Rick and Marty Lagina on Season 14: "This Is the Year to Watch"

The first question went to Rick Lagina, the elder brother, who was eleven years old when he read about Oak Island in the January 1965 issue of Reader's Digest. After all this time, the host wanted to know, did he still believe that something lay waiting under the ground. He answered without a pause: "100%, yeah."

Then he went further than the question asked. "I think this year in particular, there's proof of an old world treasure brought to the new world long before conventionally accepted wisdom would accept," he said. "And I truly believe that."

Asked for a hint, he declined in a single sentence: "Unfortunately, I cannot." What he offered instead was an instruction to the audience. "If you were to watch but one year of the 14 years of the show, this is the year to watch," he said. Viewers would "see the proof that I suggest is there." Then came the qualification, and it matters as much as the claim: "It will be up to everyone to decide how meaningful it is. For me, it was incredibly meaningful."

Rick did not say whether by treasure he meant gold, an object, a document or something else. He was precise about one thing only, and that was time. Whatever the team found supports, in his words, "an old world treasure visited or brought to the new world long before it should be here." That is the same argument the team had spent the previous season building in the laboratory, one carbon date and one coin at a time.

The Modern QuestThe Show→

Marty Lagina, the younger brother, is an engineer who built his fortune in the energy business and who pays for a large share of the search. On the show he is the one who asks what a find actually proves, and who reminds the room what the work costs. So the host's question to him was pointed: what was the closest he had come to saying he could not do this anymore.

Marty checked first whether the question was meant for him or for Rick. Then he answered it without softening. "I've come close several times," he said. The reason, as he put it, is a line he has drawn for himself: "You cross the line from perseverance to foolhardiness, you know, and I never want to do that. I never want to cross that line." He admitted the team had come near it before: "I think we've come close maybe seasons past."

Then the turn. "But we are so far away from the foolhardy line this year," he said. "What happened this year, I just couldn't have predicted." He called it "absolutely mindblowing," and finished with the sentence that carried the interview: "It just moves the needle towards that this is real, that's all I can tell you."

The weight of those words comes from who spoke them. Rick Lagina's belief has been part of this story since he was a boy reading Reader's Digest. A financier saying he has measured his own project against foolhardiness, has seen that line up close, and now places this season far from it is a different kind of statement.

Marty was just as plain about the cost. Asked how much time and money had gone into the search, he started with the name. "It's not called the money pit for lack of good reason," he said. "It's a money pit because of the money that went in it so far, not the money that came out of it."

The bill, he said, has never been the brothers' alone. "Millions of dollars have been spent looking for this and not just by us." He talked about the succession of treasure hunters who came before them: "They never give up. Most of them stay with it until they die. In fact, some of them died right on the island searching."

That is not a figure of speech. Six people have died in the search. A worker was scalded to death when a pump boiler burst in 1861. Maynard Kaiser, a member of the Oak Island Treasure Company's crew, fell to his death in 1897 when a hoisting rope slipped. On August 17, 1965, Robert Restall, a former carnival daredevil who had lived on the island with his family for six years, was overcome by gas in a shaft near Smith's Cove, along with his son Bobby, the investor Karl Graeser and the worker Cyril Hiltz. An old island legend holds that seven must die before the treasure is found.

The Restall TragedyThe Hunt→

The host suggested the brothers must have known from the start that the search would take years and millions. Marty would not take the easy way out of that one either. "Well, I kind of hoped it wouldn't have been," he said. "There's a reason it's still mysterious after 200 years. It's not easy." And then: "I thought we'd solve it sooner than this. I did. But I knew it would be costly and I knew it would be a big effort."

Near the end, the hosts tried once more, asking for "a little bit of a nugget, gold nugget, if you will." Rick answered by way of a long-running family argument. "Marty has always said that the story of Oak Island begins and ends in the money pit," he said. Rick is not fully persuaded, because, as he put it, "we have also proven that it is an islandwide mystery."

But he granted his brother the point that mattered. The Money Pit, the shaft three young men began digging on the east end of the island in 1795, is "incredibly important," he said, and something "that could not have been anticipated" had come to light in connection with the team's work there. In his mind, he said, it proves that the mystery of Oak Island is real, "and perhaps more real than we had at first thought."

It was the second time in the interview that one of the brothers had reached for that idea. Minutes earlier, asked a different question, Marty had said of this year: "What happened this year, I just couldn't have predicted." The words were different and the point was the same. After more than a decade of planned digs, the thing both brothers chose to stress was something neither of them had planned for.

That was as close as either brother came to a spoiler. The host closed the segment by remarking on "the symmetry of your work in the Money Pit and our work trying to get a spoiler out of you guys," and on the way out the brothers asked viewers to "keep rooting for us."

The Oak Island Money PitThe Mystery→

Rick's pointer to the Money Pit fits what The HISTORY Channel had released in the five weeks before the interview. The network announced the season on October 2, 2026: twenty-five episodes, premiering Tuesday, November 10, at 9 PM Eastern, with a Drilling Down special on the top ten finds of Season 13 in the hour before and the debut of History's Mystery Files, a new series hosted by the actor Jorge Garcia, in the hour after. The release said the brothers "believe they've never been closer to solving the Oak Island mystery," and that in the new season they would "push further than ever, determined to validate a lifetime of work and the legacy of generations of searchers who came before them." The line about generations of searchers reads differently next to Marty's account of the men who died on the island.

On October 13 the network released the first four episode titles, each with a one-line description. Three of the four mention new finds in the Money Pit. In Episode 1, "Silver Lining Playbook," the team is "rocked by new discoveries in the Money Pit and in the massive boulder feature on Lot 8." In Episode 2, "Bubbling Up," the team drills into the man-made stone cradle under that boulder. Episode 3 carries the title "The Golden Ratio," and its description has the team drilling "to find the gold that was detected deep in the Money Pit area" when it makes "a surprising and incredible new find." In Episode 4, "Descending Knights," new finds on Lot 5 and in the Money Pit lift the team's spirits.

On November 3, TV Insider published a promo for the season, shared exclusively with the site. In it, Rick says, "This is what we've spent our entire lives searching." The teaser ends with the two brothers in an emotional embrace.

Filming began on Monday, June 1, 2026. Oak Island is joined to the mainland by a narrow causeway, built in 1965 to carry the heavy machinery of an earlier search, and nearly everything that goes onto the island or comes off it passes the houses at the mainland end. One of them belongs to a neighbor who watches the comings and goings and reports them on her Facebook page, Oak Island From The Other Side of The Causeway. Through the summer of 2026, she posted what she saw pass along the road.

As the heavy work wound down, she reported that almost the last piece of equipment had rolled off the island. She also passed on something she had heard, a rumor that "something significant was found this year." Over the same months, visitors to the area described a busy island and a team in good spirits, and fans followed drone footage on Facebook and YouTube for any glimpse of the work.

A rumor is only a rumor, and she said no more than that: not what, not where, not who found it. But it was the first word to reach the public, months before the brothers sat down in front of the CBS cameras. In summer, a neighbor on the mainland relayed talk of something significant. In November, the two men who run the dig said, in their own words, that they had seen something no one anticipated. Neither source said what it was.

The interview makes most sense against the place Season 13 ended. When the season closed on May 5, 2026, with the episode "Pure Gold," the team had more finds to weigh than in any year before. Surveyor Steve Guptill's final heat map plotted more than 800 discoveries, and archaeologist Laird Niven put the year's total closer to 1,200. The pink markers on the map, reserved for finds older than the 1700s, were scattered across the island.

In the Money Pit area, the season's last caisson, a steel shaft the team called MP-1, reached bedrock at 210 feet, five feet short of its planned depth. Metal detection expert Gary Drayton went through what it brought up and found nineteenth-century drill pipe, a badly twisted iron fragment, and a piece of stained wood with an unusual, palm-like grain. It was the wood that stopped Rick. As he pointed out at the time, it had no natural reason to be down there.

Stained Wood FragmentSearcher Era · Undetermined→

On Lot 8, hand excavation inside the stone cradle beneath the 40,000-pound boulder had gone well below the six-foot depth at which the trench beside it seemed to meet bedrock. Yet the hammer-drill samples from inside the cradle were too soft to convince Niven that bedrock had been reached there at all. Marty's position at the end of the season was that the work stays open until the team understands what lies underneath, and archaeologist Fiona Steele's working estimate placed the feature as early as the 1200s.

Lot 8 Giant BoulderPre-Discovery · Cradle binder: post-1200s (Culligan) and pre-mid-1700s (Spooner); described as premodern, possibly medieval→

Then there were the dates, which matter most for what Rick said in November. Leather shoe fragments from a cobblestone path in the swamp returned a radiocarbon range of 1148 to 1216 AD. The Italian astronomer Professor Adriano Gaspani placed the astronomical alignments of a round stone foundation on Lot 5 at about 1236 AD, close to his earlier estimate of 1217 AD for Nolan's Cross, the cross of large boulders on the island first mapped by the surveyor Fred Nolan. Archaeometallurgist Emma Culligan's analysis of the binder in the Lot 8 cradle pointed to premodern construction. In Angra do Heroísmo in the Azores, the Portuguese numismatist Alberto Silva dated the Pitblado coin, a Portuguese coin struck under King Ferdinand I, to no later than 1371. Acadia University geologist Dr. Robert Raeside placed a stone cannonball catalogued as Peacock-1 in the 1300s or early 1400s. These findings come from different methods and do not all point to the same moment. Together, they gave the team a medieval possibility to test, and a reason to take seriously the idea of something in the New World "long before it should be here."

Oak Island S13: The Medieval CaseThe Record→Archaeoastronomy on Oak IslandThe Evidence→

One lead from the laboratory remained. Of fifteen wood samples tested in a program run with Acadia University geologist Dr. Ian Spooner, a piece recovered from Shaft 2A in 2024 returned the island's highest silver reading and its third-highest gold reading. The results were enough for Marty to commit to more testing.

Piece of wood containing traces of goldColonial · 1640-1806→

The gold that gave the finale its name came from Marty himself. At the season's closing meeting in the War Room, he produced a one-ounce gold coin bearing a Canadian maple leaf and used it to mark the spot he wanted the team to dig first in Season 14. The next season had a starting point before the last one was over.

An interview like this one can be measured only against what the season eventually shows. The brothers knew that, and both of them built the measuring into what they said. Rick called his evidence proof and in the same breath handed the verdict to viewers. Marty, who described the line between perseverance and foolhardiness that he will not cross, chose the plainest words he could find and then stopped: "That's all I can tell you."

What they could say on November 6 had limits. As with every season, finds made during filming stay off the record until the episodes air. What they chose to say within those limits is on record here, in their own words, before a single episode of Season 14 had been broadcast. The season itself is now the evidence, and Rick left no doubt about who gets to weigh it. "It will be up to everyone to decide how meaningful it is."

Corjan Mol, a historical researcher and cast member of the Oak Island team, appears in the official Season 14 trailer and worked with the team during filming. This article draws only on what the brothers, the network and their neighbor on the causeway said in public before the season aired.

The interview

• CBS News Sacramento. "Rick & Marty Lagina talk 'The Curse of Oak Island'." Good Day Sacramento, 6 November 2026. Video interview with Rick and Marty Lagina. Watch at CBS News.

Network announcements and press

• The HISTORY Channel (A&E Networks). "A Night of Mystery: New Series History's Mystery Files and a New Season of The Curse of Oak Island Premieres Nov. 10." Press release, 2 October 2026, as published by The Futon Critic.
• The HISTORY Channel (A&E Networks). Titles and descriptions for Season 14, Episodes 1 to 4, released 13 October 2026.
• HISTORY.com Editors. "Everything You Need to Know About the New Season of 'The Curse of Oak Island'." HISTORY.com, updated 4 November 2026.
• Fishman, Scott. "'The Curse of Oak Island' Promo Teases Major Discovery For Rick & Marty Lagina." TV Insider, 3 November 2026.

From the causeway

• Oak Island From The Other Side of The Causeway. Facebook page, posts from the summer of 2026.

Books

• Crooker, William S. Oak Island Gold. Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 1993.
• Lamb, Lee. Oak Island Family: The Restall Hunt for Buried Treasure. Toronto: Dundurn, 2012.

Site records

• The Artifact Vault entries for the stained wood fragment from caisson MP-1, the giant boulder and stone cradle on Lot 8, and the wood sample from Shaft 2A with traces of gold and silver.