An illicit photo, a secret code, a Project Skydrop sequel. A tale of betrayal and reconciliation.
Project Skydrop prompted treasure hunters to search for a golden statue worth thousands of dollars. The search culminated in Massachusetts.
When Dan Leonard emerged from the woods of Wendell State Forest in Central Massachusetts with a golden trophy worth thousands of dollars in October, he thought his treasure hunt was over.
A meteorologist from Belmont, Leonard used weather data to narrow down the possible locations for the lucrative prize in “Project Skydrop,” a treasure hunt created by a New Hampshire video game designer that drew widespread interest.
On his way back to his car, Leonard was met by other treasure hunters who applauded as held up the $25,000 solid gold statue, which also contained a decoding mechanism to access a far more lucrative prize — a bitcoin wallet worth $87,600.
But his moment of triumph was short-lived. Another contestant took a picture of the trophy with the decoder visible and posted it online, giving anyone a shot at the bitcoin bounty. Fortunately, the game’s developer, Jason Rohrer, hadn’t transferred any money into the encrypted account, so he came up with another treasure hunt, this time for a jar of gold coins and designed so only Leonard could find it.
It sounded simple, but the second quest was anything but. Leonard would capture his winnings, but only after a dramatic sequence of events, from an absconded treasure and accusations of betrayal to a change of heart and ultimate reconciliation.
“It’s been a wild ride,” said Leonard, 48. “But at the end of the day it worked out.”
The first treasure hunt
Leonard was watching the news one night when he saw a story about Project Skydrop, a new kind of real-world treasure hunt.
Each day, the designers, Rohrer and Tom Bailey, would post a map of the location where the gold statue was hidden. On the first day, the map had a 500-mile radius, covering much of the northeastern United States. But it would shrink each day, gradually zooming in on the prize.
Players also received a daily email featuring an aerial photo of the statue on the forest floor, with the camera gradually panning out to reveal geographic clues to the trophy’s location. A livestream of the statue on the project’s website included the real-time temperature of the area.
Leonard didn’t think he’d have much of a chance at first. But when he saw the livestream and the temperature reading, he realized his professional expertise could give him an edge.
“Whoever found the treasure was either going to be a meteorologist or somebody who had a thorough understanding of the weather,” he said.
Leonard paid the $20 entry fee and began analyzing temperature data to narrow down the search, eventually leading him to Franklin County. He then began tracking cloud cover in the area and compared it to the amount of sunlight he could see shining on the forest floor in the livestream. That narrowed the range to “several square miles,” he said.
The breakthrough came when Leonard began analyzing the types of trees in the area. He noticed from the aerial images there were no evergreen trees in that part of the forest, so he pulled up Google Earth images taken during winter and began circling areas with leafless trees in state parks in the Greenfield area.
“This was able to get me into just a couple of tight pockets, maybe a quarter of a square mile in a few different spots,” he said.
He set out to search for the trophy on Oct. 1, a Tuesday afternoon.
He parked in the town of Erving off Route 2A and ventured into the woods. He searched for about two hours, looking for downed trees and logs that matched what he had seen in the images. Just as it was getting dark, Leonard found the golden figure, hidden by the fallen leaves.
“I was an inch or two away from just kicking it,” he said. “It was virtually impossible to see unless you were really close up to it.”
His prize in hand, Leonard felt a wave of pride and relief.
“There were a lot of late nights I spent after my shift just studying so many different factors and really putting a lot of time and effort into it, and it all paid off,” he said. “That was sort of a relief, that I didn’t just do this all for nothing.”
A new game and a new friend
Between the value of the trophy and the bitcoin, Leonard was in line for a windfall of more than $100,000. But when he accidentally compromised the code for the cash prize, his fellow competitors pounced.
“A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into making a virtual version of the trophy and decoding it,” he said.
The game developers asked that the picture of the trophy be taken down from a Discord channel, and later versions had the decoder blurred out. But it was too late. Others were able to break the code, which produced a phrase to access the winnings.
“If we had put the money into the bitcoin wallet as originally planned, somebody would have taken it before Dan had even got a chance,” Rohrer said.
Rohrer and Bailey spent several days coming up with a second treasure hunt designed specifically for Leonard, with a prize equal in value to the original $87,600 bounty, this time in the form of golden coins. Rohrer placed the jar in the woods near Madbury, N.H., not far from his Dover home. Like the first treasure hunt, he placed a camera near the jar and set up a livestream.
At the beginning of the game, each player was given four secret words that could be used to access the Discord server. Rohrer used the four words he assigned to Leonard to create a puzzle that when solved would significantly narrow down the location. Without knowing Leonard’s secret words, the hunt would be nearly impossible.
But as Leonard faced a new puzzle, another player, Chris Passmore, offered to help.
Passmore, 39, who lives in southern New Hampshire, had followed a strategy similar to Leonard’s in the initial treasure hunt and reached out to chat about it. The two men built a rapport and Passmore suggested they team up to solve the new puzzle.
“The approach at the time was, ‘Hey, whatever I can do to maybe help you out, it’d be cool just to be part of the winning team and be part of your story,” Passmore recalled.
But other players had also offered to help him, and Leonard was a bit wary.
“It was very difficult to discern who was being honest with me and who was a wolf in disguise,” Leonard said. “I felt Chris was being honest from the beginning. He seemed like he had a lot more to lose than to gain if he was ever to betray me.”
Dead ends and questions about compensation
The pair spent hours on the phone over the following days, and Leonard eventually decided to divulge his four secret words — boulder, barrel, anger, piano — so Passmore and a team of code crackers he had enlisted could get to work.
After a few more days, they thought they solved the puzzle and identified a target area in southern Maine. But a search yielded nothing.
At that point, Passmore decided he would need a piece of the winnings for all his work.
“We’re taking time away from work and our families and so forth, and we’re not getting any sleep, we were pulling all-nighters,” Passmore said. “We needed to talk to Dan about some kind of split … prior to that we were just kind of doing it for fun.”
Leonard said he had planned all along to reward Passmore and his team. But when Passmore wanted to formalize the terms, they couldn’t reach a deal.
“Chris essentially replied that he expected the majority of the bounty money to go to him and his team, and I would get a small portion in the end,” Leonard said. “This was a fairly shocking revelation to me.”
Passmore said he initially asked for 65 percent of the winnings for his team. They briefly negotiated but couldn’t reach a “formal, written agreement,” Passmore said.
A couple of hours later, Passmore got a call from his team, he said. They had solved the code and gave him the GPS coordinates for the jar of gold. It was in the woods in Madbury, N.H., just 20 minutes from Passmore’s home. (Leonard believes Passmore’s team had already solved the code when he broached the subject of compensation.)
Passmore had a choice: Listen to the angel on one shoulder and send Leonard the coordinates, or listen to the devil on his other and go get the bounty for himself.
“It’s important to know that my whole relationship with Dan was not on the grounds of, like, let me weasel my way in and let me screw him over,” he said. “It wasn’t like that.”
Leonard, meanwhile, knew Passmore’s team was close to breaking the code. Fearing he would lose out on the bounty altogether, Leonard turned to the Discord community and asked for help. Leonard said one member sent him instructions and he soon had the GPS coordinates.
Around 10 p.m., Leonard grabbed his jacket to head to Madbury, a little less than an hour away. But his wife stopped him as he headed for the door.
“She said it was too dangerous,” Leonard said. “You can only imagine what happens in the middle of the night, in the dark, in the middle of the deep, dark woods, when there’s $87,000 of gold on the ground and two men come and find it at the same time.”
Leonard hung his jacket back up. He and his wife turned on the livestream, assuming Passmore would eventually arrive and take the gold.
Just before midnight, they saw a man appear in a baseball cap and balaclava. After picking up the jar of gold, he left a note that read, “Anon.”
“I just sort of grabbed my head, and then we hugged and cried,” Leonard said. “That was it, it was over. Of course I knew who it was, but nobody else did.”
Conflict and reconciliation
Passmore said he wore the cap and mask and out of concern for his personal safety. He equated it to anonymous lottery winners.
“I didn’t want people knowing that I have two and a half pounds of gold in my possession, and you can easily find out where people live nowadays, right?” Passmore said. “So the idea was I need to get it back home, I need to get it secured, I need to talk to a lawyer and an accountant and figure out what do I do.”
The next morning, Leonard called the game’s designers. He told them he had given his four secret words to someone who offered to help him, but he wouldn’t say who it was.
“He wouldn’t tell us,” Rohrer said. “He was freaking out.”
But within a few days, Passmore posted a video online, showing the coins as Pink Floyd’s “Money” played in the background.
Once the secret was out, the other participants were outraged at Passmore, Rohrer said. To tell his side of the story, Passmore set up a livestream and for three hours answered questions.
“I think the few supporters he had, he lost them,” Leonard said. “The entire community had turned on him.”
“They just tore him apart,” Rohrer agreed.
Passmore said he tried to defend himself, insisting he did not violate the rules of the game.
“Some people were on my side, and some people weren’t,” Passmore said. “I got hit with some hard questions, which I expected.”
Passmore said the other players knew where he lived and he received a couple of “very specific threats” that he reported to the police.
As the stress mounted, Passmore said he started to have a change of heart. He feared he had betrayed Leonard and the spirit of the game. Increasingly concerned for his and his family’s safety, he felt it was time to put the game behind him.
“At the end of the day, it was just like, ‘let’s make the hard choice, the right choice.’ I’m not trying to be greedy and upset people and so forth. It was just a recognition of how this story should end,” Passmore said.
Passmore reached out to Rohrer and Bailey and said he wanted to forfeit the gold to Leonard. Rohrer said it was an emotional conversation.
“After four or five days of playing the villain, being the tough guy, and bragging about the gold he had taken, Chris essentially told us that what he had done was against his personal values,” Rohrer said. “He’d been trying to justify it to himself but that cognitive dissonance was friction in his soul and he was just at his breaking point.”
They set up a meeting between Passmore and Leonard to hand off the gold. But when the two men spoke, they wanted to make the exchange special. They returned to an earlier idea, that Leonard’s 18-month-old son would be the one to collect the prize.
“It felt good to have a happy ending,” Passmore said.
Leonard hasn’t shared any of the bounty with Passmore, but he’s considering it.
“I still might, maybe someday,” he said
He said that Passmore apologized for what had happened, saying the “gold got the best of him.”
“Maybe he tripped up and had this moment of weakness,” Leonard said. “But in the end, I think he’s still a good person deep down.”
To comment, please create a screen name in your profile
To comment, please verify your email address
Conversation
This discussion has ended. Please join elsewhere on Boston.com