In the Money Pit area, the team drills borehole I-9.5 targeting the deepest sections of the solution channel at 210 to 230 feet, an area where new water tests conducted by Dr. Ian Spooner and Dr. Chris Michel have confirmed non-natural deposits of gold, silver, and other metals. Steve Guptill helps select the drilling location. Terry Matheson and Charles Barkhouse monitor cores as driller Adam pushes through loose material and gypsum near the bedrock plateau. At roughly 209 feet, Charles detects a metal signal in the core that repeatedly appears and then vanishes when the muddy material is spread out. Katya Drayton is called in with the Manticore detector and confirms the presence of fine metallic particles concentrated in clumps of soil, consistent with traces the team has found in other samples. Rick Lagina concludes that if the material proves to be gold or silver, a caisson shaft should be placed directly over the location. The entire core is bagged for lab analysis.
On Lot 5, the archaeology team recovers a sixth Venetian bead from the round stone foundation, adding to the body of evidence linking the feature to the Knights of Malta, who established a stronghold 15 miles south of Oak Island in 1632. In the research center, Rick, Marty Lagina, and the team review the feature as Laird Niven presents a 3D drone model he created of the stone marker found three weeks earlier on Lot 5, confirming it was deliberately placed in a dug hole and propped up with surrounding rocks. Steve Guptill reveals that the formation matches structures used by both the Romans and the Vikings as survey markers for claiming land or marking roads, and notes that six Roman coins have been found within a 250-foot radius. He adds that the marker should have a companion within its line of sight, and calculates a southeast projection from the stone's orientation.
Steve Guptill, Peter Fornetti, Gary Drayton, Ethan, and Alex Lagina walk the projected line using a total station and GPS to survey a perfectly straight course from the Lot 5 marker. Gary metal detects along the route and recovers an iron strap with a square hole that could be from a barrel. On Lot 27, the team encounters a drilled stone that Rick and Steve had previously surveyed years earlier but had nothing to connect it to. Steve now reveals that projecting the line from the Lot 5 marker through the drilled stone leads directly to the Kingdom Stone, the buried sefirot at the base of Nolan's Cross that Norwegian Freemason and researcher Petter Amundsen identified in 2013 as part of the Tree of Life, an ancient religious symbol of ten points highly revered by the Knights Templar. The drilled stone on Lot 27 sits at one of the island's highest points, consistent with its use as a survey pivot. Rick observes that this emerging network of aligned features suggests island-wide planning by the original depositors and reinforces his belief that digging and drilling alone will not solve the mystery.
In the Oak Island lab, Rick and other members of the team join Laird Niven and Emma Culligan to examine an artifact found on Lot 15. Emma's CT scan reveals a hand-forged instrument with two arms joined by a pin, which the team initially identified as a compass. Her compositional analysis shows no modern alloying elements, placing the tool comfortably in the 1700s with the possibility of the mid to late 1600s. Blacksmithing expert Carmen Legge then examines the artifact and corrects the identification: it is not a compass but a divider, a high-quality, double-sided engineering tool used for measuring distances, designing structures, and determining circumferences. Carmen calls it the most sophisticated item to have surfaced from metal detecting on the island, noting comparable French dividers from 1620 and a British example from 1543. Emma adds that the iron shows extreme chlorine content consistent with prolonged saltwater submersion, not just surface exposure. The team speculates it may have been lost in the flood tunnel system at Smith's Cove and later brought to the surface in Robert Dunfield's massive 1965 excavation, whose spoils were spread across Lot 15.
Rick connects the divider to the stone cairns on Lot 15, five pyramid-shaped mounds documented by Fred Nolan in the early 1960s that archaeoastronomy expert Professor Adriano Gaspani demonstrated through peer-reviewed research to be aligned with 13th-century star positions. A tool of this precision would have been essential for planning and constructing such formations, as well as any engineering work in the Money Pit itself. Carmen characterizes it as the tool of an upper-level craftsman, expensive and built to last. The team concludes that whoever carried this divider undertook work of great significance on the island, work that required detailed planning and was not accomplished quickly. The find, together with the marker stone alignment and the metallic traces in the solution channel, adds to a growing body of evidence that the original depositors operated with sophisticated surveying and engineering capability.
