The airlift operation at Borehole 10-X begins in earnest, with Irving Equipment pumping compressed air down a pipe to the bottom of the 235-foot shaft to force water, sediment, and any objects up to the surface. Dan Blankenship, who first drilled the borehole in the early 1970s and has long maintained he saw evidence of wooden posts, a large chest, antique tools, and possibly human remains on his original camera footage, watches alongside Rick Lagina. The airlift temporarily clogs, with the hose pounding as though something large is caught inside, raising Dan's concern that the fissure he discovered at 212 feet may have collapsed. The blockage clears and the system resumes, depositing hundreds of pounds of dark sediment into a dumpster for inspection. Among the spoils, Charles Barkhouse finds what appears to be a bone with visible marrow, prompting the team to plan forensic analysis. Jack Begley and Craig Tester spend nearly a week sifting the remaining material through a diamond mesh trough, recovering pieces of hand-sawn wood with no circular saw marks, wood coated in a black tar-like substance consistent with pitch, and additional bone fragments. Dan confirms none of the recovered wood could have fallen in during his decades of work on the hole. In the War Room, the team agrees the finds are encouraging enough to keep 10-X on the list, though not yet conclusive.
At Smith's Cove, Rick, Marty, and the team begin installing a temporary cofferdam made of inflatable polypropylene bladder sections, each 100 feet long and filled with 120,000 gallons of seawater to form an eight-foot barrier. The cofferdam will allow them to pump the enclosed area dry and search for the box drains first discovered by the Truro Company in 1850, which are believed to feed ocean water into the Money Pit's flood tunnels. Contractor Jeremy Frizzell oversees the installation, but the first bladder section ruptures catastrophically under pressure, splitting wide open with considerable force. Frizzell, who has supervised more than 100 successful installations, says he has never seen anything like it. A replacement will take weeks to arrive, adding another costly setback to an already strained budget.
Researcher Paul Troutman, son of James Troutman who worked on the island for Robert Dunfield in 1965, presents his findings from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library archives. Troutman discovered a folder in Roosevelt's personal files containing extensive Oak Island correspondence, including letters from treasure hunter Gilbert Hedden and photographs from the 1909 Bowdoin salvage operation. The folder also contains a file labelled "Knights Templar" and documents confirming Roosevelt's Masonic membership, a fraternity shared by several other Oak Island searchers including Erwin Hamilton and Hedden. Troutman notes that the Masonic lodge addressed Roosevelt as "his excellency."
Rick and Alex Lagina travel with Paul Troutman and Doug Crowell to the Roosevelt Presidential Library to examine the archives firsthand. Among the documents, they find a letter from the Secretary of the Treasure Hunters Club to the White House confirming that the Roosevelt family's connection to Oak Island began not in 1909 but in 1849, when FDR's grandfather Warren Delano invested in the Truro Company, the same organization that discovered the box drains and recovered small bits of gold chain from the Money Pit. A separate document, an interview with Roosevelt's close friend Duncan Harris, reveals that Harris accompanied FDR to Oak Island and that Roosevelt believed the treasure was the lost crown jewels of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The discovery of a direct Roosevelt-to-Templar-to-Oak-Island paper trail stuns the team and provides a compelling new angle on why one of America's most powerful presidents maintained a lifelong fascination with the mystery.
