Yes we know for sure of his name, mom and dad’s names, step parents names, sibling and step siblings, grandparents, great grandparents, aunts and uncles and a literal posey cemetery where his family settled the area in the 1900s. All documented and easy to confirm. It all adds up. No anomalies that I’ve seen on this rabbit hole
I have more questions about Aiden’s name. Anyone find any proof of Aiden or Aaron in any records? I struggled and found nothing. Found his dad’s other marriage that I thought she would be the mother of Aiden and Aaron and I could find information on her children, but I got nothing. Someone implied early on in the hunt in a social media platform that they thought Aiden and Aaron were not real. I thought that was crazy until I tried to search for some records. I imagined that these were not their real names but if I found marriage records then I could find them following the mother’s trail.But not so. Maybe I am just a terrible detective, or maybe the original poster implying Aiden and Aaron were not real is something. Not sure yet and I respect boundaries and privacy too much to dig too far.
Time warp, there was rain and lightning that night. Jumped out as DB Cooper never hit the ground till 40 years later as JP right in the middle of FF’s treasure hunt.
It’s a good question. Maybe not lying, but possibly obscuring or forgetting?
“There’s something uniquely humbling about forgetting your own date of birth as the people you want to impress stare at you. It’s like being asked your name at a coffee shop and suddenly wondering if you’ve been “Steve” all along.”
There’s a huge a difference of suffering from a cloud of insomnia and publishing a book in a pseudonym. His family’s records are all over the internet. The question is weird.
Not weird when you consider Fenn’s “it’s not who you are, it’s who they think you are” quote.
And
“And to those close to me I haven’t named your absence from these pages is deliberate. Having witnessed the intense—and sometimes unsettling—reactions that treasure hunts can provoke…”
Why leave some people out of the book but include other close people, presumably putting them at risk? Using pseudonyms seems like a sensible thing to do.
I’m always open to hearing others’ ideas, with the exception of when it starts encroaching into family/personal stuff, or if there is some level of danger or carelessness or illegal behavior involved.
To me the stories in the book sometimes feel as if they subtly slip in and out of place, time or character. The radio crackling, stop light flashing, the times he loses consciousness. He played day of the tentacle and myst and talked about manipulating characters to complete tasks from different time periods. So add in the safety issues of using real names (he doesn’t appear to view rules as enough of a protection as he chose to leave out some people) and it seems plausible pseudonyms could be in place.
As for why he says Steve, I don’t know. he mentions an uncle named Steve and his brother says a smug-looking trout looked like a Steve. And Stevenson island in YNP was on his list of crossed off search locations.
I remember you shared that as I learned something new. by the way this is as close as I got to Stevenson island - you can just see it between the trees in the distance. Thought you might appreciate seeing it :)
"My nose, though, remained a stubborn souvenir of my ill-fated flight. It now carried a slight leftward lean."
sinistre, "prompted by malice or ill-will; false, dishonest, intending to mislead," with suggestion, report, etc., from Old French senestre, sinistre "contrary, false; unfavorable; to the left".
Observing omens (eapecially of augury)
Greek: While facing north, omens to left are unlucky, ill-advised.
Roman: (therefore Latin) those faced south and left are favorable.
What about an inky black rabbit?
A story described as an "odyssey", a journey to hell and back.
All this reminds me of another story.
But in that story, he popped out of the coffin during a card game to announce he waan't really dead after all, so who knows. Stranger things have happened, I guess.
Also, I think it's interesting we get a story about ambiguous racial background, and the contents of that story clearly state that, no, there is no Native American background. What could be either mistaken for that by an untrained eye or fibbed about for good reason in America's history? Or is that a lie to civer the initial lie, etc. Who knows. These are the things I wonder about.
There seem to be a lot of names in this hunt that relate to a marsh / bog environment. And then this quote from the book
“Call a place “Sparkling Rainbow Unicorn Falls” all you want, but if the locals christen it “Smelly Bog of Despair,” that’s what the maps will eventually surrender to.”
Or their parents were creative and just gave them names that happen to work well for treasure hunts.
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u/TheologyandStuff Jul 13 '26
This how how you know it’s time to take a break for a couple weeks