to the hand in our image of the juggler, right?

Savral
Yeah, I’m on the south side. So

JM
basically, the path brings you right to the relief. And then from there, you have the two options that I was talking about before. We had this little stop and chat with you. So now, the next move is basically stay on the OakLeaf trail or if you look behind the stairs Too there? Are there still like three or four well worn paths that go down to the down to Lincoln Memorial Drive?

Savral
Well, I know what you’re talking about. And there’s definitely one that if you’re, yeah, there’s one pretty good worn paths directly right and back of him. So

JM
there is there’s still one path there. There used to be like four of them, there were just well worn paths. I don’t know if people and animals use them or whatever. But those paths have been there forever. People use it to go down to the Summerfest grounds, which the entrance is not far from there. But the other thing to keep in mind is Lincoln Memorial Drive starts basically right there, it starts kind of at Wisconsin Avenue, one block over. So yes, you’re on the south end of Lincoln Memorial Drive. So no matter what you’re doing, you’re still going north. And we all know you’re going to Lake Park, listen, if you want to stop at the water tower and take some pictures Be my guest. But we all know that we’re going to Lake Park on this deal. So why don’t we talk to you a little bit after you get to Lake Park? Okay, we’ll do

George Ward
what you mentioned about the hand, we’re seeing that a lot in these puzzles, hands on statues in the paintings, matching hands on statues in the city around where we’re digging could be a coincidence, or what do you think about that

JM
I’ve been looking at this for a while. And there’s some cities where there are no hands. And there are some cities where you find the statue from the image, and it’s halfway across town in another spot, that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. I was trying to figure it out based on what we knew from Cleveland in Chicago, where the statue of the lady of the Great Lakes in Chicago is highlighted. It’s actually if you examine that statue, this was a forest blight fine from a long time ago. 2008 or something, that statue is actually comprised of five different nymphs, you could say. And they all hold a well of water and the wells kind of trickled down, like some kind of Rube Goldberg thing where you know, each well fills up the next one going down. And that’s how the fountain works. So there’s five of these ladies, five ladies represent the five great lakes. And they’re in the same configuration as the Great Lakes as well. And the lady who’s in the Chicago image, who is our statue represents Lake Michigan. No surprise, they’re trying to figure out what the significance of that statue might be in relation to the puzzle. I mean, it’s where the verse starts. But then you go to Cleveland, and where you find the statue is, you know, along a trail where you would turn on St. Clair Avenue to go to the Italian and Greek gardens there. I don’t know what the statue for a while I thought it might have been something now I’m just kind of taking things as they come. And you know, if it’s a coincidence, I just noted, but I haven’t been able to put a good theory together on the statue. Some people had some theories in the past and the team that didn’t pan out, and nobody’s really brought up a good one. Yeah. Do you have any theories on that?

George Ward
I mean, I don’t I just think it’s really it’s kind of interesting. The hand in St. Augustine is kind of generic, we’ve got like three or four different statues that it matches, there’s the statue of Menendez, there’s the statue of Ponce. And then there’s the the one of its pawns in the fountain of youth, with the Indians, where the hand matches, you know, all three of those, but they’re all in like different areas of town. The first two I mentioned are downtown ones in front of City Hall ones in front of the Legion, and the others, like I said in the park, I don’t know, I think it’s an interesting coincidence, it might be something that we haven’t figured out, it might be something that Byron had an idea, but it didn’t really, you know, 100% flush out and who knows,

JM
there could have been coincidences that we’re seeing that we’re maybe applying the wrong way. Who knows. The next line in our verse here for Milwaukee, is ascend the 92 steps. And as we all know, from seeing it on TV, and through other posts all around the grand staircase, and Lake Park does indeed have 92 steps. If you don’t count the four or five patio steps on the bottom, which aren’t part of the staircase itself. Those are completely separate from the grand staircase, the entity that is the staircase. That’s pretty clear. Right?

George Ward
I remember once in the past didn’t people used to think this verse had something to do with New York? Was it this paired with the New York painting? I don’t know. They were trying to find the grand 200 and the 92 steps in New York. I don’t know in all honesty, I don’t 100% by the grand staircase, I don’t want 100% by the Grand 200 Just because the staircase makes the shape of two sees, well, my

JM
friend, I’m going to show you something different on that front here in just a minute. I

George Ward
hope you do because it tells you to ascend the 92 steps after you climb the grand 200 and the 92 steps and the Grand 200 in this sort of theory are the same thing you can’t climb 92 After in fact To start before the grand 200, like I don’t, I just don’t want under percent by it well, but I don’t I haven’t seen anything that’s a better explanation. I mean, it could just be like, you know, bad prose, who knows

JM
how it sits in there, I totally agree with you because I went round and round with people on it as well. It’s, he’s starting the phrase with after. So it’s after you’re done climbing. But the problem is, is that the 200 doesn’t apply to the staircase at all, the 200 is an instruction of what to do after you’ve climbed the grand if you apply it like that, at the top of the stairs, basically, you have two choices of where to go. The clue is 200. So how does that give you a direction or how it doesn’t help you? Well, in this puzzle, if you read through the whole verse, you’ll see that he’s giving you specific instructions to follow geographical terms like staying west, south east over rock and soil, Southern foot. At some point, when you’re on the ground, you’re gonna need to know where these directions are, you’re in a wooded area, you can’t see the sun, maybe it could be cloudy, you need something to tell you what direction to go in, in 1981. The easiest way to do this would be to bring your pocket compass, if you’re going hiking, you’re gonna have a compass with you in 1981 Is it smart thinking, ironically, he includes the word compass as part of a riddle in the next line, but you don’t know it’s a riddle until you’re there. So we’ll get to that in a minute. Anyone trying to navigate this verse would have a compass or need one to know exactly which directions to go to follow this thing. If you have a compass with you. And you’re standing on top of the grand staircase, you can set your compass to zero degrees at true north, and 200 degrees on the compass will send you exactly down one of the two paths that you can walk from the top of the staircase sends you exactly in the correct path to your left as you reach the top of the stairs. And when several gets down there, we’ll talk to him about it a little bit, because there was some contention on the wiki, that of course, you would go right and go over ravine road, and then down the stairs on the other side there and start looking for birch trees. And his whoever came up with the solution there. There, there evidence for doing this was that there’s a Masons compass on the light pole, on the ravine, road side of the staircase. So the problem is, is that I sent those pictures into the wiki, to basically prove that the compass was on the left side, and depending on how you’re facing it, the left side or the south side of the stairs is where the Masons compasses the 200 degrees side of the stairs, not the North ravine, road side of the stairs. So pass the compass, we’ll get to in a bit as what I think is a riddle. But yeah, you don’t go right. The answer to that is, after you climb the stairs go 200 degrees.

George Ward
All right? It just seems a bit complicated for me. And I know you’re gonna hate me for this. But I actually I kind of liked the wiki solve for this, it makes a little more sense.

JM
Well, feel free to go put some more holes down over by that drain pipe there.

George Ward
I know, this is where we disagree. Like, I’m the total dead simple guy. And it does kind of make sense. If you’re, if it tells you to pass a compass. And there’s a compass there. You know, why not pass it.

JM
That’s the problem. It’s not on the correct. If you do, you can either pass the compass or go at 200 degrees, you’re still going south. So what they did on the wiki is they just switched the compass side, he just basically said, well, the compass is on the north side, when it was actually on the south, I just took two real close up pictures of the lighting poles I didn’t, you can’t see the far away shop because I wanted to capture the Mason symbol. And to be honest with you, they were they were new looking plates, you know, the kind of plates that you put over like an electrical outlet on a light. If you wanted to tap in power to the electricity going into the light, you’d put one of these little plates on there. And that’s what it looked like it looked like a brand new plate to cover an electrical access panel with the Masons logo on it. And then there was on the other side of the light was a plate, just the same that had no logo on it. I mean, who knows those knuckleheads in Milwaukee there was probably no Mason’s logo on there, and they lost the ones that were originally on there and then they didn’t want to get yelled at by their boss. So they go and find some other ones they can rip off some old lights and they put them up on there some scrap ones who knows unless you can get a picture from 1981 What that look like. You can’t really say that solid

George Ward
Are we sure that’s amazing logo. Yeah, I guess it is. The G stands for geometry by the way.

JM
All right. Let’s see if several has made it down to Lake Park yet. How you doing down there? Have you have you? Are you at the stairs? Did you make it up the stairs? Are you at the bottom of the stairs where Yeah,

Savral
I meticulously count 92 steps they are still 92 steps here.

JM
Glad nothing’s changed. There’s no erosions taking it away. It’s still 92 Did you sing the Laverne and Shirley song while skipping up the stairs? merrily?

Savral
I didn’t have my surely to go with me.

George Ward
It’s also kind of impossible to do anything merrily in Milwaukee.

JM
Alright. Nice. It’s the home of Jeffrey Dahmer. I mean, I don’t know what to say, you’re right there when you’re right, you’re right. Okay, so you’re at the top. And you’re looking out you can see Lake Michigan, there should be two light posts. Now this is part of this wiki solve that you go to the top of the stairs and you turn right. And then you go across the ravine Road bridge there, George and I were just talking about this when you were on your way down there. Tell me what you see on the lamppost on the north side, the ravine road side, what do you see,

Savral
the North side there is the lamppost that has the, you know, the light that is unique to this area. However, the vegetation and the size of this bush that’s around it makes anything at the bottom of it impossible to see.

JM
Okay, so you can’t see, I’ll post the pictures, you can see there’s basically two of them, one on the right one on the left, it really doesn’t mean anything that’s not the compass people don’t worry about it. Right now several, what I want you to do is I want you to head out at 200 degrees on your compass. And take that path, which I’ll give you a hint, it’s the path on the south side,

Savral
my handy dandy Compass app that is 200 degrees, and walking.

JM
The next line that we’re going with is past the compass and reach. That’s the next line of the verse. After walking for a while on the path from the staircase, you’ll go past a golf course, monument bridge, and then you’ll come to the North Point Lighthouse. Now in 1981, this lighthouse would have still been in operation, it would have also been fenced in not open to the public, and manned. Although it was automated, it wasn’t really manned, manned, a large sign stood in front of it, which said the North Point Lighthouse, and it has a few paragraphs of history about it. The name of the lighthouse is the answer to this riddle, a compass always points north, this is one of those things that you really don’t quite get until your boots on the ground there on site, it doesn’t make any sense to you at all, until you’re standing in front of that sign that tells you what that lighthouse is. for all intensive purposes, you would have been looking for an actual compass until you came up to that sign and probably brought one with you seeing what was in the verse until you get there and read the sign and figure out that it was more wordplay going on in the verse, you really wouldn’t know. So just as you pass the lighthouse on your path, you see a bridge in front of you. And you could walk over the bridge. However, to the right of the bridge alongside of it is a well worn path that leads down to the culvert below. And let’s check in with several have you made it over to the lighthouse yet?

Savral
Yep, I’m coming up on it right now.

JM
Okay, so you’ve walked past the golf course you’ve walked over the first bridge. And now you’re standing in front of a big white lighthouse? That’s a sign that says North Point Lighthouse and some history about it, correct? Yeah, that’s correct. Have you seen anything? Now just take a good look around where you’re at right now in front of that lighthouse? Do you see anything in the image in front of you you see any matches or anything close? I know, you had an idea that you had said you saw some of those stone pillars looked like they made a shape to you facing east

Savral
away from the lighthouse? There are these stone pillars that make the shape of what looks like a necklace almost. I think at one point there was something in that location. But

JM
it used to be a big cannon there. Yes. If you look at an overhead view of that, that does resemble the neckline a little bit the the same thing that we call the arch at the paps. Again, it’s just some common architecture. It’s an arch. It’s a half circle. They’re kind of everywhere, but there’s not many golden ones. Anyways, nothing significant on the lighthouse, though I’ve never been able to find any kind of image match on the actual lighthouse. I mean, the clue pretty much rests with that sign and the interpretation of the compass.

Savral
I think the sign at some point, if I remember correctly, has changed over the years.

JM
Yeah, I think it was on the other side right front of the lighthouse, if you see it now it’s on the lake side of the path whereas in the past it was the other side and I think I have a picture of that there’s some animal painter had some pictures going back to 2005, maybe of that area. So we’ll see if we can put up some pictures to show you a little bit what that area look like. So right now, you are basically in front of this lighthouse and the next line that we need Need to follow is the foot of the culvert. So this is a continuation past the compass and reach the foot of the culvert, you’re gonna have to go past the lighthouse, past the compass, and then you’ll see that path on your right,

Savral
that’s gonna want me to go down.

JM
I mean, you could jump off the bridge to I don’t think it’d be good. But you can see that path on the right now, you can turn right and go past the lighthouse, passing it going west, but there would have been a fence there in 1980. And you couldn’t you wouldn’t have been able to do that you can’t enter off wall Avenue. I think what he means is for you to take that path. I mean, do you see anybody on the path now? Well, there’s

Savral
some people down there and there’s a couple of kids actually going down the right now. So I can do it.

JM
It’s a well worn path. Why don’t you head down the path? And I’ll tell you what, once you get under the bridge, don’t you know, I don’t want to put you in any dangerous situation. So don’t call me. Once you get down the bridge, just walk the 100 paces, and then get a hold of me from the bottom of the ravine there.

Savral
Okay, wish me luck.

JM
All right.

George Ward
I’m sorry,

JM
I still don’t buy it. So you got to be there kind of thing. Yeah, maybe that’s why I’ve never been to Milwaukee. So hey, that’s our next trip. So basically, below the bridge, several is going to make his way down beneath that bridge. I’ve been below that bridge of many times, I was down there with a GPR. I thought maybe the cast was buried at the foot of the bridge. So animal painter and I were probing around down there and GPR and nothing down there. But there is a path and there was a path in the 80s it’s much nicer now. You can go below the bridge, and you can count off 100 steps, and we’re gonna see where it puts him. Today, when you come to the end of the South Ravine Trail, you see a paved walkway, a sewer grate and a drainage pipe, which I’m sure several is going to encounter. In 1980. There was no cement, no drain. So when it rained, the ravine created a washout at the end of the trail. And after 100 paces from under that bridge, you would have come to this giant rock and soil outwash, which you would have to then walk over to the first young Birch is the next line. And I’m going to tell you right now, there’s no birch tree down here. There wasn’t a birch tree in 1984. I can go back to 1984 with a little research at the Historical Society downtown by Pierre Marquette Park, and a Milwaukee Journal photo from 1984, which shows no birch trees at the end of this wash out whatsoever. And

George Ward
we shouldn’t take this as a clue that we’re on the wrong path.

JM
That’s what I’m saying, you know, you get down to the end of this thing, the end of this ravine. And there’s just nothing there, man, we’re gonna we’re gonna find out, we’re going to check in and find out in the line cast in copper, the reference to the US Penny comes into play. Okay, so another reference could be the very first US Penny was called a birch Penny, the first young birch that would be another riddle that can be solved as Lincoln Memorial Drive again, just kind of a nod a you know, take the penny, and then you go back to the penny. But what are we doing down here? It’s an interesting coincidence. I mean, it would complete the line. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. I know if it’s right or wrong. It wasn’t my idea. Well, yeah, of course, the sewer pipe Master. How many are you up to now

George Ward
I feel like you’re about to tell me that southeast over rock and soil is a reference to rock and roll. But you have to replace the word soil with roll and then that takes you somewhere. I don’t know, man. This is just there’s a lot of reaches here. And I don’t

JM
not as many as are going out to New Orleans right now. At least I’m that’s Listen, that’s true. Oh, man. I’m going point to point just, you know, solving this thing as a puzzle. And this is what I do. I look at it like a puzzle. So I go in there. I solve the verse lines. If it sounds like a riddle to me, if it look, one of the lines that we just came upon was below the bridge. Okay. There’s a bridge, I see a bridge. There’s no riddle going on here. But when you walk up to an area, and it’s like, at a distance in time, you know what? That’s got to be a riddle. It’s got to be some kind of It’s a puzzle, it must be a riddle. So this is,

George Ward
or it’s something super obvious, and you’re just in the wrong place. You just don’t see it. Because you’re not that’s possible

JM
to I would agree with that. But when you start getting hits, and then it goes cold all of a sudden, but you seem to be in the right area, or you see you have an image match, maybe. But the first line doesn’t make sense at all, you know? So these are the kinds of things where I jumped to okay, it must be a riddle at that point. So I’m going to start solving it like that. So this is what I did in this city

George Ward
and I stay with it’s just a bad puzzle when we went to New Orleans and I think I talked about this on another bad city and I think I talked about this on another episode where we stood in Hell’s name in that park in front of the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. where you went through the San Francisco verse and was like pointing everything out and it matched up perfectly, but it’s obviously the wrong place. It’s just too vague. It’s not done. Well.

JM
I think that that is why you have to use these things in tandem. The verse works with the image things verify each other.

George Ward
That’s why, to me the stretches are difficult, because I can take any of these verses and as long as I stretch them, I can match them to wherever, like we could take San Francisco and make it work with Kenosha, Wisconsin, if we stretch it hard enough. The point

JM
of what I’m getting at is, I’m using as much contextual evidence as I can for solving these. I’m not saying well, the treasure must be in St. Louis, because this is a match to this, and I found a sports car that had a logo on here, and when I Photoshop it, it looks like the flower in the eyeball I’m not doing that I’m using

George Ward
his painting does have a giant arch in it.

JM
It does have an arch. I’m using as much contextual evidence as I can the Orson Welles connection, maybe wouldn’t be so interesting if he was from Buffalo we’re at let’s stay on track because this is gonna be a long one already. I know. Going down to the end of this ravine is where He’s taking us in this verse. So what’s going on here? And this isn’t unlike many of these other puzzles. Once again, we follow the path to the end. And like we’ll house in Houston. Here we are, with several walking through the puzzle, as straightforward as we can, given all the riddles and again, we’re scratching our heads looking for something that isn’t here at the end of the verse. Did you make it down the ravine? Okay, did you? Are you alright? I did. Is there a mudslide? Nothing, no problems.

Savral
It was not as muddy as it was a few days ago. So I made it down just fine.

JM
You went down underneath the bridge, you walked 100 paces. And where are you at right now? Are you out by Lincoln Memorial Drive? Are you still in the woods or where? Yeah,

Savral
so I can see Lincoln Memorial Drive my 100 paces gets me to, there’s like steps going on. I’m on the third step up. And to my right, there’s kind of like a, like a rocky kind of surgery. It’s a

JM
sewer drainage ditch that they’ve put in. This is a new feature. This wasn’t there in 1981. And basically in 81, it was just a wash out there was no drainage. So all the rain that came down those ravines there would wash all the rocks and mud and soil out onto a wash out at the bottom of that thing. When he’s talking about over rock and soil. He’s talking about that wash out and we have pictures, I do have a 1984 picture before all of that stuff was put in down there where you can see the wash out and I’ll post that up on the Facebook page. Why don’t you walk out to the you know, a few more steps. There are seven or eight more steps to get out into the clearing. Where our Big Friendly tree is that’s been dug a few times are right at the end of that wash out there used to be I don’t think there are any more there used to be five humongous giant cottonwood trees. I have pictures of them going back to the 40s that we got from the historical society and they were big in the 40s. So they they’re gigantic. They were gigantic. When Byron was there. They’re whatever’s left is gigantic now is how many are left?

Savral
A lot of it’s overgrown, but there’s one it’s definitely very prominent. Let’s stick it out

JM
is that the one that is riding on your left side as you come out of the Ravine Trail? It is yeah, just do me a favor and check the south side of that tree and see if there’s still divot holes from where we dug it out.

Savral
Alright, so I mean, it’s a little bit eroded, but they still got some divots in there. Yeah.

George Ward
Come on, guys. Fill your holes.

JM
I have a picture of how we filled it in. I can post it we did a good job that that was a dig. So animal painter and I dug that tree out two times. And then before that forest blight and pine tree, and I don’t know how many people were up there for it was like four or five of those guys were up there. Maybe some other people from our group were there back in 2006. And they dug it up. So what after they dug it up? We said, well, maybe they missed it. Let’s go a little further south. And we dug it up. And then we went back and dug up the next tree down the southern foot of that tree in case we counted wrong and there’s absolutely nothing. past three. Staying West is our next line several weeks, we got to work hard at figuring this one out. Because you know, we’re close to the end here. So when you arrive at the outwash at the end of the South Ravine Trail, you see those five cottonwood trees. The tree that’s directly on your left, the one that we were talking about, is featured in the image as the top of the cape. It’s the flared cape. It’s it’s an exact match to the tree. It’s got the same foot Am I right? Several. Can you see it? Yeah,

Savral
I’ve seen the picture that and yeah, you’re right about that.

JM
It’s got that nose like foot on the southern side. So everybody thought for a long time that that was the foot The Southern foot was that nose like feature on that giant cottonwood tree. Anyway, past three staying West, what do you see it’s Is there anything there,

Savral
tons of vegetation, a bunch of trees that have been cut down or fallen over the years? A little spot that I like the head, it looks like I don’t know, way back in the day, there was some kind of rock.

JM
There’s Napa down there. This is what I did. When I was down there. I basically lost options. There was nothing that was path three, I was looking for knots in trees that represented a letter, there was just nothing. Eventually I decided, well, hey, what if I just keep walking southeast, I continue to walk southeast. And if you go, maybe, I don’t know, maybe 50 yards or so southeast from where that trail leads out. There is a way overgrown planter wall. On the hill above the planter wall is a giant mulberry tree that somewhat resembles the other tree in the cape. It’s it’s a you couldn’t really say it’s a dead on match. But who knows it’s a tree and it’s been 38 years, I did find this giant mulberry tree and this planter wall. And this is the planter wall and said Vice magazine article that was you know, tore up for a whole week. I must have dug a dozen holes or more there. And then I think several you you check some spots for me also after that point in time we check that planter wall

Savral
I did. I was hiding in that hole one night at 4am Morning.

JM
So we’ve checked all those spots, anything that could be a letter I’ve put a hole next to there’s really just nothing there. The next thing we have is you’ll see a letter from the country. If we don’t have we can’t even find the past three. Now we’re looking for this letter, the only letters that were really down there, there was a giant rock sitting out about 100 yards into Lake Michigan right in that vicinity right there where you come out of that outwash there. If you look out straight out to the lake, but 100 yards out there was a big rock that in the 70s Some kids spray painted the word love real big on it. I think I have a picture to have it. I’ll post up you can see the outline of this rock on the right side of the face the dark area on the right side of the juggler space. There’s also a representation of the Daniel home bridge. That’s the thing that people thought was the laureate behind the PAC downtown. It’s actually a representation of the home bridge. Basically, there’s that rock down there. And that’s the only thing that has a letter on it. There’s signs I mean, there’s a couple of street signs right, we got a 30 mile an hour street sign somewhere down there. Yes, 30 mile 30 mile an hour. That’s a really that’s the only sign of Wonder stones. Hirth on a proud tall fifth, you’re counting trees down there looking for letters on trees. Trust me, there’s nothing down there. Why don’t you do me a favor and I know this kind of sucks. But why don’t you head back up to the staircase. And let’s go through this one more time. And let’s try a little trick that I learned about this verse. I spent a good month straight every day for 30 days while I was on a tour break going to Lake Park with a camera a metal detector ground probe. Sometimes the GPR just scouring the area for a birch tree, or for anything that looked like five trees with a letter. In addition to the two big digs that I did with animal painter, I spent an additional week digging another dozen holes in an area south of the ravine, which I spent a lot of time in Lake Park and what’s going on here. It’s like we miss something. Luckily, in this spot, we just happen to be only 100 yards or so away from where we took the steps up to begin with to get into the park. So after exhausting the ravine with holes and trying to figure out where I went wrong, or where did what letter I missed. It’s back to the stairs and back up the stairs to see what I missed. After doing this a number of times up the stairs through the park come down the ravine, look at everything take as many pictures as I can you start to realize that all of the things at the end of the verse are things that you walk right by in the park between the stairs and the lighthouse. In comes our surprise Indiana Jones twist, which I now have come to believe that all of these puzzles have in them. It’s like a special little puzzle you have to figure out at the end, when you’re on site boots on the ground, like the clue about the compass. It’s something you wouldn’t be able to know until you are on site and looking at things and moving around. I’m going to let you in on something folks. This is the secret this is what it is. Each puzzle has a twist to it. Judges is laughing all right. All right.

George Ward
Look, this theory makes sense to you. And it makes sense Everybody like everybody see, okay, there’s one thing that you would only know if you were in the park.

JM
One, it’s not necessarily being in the park, a lot of them seem to be boots on the ground things. But the Chicago one wasn’t it was just solving a word puzzle. It was easy,

George Ward
right? But that only makes sense because we’re in 2018. And we have the internet and we have Google Maps. Like if we were in 9080 to 90% of these of the stuff in these puzzles, we wouldn’t know unless we were there. I agree. Like you can’t go into an encyclopedia and look up Lake Park and know that there’s 92 steps. You just can’t know it. You wouldn’t know that unless you were at that staircase. I would

JM
agree. But some are easier than others is Chicago was easy. And but look in New York has the same exact type word initial puzzle as Chicago is that one easy? Hell no, that’s not easy. It’s a whole different ballgame there. No pun intended. I think this is what it is. There’s a twist. This is most likely the reason we’ve been looking in or near the correct areas for almost 40 years. And we’re finding nothing. Like I’ve said before, it’s not a scavenger hunt. It’s a puzzle. The reason the cast wasn’t in the exact spot it should have been in Cleveland. And the reason why we’re looking around the bottom of a ravine right now in Milwaukee, is because, like the movie Raiders of Lost Ark, there’s a twist to the puzzle, the medallion that Marian had which Indy was coming to get at the bar had a backside to it when the Nazi when tote went to reach down and grabbed it and he burned his hand. He only had the front side of the medallion. Later on while reflecting on the Well of Souls in the medallion, salon Indy are reading the backside and they exclaim unanimously, they’re digging in the wrong spot. It’s this sort of twist that’s going on here. Yes, with enough straightforward scavenger hunt type puzzle solving, you can find the area that He’s directing us to there’s clues hidden in the image, there’s things you can see. So you can visually put yourself in an area when there’s enough visual clues around the cask. However, if you’re going to find the dig spot, you have to go to the site and spend some time there and figure out what the twist is. Chicago was simple, it was solved the riddle What the letters mean. And then you can find what 10 by 13 He’s talking about in Cleveland, there appears to possibly be a mirror thing going on, which explains the verse being reversed and the Digg spot being reversed. And, you know, I found some coding on the images, which might explain some more about how these puzzles work. But we’ll get to that in a future episode. Once I can collect some more data. Milwaukee’s twist is the juggler. There’s something I believe that I posted many years ago on cue for tea about this, you might be able to dig it up on a search. Once you have walked up those steps, about five or six times and down that Ravine Trail the same amount, you begin to realize that there’s something going on with the verse and something’s not right. Because a lot of the stuff you pass up in the park sure does correspond to what’s going on at the end of the verse. But how can the juggler apply to the verse in this situation like what’s going on? Well, it’s just another puzzle. Another puzzle that George won’t agree with. That’s fine. In juggling the act of switching an object from one hand to the next is called the pass. It’s called a pass just a standard juggling term. If you examine our verse, There are two lines which start with the word pass. If you use these two lines, to separate the verse into three parts, by drawing, say, an imaginary line above the word pass in each instance, you can then juggle or swap the bottom two sections. So the verse then becomes correct. If you don’t do this, you’re never going to find the correct spot. Seriously, like you. This is how you have to swap it out. And all of a sudden, everything fits into place. Now we have a verse that works with the whole path. The whole

George Ward
thing you said about Cleveland being reverse, you know who came up with that first, right? Oh, yeah, our

JM
good friend, Josh. Yeah, of course, Josh. I don’t think I don’t know if he’s figured it out quite as deep as I have. I think I might have gone down the rabbit hole a little further than him. Well, I’m

George Ward
glad that you’re right on track with Josh. Yeah,

JM
don’t ever do that again. All right. So now we have a verse that works with the path that we’ve been taking through Lake Park. So let’s go back to the top of the stairs and follow it again to see what we might find with the final puzzle solved after climbing the grand 200 off to several. All right, several you back at the top of the stairs there.

Savral
Yes, I’m back here again.

JM
Let’s do this again. And let’s try to keep in mind the things that we talked about when we juggled the verse into place and we switch those two bottom sections. So now, after climbing the grand 200, you still head out on the same southbound path. Your next instruction would be after solving the surprise twist at the end. The next instruction would be past three staying West. The next thing that you come to and we left this out so we could talk about it now. The next thing you come to from the stairs is a par three golf course it’s between the stairs in the entrance to the lighthouse section of the park. The golf course has these orangish red T ball markers, they’re not there anymore. They were they’re there but they’re square and they’re really kind of bright red now but they used to be the standard orange T ball markers that you’d see at any county park. They look exactly like the one that jugglers holding and the the same color and everything and I believe we have some pictures of those we can pose to now the golf course could be the answer to pass three staying West, however, and several Why don’t you continue back on the trail over towards the the entrance to the lighthouse portion again. All right. As we continue to walk along past the golf course, we’re going to come to the monument of a Rastus be Walcott now this guy was the first Surgeon General of Wisconsin, he seated up on top of his horse with a cement monument below, which has stone benches on either side built into the monument, the benches along where you would have your back while sitting on them spell out the words and this is from left to right. Fraternity charity equality on the left side and then you have the statue in the middle. And then on the right side it says devotion to country. And then on the statue itself on the base of it is a dedication I think from his wife. On the outside edges of the monument there are pedestals one on each side, which once held these two bronze eagles, on top of them that the eagles were stolen sometime in the 70s or 80s. And no precise date has been found as to when they were pilfered away, so we don’t really know if they were they’re not on the pedestals themselves though the stonework in them and the ornate decoration on them. There are some designs on the right side of the monument. As you look at it. There’s three symbols which sort of look like Fleur de Li. I don’t know. Are you there yet? Several Can you see the statue the monument?

Savral
I’m walking up on right now

JM
walk up to that right side and look at those three little emblems that are down there and tell me are those Florida leaves? Or are they some other kind of variation? I wasn’t really sure what those things were,

Savral
I’ll make sure to take a picture for you. They do look like a Florida lead. There’s a picture of a bowl at the top. There’s it’s hard to describe they look like almost swords going downwards.

JM
But they’re really strange symbols, right? They’re in a triangle shape if I remember, right,

Savral
correct. And the on the sides of it look like almost upside down candles.

JM
Interesting. So maybe somebody can figure out in our wide pool of knowledge of all you key searchers out there someone can figure out what that symbol actually is. So that’s on the right side of the monument as you look at it now go over to the left side of the monument

Savral
Alright, this one’s also has the upside down like candle looking things, but it also has an eagle on the top. All right, and then you have a post. And then there’s a W A W, that’s a W just a single letter W W is the most prevalent but if you look closer, it’s w then it looks like there’s a B and then there’s an E.

JM
So it said post number one with a big W in the middle basically

Savral
Oh yeah, I don’t know if the W EB means anything.

JM
Well, I never actually saw the EBA must be pretty small. I mean, what I see is post W and then number one at the bottom you every time I look up to it, but that’s the most prominent Yeah, just

Savral
mixed in really well. I’ll take a picture of that as well show us

JM
a picture that How ironic is it that our next line of the verse is you’ll see a letter from the country we’re looking at a monument that has two pedestals one has three objects on it on the right next to a big spelled out word country huge. You can’t miss it. Giant word country right in front of you. Just a few feet from that word country, a single letter W. Another thing this could be a reference to is the word Wisconsin. It’s Walcott on the monument, but the fact that the giant word country is looking at you right in the face should be a dead on giveaway that this is you know, this is where we should be. So the next line is of Wonder stones hearth. If you look at an overhead view of the Walcott monument you’ll notice that the monument itself in combination with the portraits on form the shape of a fireplace hearth, I suspect to use the term Wonderstone so he could include a W. It may be it’s for Wisconsin, I don’t know why he used wonders. stone and the W are where the tie in is with that. But I suspect that there’s probably something going on there. In any case, we found a single letter from the country. And it’s on a monument with sits on a hearth shaped platform in the park. And I’ll show an overhead view of that platform so you can get an idea of what that looks like.

George Ward
There’s another place where we disagree. I can’t break these two up, you’ll see a letter from the country of Wonder stones hearth, it seems like that’s the phrase he’s using here. Total combined. And that would be a letter from the country of Germany, like Wonderstone is the gym. It’s in the book he calls the gems wonder stones.

JM
Well, there’s a W in Wonderstone. Well, I mean, if you just read it totally literally, yeah, you’ll see a letter from the country of Wonder stones earth, there could be a W and O and N D, E, R any, any one of those letters, if you just take it literally.

George Ward
Yeah, but it’s a weird phrase, right? Wonderstone that’s a weird, there’s an actual thing that is Wonderstone there’s an actual stone, but

Savral
I have to interrupt you. I was gonna say if you actually look at Wonderstone on Google,

JM
I’ve heard those theories. And I’ve heard you know, George’s theory about it has to be you know, but I think it Wonderstone was used in the book in the story, was it not?

George Ward
Right? It was and it’s a weird like, I’ve lived my entire life and I’ve never used the word Wonderstone until this puzzle. And then this man not want this man happened to use it twice and the same book in one place. He’s referencing a gym and in the other place, he’s referencing a W from a Walcott, I think in both places, he’s probably talking about the gym, and hearth like, yeah, okay, the monument shaped like a hearth with a heart shape, like a rectangle, like everything shaped like a rectangle.

JM
No, it’s a little different. In the back, there’s kind of an angled feature, it’s, well, you know, you’re free to disagree. There’s no cost. I’ve heard different explanations. I’m just telling you where the work I’ve done on it. So after you switch the verse around, you come through it this way. And now you find the past three, you find the word country, you find a single letter. And now your next one is on a proud tall fifth. Well, one explanation for this is Walcott is a one star general, one star out of five is the fifth. But nowhere on the monument does it indicate that he’s proud, the whole thing refers to humility and sacrifice for his people. One would think that the word proud would refer to the eight lions which are on the bridge in front of you. There’s all kinds of interpretations for what that might be. I’m not going to say here nor there, because this is kind of right at the end, obviously, the next instructions at its southern foot, and again, determining what the actual proud tall fifth is, then you have to figure out if there’s a southern foot and actual foot or a metaphorical foot or if it’s one foot south of what he’s talking about, that you should find to dig at. So I’m not going to give anything away but does it say Brigadier anywhere on the monument? Several does it say general Brigadier does it give away that he could be a one star general somewhere?

Savral
The first line actually says Brig. Gen. Rastus. Be Walcot.

JM
All right, EB W. That’s the guy. Interestingly enough, you were saying that there’s a few Walcott’s had a few visitors recently.

Savral
Yeah, definitely hasn’t had a few visitors behind Walcott in that shape of almost like a fireplace. So you’re mentioned I’m looking at polls at the southern foot by wall Kyle the actual foot his foot? Yes. Where are the first places you can dig? That’s not cement, right. Okay. The corner if you go a little bit more solid where the other end cement stops, there’s a very, very large hole next to the bush. That’s here. Okay.

JM
So they’re trying that it actually looks like

Savral
at one point someone tried digging a lot of basically run the whole archway behind Walcott and then someone might have just looked at their compass wrong and then there’s a there’s a big hole by the northern foot of all time. Oh, just

JM
in case it was backwards. Yes. Right. Well, that’s interesting. I mean, I’ll let everybody out and listener land know that I animal painter and I have GPR the back of that statue. There’s nothing back there but one single wire what looks like one single electrical wire running from one end of the statute to the other end of the statue. I don’t know if it’s if it’s hot or not, you know, we didn’t we didn’t do any digging because we didn’t find anything directly behind the statue. So I’ll give you that we GPR the whole behind and didn’t find anything.

Savral
They do have new lights on here. So I wouldn’t dig too far because I bet you those wires are connected the lights are shining on won’t cut at

JM
night, someone we know made a documentary where he’s was digging next to a lighting pole down there by the lighthouse. Not a good idea either. So Be be real careful when you’re digging in the park, pass the compass and reach the foot of the culvert on and on and on, you already have the treasure now, so he’s giving you a way to get out. So you take it on out. That’s about as much as we can do on the walkthrough. I want to thank several for being on the show. And you can reach him via our Facebook groups. If you have any questions for him. He’s a great photographer. He’s a nice guy, happy to help. He’ll be glad to answer any questions just hit him up at our Facebook group on the secret podcast on Facebook, or any of our numerous city groups that we have, which I don’t even know why we have them as city groups of people talking about anything they want. Thank you several for coming down.

Savral
Thanks for having me on the show, John. All right, gang. So

JM
this is about as close as you can get to revealing a dig spot without actually saying where it is.

George Ward
It’s about the lion, the lion, we’re all going to be rich, we are all

JM
going to be rich. I’ve said as much as I can say without saying, hey, look, let’s dig here. And I’ve worked for many, many, many years. On this particular puzzle. It’s not even funny, like sometimes eight hours a day for a week or two on it. For the sake of showing some of my own crazy work because I all I’ve been doing is featuring other people, I wanted to feature some of my own work. So I can be equally criticized with the rest of our troupe.

George Ward
And criticized you have been Oh, yeah, it’s it’s been a

JM
real blast. Hopefully, this will help people look at the thing a little differently. And maybe they’ll get an idea from me and say, Hey, listen, you know, maybe I’ve been looking at this first line wrong. Maybe it’s a word puzzle. Maybe I see this in the image. You know, who knows what, whatever it sparks. If it helps you figure out a part of the puzzle, something you can prove something that’s based in logic. That’s great, go for it. But I decided to lay out 90% of my proposed theory to show you all the kind of work that I’ve done over the last 10 years. And I’m not holding anything close to the chest here except for the final spot. These are all clues that have taken me years and years of research and the help of a team of people to bounce all these things off of and deny and confirm now that I’ve pretty much devolved and all the info on this puzzle, let me at least put out a stern reminder that the Milwaukee parks department is outwardly hostile when it comes to this puzzle. With the exception of two very nice ladies with the Lake Park Friends Association and Susan, the parks department supervisor over Lake Park. Lake Park does not want people looking for this thing. They don’t like the fact that it’s buried in the park. Yet if it’s found they demand to keep it. It’s a bit of a psychotic situation really, I was met with mixed feelings when I approached Lake Park friends to do research on this project. Gil their nature specialists, the guy who knew the info I needed about the trees at the time, was not only skeptical, but noticeably put off by me even mentioning a treasure hunt in the park. So when I finally received a right of entry permit to excavate an area that I had already been digging for a week, which is that area I spoke of earlier, it came with a caveat that if I find the cask, it will remain the property of Lake Park. Alright, so get this. They’re mad that it was buried there. They would rather it not be buried there. But if found, they keep it. And something about that whole story seems a little fishy to me. And that’s all I’ll say about that on the podcast for now. Another thing about Milwaukee and there’s a long history of this. It’s well known that Milwaukee Police are not the nicest people in the world, even Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes cracks about Milwaukee Police from time to time. You can do your own research, of course, but I can tell you from living there for 20 Some years that if someone calls the police in Milwaukee, those cops are not leaving the scene without somebody in custody. No matter what. Police like to arrest people in Milwaukee so those who want to risk the dig. Just know that there’s a warning for your own safety from the police ironically, to think twice about an unauthorized dig in Milwaukee. If you do have or decide to go rogue put the last few easy pieces together and dig up the cask. Please speak well of me

George Ward
while in prison while in prison.

JM
Now I have made a standing offer to remove the cast from Lake Park. But my terms are that Lake Park doesn’t get to keep it. I promised the key actually to animal painter a long time ago and if I’m going to dig it out, I get to keep it. It’s not because I particularly want to cask it’s well known that I really only wanted to solve the puzzle for the sheer hubris of the parks department in a city funded organization. In a city well known to V as socialist in nature, with a long history of socialist may yours to scrutinize the treasure like they have. But they demand to keep it if recovered, it just doesn’t resonate well with me. So Lake Park friends, Kevin, Susan, Georgia, and I will come up with the GPR. And we’ll pinpoint exactly where the thing is. It’ll take us about 15 to 20 minutes. I won’t say any more about the spot, but it’ll take us about 15 to 20 minutes, we’ll pull it right out of there for you. You can take some pictures and keep the pictures and we’ll just take that puppy and George can have the cask and animal fainter can have the key and and that’ll be that. Anytime. Right. We’ll come up there and get it I guess.

George Ward
Yeah, I mean, I don’t really want to go to Milwaukee, but

JM
I think I have like four or five days of antidepressants, I can give you that, oh,

George Ward
yes, I’m going to need those, I’m going to need those. I think the reason they want to keep the cask is just because people in Milwaukee don’t have any joy. And they don’t want you to have any either. So if you find something that makes you happy that they’ll take it from.

JM
So that’s it. That’s my Milwaukee thing. And right now, I wanted to spend some time with you to talk about the state of affairs with our Facebook groups and some of the things going on there. And then I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Fountain of Youth if we could for a minute. Really, let’s just kind of start with that and then we can lead into the other stuff. Our warning didn’t help, apparently,

George Ward
no, it did not help. Well, I take that back. Okay. I talked to John Fraser and our warning did help it curved. A good bit of digging. Well, that’s good. What it did do was start a lot of digging at the old fountain of youth. So someone has gone down to the old fountain of youth where, like I said, we went over it with a GPR I don’t understand why people would go in there. They’ve busted down two of the old wooden gates. They’re not gates, they’re huge doors. They’re like castle doors. They’re made out of super thick wood, but they were kind of rotted, they’d been there forever. All of those have been busted out. There’s probably 100 holes, and they’re weird. They’re like the holes are eight inches wide. Maybe it looks like somebody just like went in with a spoon and started digging little tiny holes that are like 10 inches deep, maybe at most, and like eight inches wide. I don’t understand what they were trying to accomplish.

JM
You know what? I think it is right? Is it alligator?

George Ward
Yes, it’s okay. It’s an alligator. There’s no alligators that bending branches upon another thing bending branches pawn had like a awning over it that somebody’s busted that down. It had an old house out there. Somebody’s busted up the house and like stole parts of the piano that was in it. There’s trash everywhere now like hooligans, some of you guys are assholes. Man. Seriously, it has cut down on digging at the at the actual fountain of youth. John did say that. One thing it has done it started sort of a mass mailing campaign. He said he’s just gotten gobs of of solves, Oh, no. People are sending themselves that have nothing to do with the Fountain of Youth just think and he can help them get, you know, dig permission which he cannot like if it’s not in the fountain of youth. He can’t help you with anything. He’s spoken to the mayor of St. Augustine, about a couple of them and the mayor of St. Augustine is like if they want to dig anywhere in the city, that’s you know, city property, they’re not going to know we will arrest you if you put a shovel in the ground like they’re pretty adamant about, you cannot dig anywhere on city property. The Fountain of Youth is getting a little annoyed. We went over practically everything that wasn’t in the park proper with the GPR we couldn’t find anything. We dug about 20 holes.

JM
And you posted pictures of this up to did you I did I

George Ward
posted a map of everywhere that was GPR by us everywhere that was GPR by expedition unknown, and have started updating the website with a list of every like to the foot everywhere that’s been dug in the fountain of youth. That’s not complete yet. But I’ve started it we’re starting to run out of places and the fountain of youth, you guys might want to start looking at other areas.

JM
Or maybe there’s a twist that you need to figure out. Yeah, I’m sure there’s a twist.

George Ward
If you just replace the words fountain and youth and fountain of youth, you get like Oil of Olay. So it’s got to be at the makeup counter at Sears.

JM
That was the dumbest joke I’ve you have to do better than now or whatever.

George Ward
I don’t know, I couldn’t think of anything. John is getting aggravated. The board at the fountain of youth is floating the idea of charging for digs, but they haven’t decided on that yet. And I’m hoping that they’re not going to

JM
this is why we can’t have nice things right? When I

George Ward
went out there was me another member of our group was two people me and the other. Other people we both had permission to dig I was looking outside of the park and they were looking inside of the park. They dug very very very large areas inside the park. But there was this one other guy who had sent us off to John and John was like yeah, you can dig it up at his salt was in the parking lot. We were there with the GPR so we told the guy like the founder youth parking lots all crushed stone and shell it’s super hard you can dig up the park In a lot area, it’s gravel. Yeah, you need a pickaxe. So we told the guy, we were like, Hey, man, we got a GPR here, why don’t we just run it over your spot and see if we can find any help the guy out, right? Just give me a hand. So he led us and we ran over his spot, probably like the entire length of the parking lot in his area. And what we found was a fiber optic cable, a fiber optic cable was like two feet underground. And we told the guy were like, Hey, there’s a fiber optic cable, like right where you’re at, you’re digging on top of a fiber optic cable. Please don’t dig. And I was like, okay, that’s fine. We walked away we come back, like an hour later, the dude’s got like a, like a hole right over the fiber optic cable.

JM
Because he didn’t trust you. He thought that you found it. And he’s, you know, you’re gonna walk away and oh, yeah, sure. It’s a fiber optic cable, buddy. Yeah, he’s,

George Ward
he’s like, we researched it. And there’s no fiber optic cable here.

JM
Why do you want on fiber? optic.com? And what I don’t

George Ward
know, what did you find some kind of map, but you got it. Like John can see this. Right? You obviously got to talk to John about it. And John said that he knew the fiber optic cable was there. Because when they had put the trees in, in that area, they had busted the fiber optic cable, they broken it. And it cost 1000s of dollars in like a week to repair it. And he’s super pissed at this guy. Like we found the fiber optic cable, we told them exactly where it was, and he dug it anyway, the dude was the first person, I think that was gonna get permission to dig at the obelisk in the park anymore. If you’re gonna risk damaging a fiber optic line in the founder youth when somebody’s like, there’s nothing there. But a fiber optic line like,

JM
I don’t know. That’s bad juju. That’s the

George Ward
state of the found a youth. I’ll say that. The wiki apparently put together all of their information and mailed it to John, do

JM
you mean like all of their like pages and pages and gigs and gigs? What

George Ward
he said was it was pretty much a printout of everything on the wiki related to the fountain of youth. They were trying to get permission today. They were he told people to send their solves, and he would review them. So that’s what they did. They did exactly that. He

JM
just sent him the whole website. Hey, have you seen our website?

George Ward
Yeah, and just to clue you guys in like the fountain of youth has people on every forum. Like I’m sure there are people that work of the fountain of youth that are members of the Facebook page, they check the wiki they check with you for tea, you can’t talk to John about anything about this puzzle and him not already know about it, like they know. But anyway, they did exactly what he asked them to do. They sent their solve. And they politely asked today,

JM
well, good. The majority of people did, right.

George Ward
Yeah, majority of people, you know, were very polite about it. I don’t know if he ever allowed them to dig. But he did ask us to GPR the area and what we found and so the wiki had three areas. I’m not gonna give away their actual area, because I don’t know if it’s public. Sure, sure. Yeah. The first they sort of abandoned was a palm tree next to the fountain overlooking the planetarium. And then there was another one a little bit farther back, and then the one that they’re ending up on, is next to a sidewalk. So out of respect, we didn’t dig the sidewalk because that’s their spot. I don’t want to dig their spot, you know, especially without their permission. But what we did do is we dug their abandoned spots. So we went from that first tree next to the green picket fence all the way back to the second spot, probably about two or three feet from their current spot. We dug all that out, we GPR the entire area, what we found was a giant cast iron pipe. That used to be a watermain for a house that was there. We found all their irrigation lines, and right over the wiki spot is a as a huge irrigation line that’s about two feet deep. I mean, it runs right underneath where they’re at. So I sent all this to the guy that runs the wiki. I don’t know if he posted it. I think I sent him the map of where we GPR I don’t know. I’m sorry, guys. We need to come up with a new spot. Well, there you have it.

JM
We should rename the show in search of sewer pipes with George Ward are so many sewer pipes. Alright, so let’s move on here to this New Orleans nonsense,

George Ward
right? I’m not going to call it nonsense. The guy’s got passion, and I’ll give him that. No, no,

JM
no, I have nothing against Jason. Listen, I watched that news article. And it was painful. That was retarded. It was painful. And listen, I’m not bashing the focus guy of the article. Jason right.

George Ward
No, no the journalist it’s the the journalist was horrible.

JM
This is concurrent. Now for the last three news reports slash videos that I’ve seen on the secret guys. There’s one page in the back explains everything and one page in the front explains the rules are how it works. And the back explains the rules. It’ll take you three and a half minutes to read this stuff.

George Ward
I’ve watched a couple of news programs. I watched the one in New Orleans and then there was one in San Francisco. I watched that one too.

JM
And they both Oh, there’s the Houston the wonderous Houston ones too which I

George Ward
haven’t seen the Houston ones but those two specifically taught me They both said the exact same thing. It was brand new information to me. And I don’t know if you know it. Did you know that in 1982, a man named Byron priests varied his safety deposit key and a ceramic box.

JM
Yes, this is what I keep hearing. This is like twice in a row, I’ve heard that the key is for a safety deposit bar to open a safety deposit box to get the gym. Like there’s some after quest after you get the key out of the ground. Listen, you can’t, I don’t even know my face is in my hand right now. I don’t even know what to say about this stuff. They’re porcelain keys. They represent the treasure, you give it to the author, he gives you the gem, will you get a gem now I don’t know. Sandy’s kind of gone quiet. You have to really reach out to brick tower and ask them what the deal is with the gems. I’m not after the gems, I don’t really care. But there’s not a metal key inside of the box buried in the ground. That’s not how it works. And there’s some other things that they got a little off to, I mean, where his journalism gone. It’s I understand maybe it’s a quiet day in New Orleans and you need something to fill the news up with, or maybe a genuinely think it’s an interesting article, just do your due diligence and research the thing a little bit. It’s the

George Ward
simple things, man, I just don’t understand. And so many people are given. This guy’s name’s Jason right.

JM
I think it’s Jason. Is it down? Bala?

George Ward
It’s done ball. Yeah, I think so many people online are giving them shit. Like the new running joke is wolves, wolves and everything. I mean, the guy’s put in a lot of work. He’s got passion. And there are a lot of crazy ideas out here about this puzzle. His idea isn’t as crazy as some of the others I’ve heard.

JM
Now listen, for the first five years of doing this, you go through all kinds of you give up on a theory because you just like I don’t know, it’s I can’t, maybe it’s something else, and you go to a different thing. And you work on that. And you get really into it. You know, the ambiguity of this puzzle allows for many different possibilities. And people really do get tied up in some crazy off the wall theories. And, you know, sometimes they’re right, most of the time, they’re wrong. Sometimes they’re right. But in any case, they’re doing things that are outside the normal, accepted realm of possibility, so to speak, like they’re pushing the boundaries a little bit. And they’re trying to say what else there are some people who are not really pushing any good boundaries, though. One thing you have to realize is that Google Maps is only a tool that we can use in our day and age to work on this. It’s not anything that Byron had or Palin car had back in the day, they were using maps and atlases 3d imaging of the planet, was not something that was hidden inside the image, I don’t believe, get off onto a tangent if you want. But all of this has to do with trying to get you to a certain spot in a city by following a puzzle. You heard how I look at it as a puzzle. In this last podcast, I laid out how I solved what I consider to be that puzzle, you might have a different way to solve it my way might be right or wrong or yours might be right or wrong. You have to keep it within the realm and the context of what’s going on in the book in the story. In the city that you’re in. We all want to go explore Knoxville and and Tupelo and you know Hattiesburg and wherever. But I think the cities would you agree, George the cities are pretty much laid out here we have 12 solid rock solid cities.

George Ward
Yeah. I mean, you can’t really argue with latitude and longitude coordinates.

JM
I guess you could still argue the verse combination. You could definitely argue that Yeah, yeah. But as far as finding new cities, I don’t think he I don’t think you can really reinterpret that in any day. Unless you can show me a way how to reinterpret those numbers and get you to diff 12 different places in North America. Yeah, I, you know, I’ve listened. That’s about the only way what else is going on.

George Ward
I do want to say we had a contest, right? You can call me like a wussy, hippie, hipster, whatever, if you want. But he made a really like he made an effort in that interview that he gave to show that he’s been just kind of beaten down on the forums for his ideas, like people just make fun of them. And it’s crazy. Like he’s just a guy with ideas. This is a puzzle. It’s supposed to be fun. You know? Why are we beating people down just because we don’t agree with them. I get it vectors and whatever. And wolves. It’s, it’s unorthodox. But it’s no reason to just like beat the dude down about it. So much so that he has to go on the news and talk about it.

JM
There’s always going to be a little bit of ribbing when you have groups and forums and stuff, but enough is enough. i Yeah, right.

George Ward
Ribbons one thing like I’ll poke fun at you for your world world’s crap all day long, but I don’t know we’re supposed to be a community that supports one another.

JM
Hey, we need to get Eric on the show. Eric,

George Ward
I don’t know that he wants to show. Oh, come on.

JM
I mean, come on, Eric, come on the show and talk to us, we’ll be good. That’s one guy that I think really is doing his own thing. And he gets criticized all the time for it. And, you know, he really just doesn’t care. He just keeps going on doing his own thing.

George Ward
I don’t think it’s that because I’ve talked to him. And I’ve told him like, look, I don’t agree with a lot of what you say. But I kind of love the way his mind works, the kind of parallels he draws. He said something very, it was very humbling. He was like, I don’t want to come on, because I don’t know if I have anything of substance to talk about kind of which I was just like, Are you freaking kidding me? Like, like, everything that he comes up with is something to kind of talk about? Yeah,

JM
I would agree. I mean, even if it’s not substance, it’s fun. That’s what this is all about. Listen, we’re gonna get through these 12 original podcasts that we’re doing. And we’re gonna keep the show going. But it’s going to change format a little bit, and it’s going to be a little more open, we’re going to start interviewing different treasure hunt related guests and having, you know, it’ll still be based around the secret. We’ll talk about things going on in the current. And we’ll bring some more people outside of our group online to talk to and talk about their adventures and will do all kinds of stuff. But Eric, please come on the show. And just let’s chat. Let’s just talk about the puzzle. Because I agree his mind works in a very interesting way. And he comes up with stuff that I would never think of, but it makes me think of other things. John, can

George Ward
we please leave Milwaukee? I’m sad now. Yes,

JM
we can leave Milwaukee now. I know, this was a long podcast. And unfortunately, I didn’t get to go over all of the details and how all of these things tie into the puzzle. Some of them I did. But there’s still a lot more information about it, which I’m happy to answer questions about on our Facebook page. You can also send Georgia and I private email if you desire through the podcast website, the number 12 treasures.com. As a closing note, Georgia and I want to express our gratitude to all of you for subscribing to the podcast. Every day, we continue to meet new people with new ideas and their own unique stories. As the community grows, we will grow with it doing more fun things like this live walkthrough. We do have a Facebook page. It’s the secret podcast. And in addition, we have 12 other pages one for each city for community interaction and information. If you haven’t already, please like our podcast page. And this will allow you to stay up to date on tapings, post questions for George or myself or any of our guests to answer. And of course, you’ll be notified first each month when the podcast is released or dropped as the kids say. We’re glad you enjoy what we’re doing and we’re grateful for your attention. Until next month. I’m John Michaels and for George ward. You take care now

George Ward
we’re all going to be rich.