In November 2016, area historian Doug Crowell introduced the Oak Island team to a New York-based researcher named Zena Halpern. What she brought to the table would reshape the investigation for years to come: three documents that, if authentic, would place the Knights Templar on Oak Island centuries before the Money Pit's discovery in 1795. Halpern was not a casual theorist. She had spent more than a decade tracing a chain Th of evidence from a medieval document purchased in Cremona, Italy, through a web of collectors, secret societies, and hidden objects, all the way to the shores of Nova Scotia.
Her work appeared across multiple seasons of the show, generated real archaeological investigation, and connected Oak Island to European noble families, Templar prisons, and ancient navigation technology. She passed away in 2018, and her entire research archive was bequeathed to the Oak Island team. This article examines what she presented, what the team found when they tested her claims on the ground, and where her evidence stands today.
The Templar Document and its Origins
The foundation of Halpern's theory was a manuscript she called the Templar Document. According to her account, the document was purchased in 1971 by a man she identified as Dr. W. David Jackson from a Mr. Benvenuto in Cremona, Italy. The manuscript had reportedly been kept at the Church of San Sigismundo in Cremona, and before that at Castrum Sepulchri, a Cistercian abbey in Seborga, a small principality on the Italian Riviera near the French border. Seborga had documented Templar connections dating to the 12th century and sat along the medieval pilgrimage route.
The Inscribed Marker Stones of Seborga→
The Knights Templar→
The Templar Document contained maps, journal entries, and descriptions of objects recovered from beneath the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the early 12th century. Among these was a journal entitled "A Year We Remember," attributed to an English Templar knight named Ralph de Sudeley of Gloucestershire. According to the journal, de Sudeley was dispatched on a mission in 1178 by Templar Grand Master Odo de St. Amand to recover secret scrolls hidden in a land called Onteora, a mountain range in what is now New York State. On his way there, de Sudeley and his men reportedly stopped at an island of oak along the coast of maritime Canada.
The document also described five devices found in the Jerusalem tomb, including navigation instruments, a decoder with Arabic and Hebrew letters, maps, gold, and the bones of a man named John. These items were said to have been transported to Castrum Sepulchri, where Cistercian monks translated the accompanying scrolls with the help of Jewish scholars. The scrolls allegedly described a hidden cache of treasure in Onteora and provided maps showing the route.
Three Documents on the War Room Table
When Halpern appeared on Season 4, Episode 1, she presented three specific documents via conference call with Marty Lagina, Craig Tester, and Doug Crowell.
The first was a hand-drawn French map of Oak Island, which she dated to 1347. The map labelled landmarks in French, including a basin corresponding to the swamp, a marsh, a dam, and an entry point labelled "la chene" ("the oak"). Three features on the map drew particular attention: the anchors, the valve, and a location marked "Le Trou Sous la Trappe," meaning "the hole under the trap door." The team would spend years searching for this feature, eventually calling it the Hatch.
The second was a Nova Scotia map dated 1179, which Halpern connected to the Templar Document. This map marked an area from west to east where gold was present, corresponding to the Gold River that flows from New Ross to Mahone Bay, where gold deposits triggered a major rush in the mid-1800s. The map also showed a land bridge connecting Nova Scotia to Cape Breton Island, and depicted water levels and island configurations consistent with what oceanographers confirmed were lower sea levels several centuries ago.
The third was the La Formule cipher, a coded page covered in strange symbols. Crowell noted immediately that the symbols appeared to match those believed inscribed on the lost 90-foot stone, the stone found in the original Money Pit shaft in the 1790s whose inscription was famously translated as "Forty Feet Below, Two Million Pounds are Buried." The La Formule page was torn in a deliberate jigsaw pattern and bore a faint inscription at the bottom: "Tim McInnis to W. David Jackson, one of seven."
The McGinnis Connection
The surname McInnis caught the team's attention. Halpern and fellow researcher Judi Rudebusch had tracked the name to Jim McGinnis, a direct descendant of the original Oak Island discoverer Daniel McGinnis. McGinnis had lived in Florida, worked for the CIA, and was known to have shared Oak Island information with Dr. Jackson in the 1970s. Before his death, McGinnis gave his sister a gold cross he always wore, the same cross she later showed on The Curse of Oak Island. The cross was authenticated and dated to the 16th century.
McGinnis Gold Cross→
Halpern believed Jackson found information about Oak Island within the Templar Document and that certain parties wanted it. She pointed to a note Jackson had written in the back of a book, dated 1996, which read: "They wanted the info about the tunnels so they bought the document from me. But they didn't get it. Who has it now? I think it was broken up into 8 parts. I have 4, what happened to the rest?" The La Formule page, torn like a puzzle piece, appeared to be one of those parts.
Testing the Map on the Ground
The team did not simply accept Halpern's documents at face value. They tested them against the physical landscape of Oak Island, and that investigation produced a trail of results that stretched across multiple seasons.
In Season 4, Jack Begley overlaid the 1347 map onto modern satellite imagery and found that the old French coastline aligned with the current island shape. Dave Blankenship revealed a strange depression near his property on Lot 22, close to where the map placed the Hatch. The team found a rectangular opening that appeared to have been chiseled through bedrock. Archaeologist Laird Niven confirmed the feature did not appear natural and recommended a formal archaeological permit before further excavation.
In Season 9, mechanical engineer Matt Sandt corrected a translation from the map: the original French read "the hole under the hatch" rather than simply "the hatch," a distinction that changed the search parameters. CSR GeoSurveys scanned Lot 22 and Lot 4 with VLF radio signals and magnetometer equipment, revealing anomalies near the road on Lot 4 in the area where the team believed the Hatch could be located. Subsequent metal detecting on Lot 4 produced a leather strap and buckle, a gold-plated button, an iron spike, and a topping adze that Carmen Legge dated to 1620 to 1740.
By Season 10, the team had identified a 13-foot-diameter circular stone feature on Lot 5, close to where a half Roman coin and a lead barter token had been found. Its dimensions matched the original Money Pit, and the construction resembled a wall on Lot 26 that contained charcoal dated to the 15th century. The team considered whether this could be the Hole Under the Hatch.
In Season 8, GIS expert Erin Helton used the positions of Nolan's Cross boulders and other landmarks to identify geometric alignments across the island, placing the original Money Pit just three feet from Borehole RF-1. She later interpreted the La Formule cipher's instructions as describing a 522-foot corridor at a 45-degree alignment from the Money Pit, followed by a passage of 1,065 feet, leading her to propose the treasure vault lay not beneath the Money Pit itself but at the end of a tunnel extending west.
The Rochefoucauld Connection
One of the most productive threads from Halpern's material was the name "La Rochefoucauld," which appeared on the alleged 14th-century map. Doug Crowell researched the family and found the Rochefoucaulds were a prominent French noble house dating to the 10th century with direct connections to the Crusades through the Lusignan family, who ruled in Jerusalem.
At the Centre of Geographic Sciences in Lawrencetown, the team discovered that a Francois de La Rochefoucauld married into the line of Pierre Dugua, the founder of the first French colony in Nova Scotia. Dugua's personal cartographer was Samuel Champlain, whose otherwise meticulous maps conspicuously omit Mahone Bay, a body of water containing more than 360 islands. The team asked why Champlain would leave a 25-by-20-mile bay off his charts.
Rick Lagina and Alex Lagina later traveled to the Chateau de la Rochefoucauld in France, where family representative Sonia Matossian confirmed the family's participation in the Crusades. Critically, Matossian and translator Nichola Lewis corrected a translation on Halpern's map: a phrase previously rendered as "a little drink from Neustria" in fact read "a little towards the west," strengthening the map's potential as a directional document.
The most striking Rochefoucauld connection came from the Halifax archives. Doug Crowell presented what appeared to be a French military ship's log describing an advance vessel for the fleet of Duc d'Anville, which sailed 97 ships and 13,000 men to recapture Acadia from the British in 1746. The log described the crew burying treasure in a deep pit with a secret entrance by tunnel from the shore. The shaft reached 67 feet before seepage made conditions too damp. Duc d'Anville's real name was Jean-Baptiste Louis Frederic de Rochefoucauld, connecting the expedition directly to the family whose name appeared on Halpern's map.
The Doomed Expedition of the Duc d'Anville→
Château de la Rochefoucauld→
The La Formule Decipherment
Rick Lagina sent the La Formule page to Professor Kevin Knight at the University of Southern California, a leading expert in machine translation and decipherment. Knight concluded the cipher was likely a substitution cipher used by secret societies and created by someone knowledgeable in cryptography. His partial decipherment translated into French and, rendered in English, read: "Halt. Do not dig to forty foot with an angle of forty-five degrees the shaft of five hundred twenty-two foot you enter the corridor of one thousand sixty-five foot reach the chamber."
Rick noted that 522 feet was almost exactly the distance from Smith's Cove to the Money Pit, suggesting the cipher might describe the relationship between the flood tunnel and the treasure location. Knight also identified the cipher as one of seven pieces of a larger document, with the remaining six fragments still missing. The number seven carried its own weight on Oak Island, where legend holds that seven men must die before the treasure can be found.
Halpern's Visit and the H+O Stone
In Season 5, Rick visited Halpern at her New York home, where she presented material for her book on pre-Columbian Templar contact with North America. She traced Ralph de Sudeley's 12th-century voyage from Gloucestershire, England, to Oak Island and beyond, arguing he was sent to recover ancient scrolls hidden in North America.
Halpern drew a connection between Templar coins bearing four distinctive dots around a cross and the markings on the H+O stone, a fragment salvaged by Gilbert Hedden in 1936 from a massive carved boulder that earlier searchers had dynamited in 1921 on the island's northern shore. The four dots on the H+O stone matched the embellishment style found exclusively on Templar crosses, according to her research. She also offered an unexpected interpretation of the lead cross found at Smith's Cove: rather than a depiction of Christ crucified, she identified the figure as a representation of Tanit, a Phoenician goddess dating back 3,000 years who was revered as the protector of sailors.
H+O stone→
Legacy
Zena Halpern died in 2018 at age 88. Rick learned of her passing during Season 6 and read a tribute written by archaeoastronomer Rich Moats, who had worked closely with her. Rick and nephew Peter Fornetti traveled to Halpern's Long Island home, where they joined her sons Davin and Jason in sorting through more than 50 years of research materials. Among the collection, Rick found a copy of the Cremona Document, the manuscript attributed to Ralph de Sudeley.
The Oak Island team established a dedicated research center on the island to house Halpern's archive. Doug Crowell, Paul Troutman, Rick, and Charles Barkhouse began unpacking and cataloging her annotated books, maps, and documents. When Davin Halpern later visited the center, he presented Rick with a candlestick artifact from one of his mother's research trips. Rick promised the candle would be lit only once: when the team finds answers because of her work.
Her research continued through others. Emiliano Sacchetti and Judi Rudebusch presented findings from the Cremona Document, including the Ralph de Sudeley deposition and connections to Seborga. Professor Adriano Gaspani analyzed stellar alignments encoded in Nolan's Cross and dated its construction to approximately 1200 AD, matching the Templar timeline Halpern had proposed. Rich Moats argued that Nolan's Cross functioned as a navigational treasure map constructed by engineers with celestial navigation skills. Carbon dates from across the island continued to cluster in periods consistent with her theory: the serpent mound dated to 1320 to 1440, the swamp disturbance to approximately 1220 AD, and the stone pathway charcoal to the 15th century.
Assessment
Zena Halpern's contribution to the Oak Island investigation is substantial. She drove years of fieldwork, connected the team to verifiable European noble families, and introduced documents that generated testable predictions about specific locations on the island. The Rochefoucauld family is historically real. Champlain's omission of Mahone Bay is documented. The Duc d'Anville expedition happened. The artifacts found in the areas her map indicated are genuine and have been dated by independent experts.
The documents themselves, however, are forgeries. The French across all three is riddled with errors no native speaker would make: masculine and feminine articles mixed up throughout, modern vocabulary used on supposedly medieval documents, and grammatical constructions that read like dictionary translations from English. The word "atterrissage" on the 1347 map did not enter the French language until 1830. The word "chene" was still written "chaisne" in the 14th century. The Oak Island map depicts the island as it appears today rather than as it would have looked in 1347, when sea levels were lower and the island was still connected to the mainland. The Frog Island Shoal, submerged today, would have been visible land at the time the map was supposedly drawn, yet it does not appear. The Oak Island Compendium has published a detailed four-part linguistic and provenance investigation of the Jackson documents that lays out the full case, and their findings are thorough.
The provenance is equally problematic. Every document traces back to Dr. W. David Jackson, a figure whose existence cannot be independently verified and who had a remarkable habit of discovering important objects hidden inside other objects. The Vatican confirmed to the Compendium that Franco Franzetti, who supposedly authenticated the Cremona Document, never worked for them. The Parisian rare book dealer who allegedly sold Jackson the document has no record of existence in France. Don Ruh, who co-owned the documents with Halpern, eventually declared the Oak Island map a forgery on Scott Wolter's blog in 2018, claiming it had been fabricated by Jackson as bait in an intelligence operation, though his account of how Jackson obtained the map contradicts what he wrote in his own book. Your author visited Cremona multiple times and found no Mr. Benvenuto ever worked at San Sigismundo, the City Archives or in any other place that had an archive or library.
None of this is Halpern's fault. She was given these documents by others and she believed them to be genuine. She invested years of her life researching their contents in good faith, and the connections she drew were logical given the materials she had to work with. The team respected her deeply, and Rick Lagina's relationship with her was genuine. The deception, if that is what it was, was done to her as much as to anyone else. In fact, all facts indicate Don Ruh himself is the forger.
In an irony only life itself can produce, Zena's book and maps have spurred research that she probably would have loved. The facts and datings found on Oak Island now could serve to substantiate a Templar journey to Oak Island in the Middle Ages. The Rochefoucauld research stands on its own merits. The artifacts found on Lots 4 and 5 are real. The carbon dates are real. The questions she raised about pre-Columbian European contact with Nova Scotia continue to be worth asking, regardless of the documents that prompted them. We can call her a visionary for that.
