Rick and Marty Lagina begin their first serious attempt to locate and drill into the original Money Pit. A coring rig is brought in to drill test holes to a target depth of approximately 140 feet, where an 1897 expedition reportedly struck a cement-covered vault containing what was described as loose metal pieces. The first hole stalls at 53 feet, unable to advance through more than two centuries of debris left by past searchers. There are 44 known shafts in the Money Pit area, all backfilled with wood, nails, and rubble. Dan Blankenship examines the core samples and identifies spruce wood from the Chappell shaft, dug in 1931. He advises moving the drill site four to six feet to thread between the Chappell and Hedden shafts, the two excavations historically believed to have come closest to the original Money Pit.
In the War Room, the team meets with Paul Troutman, whose father James worked alongside Dan Blankenship and California geologist Robert Dunfield on Oak Island in the mid-1960s. After the Restall tragedy on August 17, 1965, Dunfield took over the Restall contract and launched the most aggressive and controversial excavation in the island's history. He bulldozed Smith's Cove in an attempt to block the flood tunnel entrances and dug the Money Pit out to 100 feet wide and more than 100 feet deep. In the process, many of the island's landmarks and what are now believed to be precious archaeological clues were destroyed. On January 1, 1966, the massive excavation collapsed due to flooding, and Dunfield left the island in April of that year, never to return. Paul shares color home movies filmed by his father that show the destruction firsthand, including footage of a wooden structural piece with dovetail joints and what appeared to be numerals engraved on it, an artifact that was held in hand but is now lost.
At Smith's Cove, metal detection expert Gary Drayton makes his first appearance on Oak Island, working with a CTX 3030 detector alongside Peter Fornetti and Dan Henskee. Drayton, a professional treasure hunter for over 20 years, specializes in coins and artifacts. Scanning the rocky shoreline, he recovers an old flat military button that he dates to the 1700s, possibly from a soldier's uniform. The find raises questions about which military forces may have been active on or near the island during the 18th century.
Back at the Money Pit, drilling resumes with a stronger bit at Dan's recommended location. Craig Tester oversees the operation but the casing hangs up again at 105 feet, still 35 feet short of the target depth. Craig diagnoses the problem: the small coring rig lacks the pump capacity to clear the rubble it grinds up, and the material simply gets re-mulched in place. The team concludes they will need to bring in a significantly larger and more powerful drilling rig if they hope to reach the 135-to-140-foot level where virgin ground and the original vault may lie.
Investigative researcher J. Hutton Pulitzer visits the island to examine petroglyphs carved into exposed rock surfaces. Using a 3D scanner that projects a coded light pattern onto the stone and creates a real-time digital model, Pulitzer identifies a series of cross symbols and an eight-pointed star. He draws a connection to the inscribed stone slab found at 90 feet in the Money Pit in 1804, which was long thought to contain a coded message reading "Forty feet below two million pounds are buried." Pulitzer suggests the markings on the 90-foot stone may not be a cipher at all but characters from an ancient language, one whose symbology matches the petroglyphs found on the island's surface. If verified, the connection could link Oak Island to the treasures of King Solomon's Temple. The team agrees to let Pulitzer's research group correlate the data and present a comprehensive analysis.
