Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch: Mormon Gold (S1E3)

Before diving into the murky, treasure-filled waters within the acres of Blind Frog Ranch, I just wanted to touch base on some Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch adjacent content. Even though I went pretty hard on Lue Elizondo in some of my Secret of Skinwalker Ranch coverage, I decided to buy his book Imminent. At the time doing this coverage, which is quite some time before this piece will go out, I am roughly halfway through the book. If you follow anyone in the field of Ufology on Twitter, then you know this whole thing has been a crap show.

One side of the aisle paints Lue Elizondo as a grifter, someone whose main source of evidence is, “Trust me, bro.” The other side worries about Elizondo’s safety after this shocking disclosure. And then there is the small group of people like myself. The people who are frustrated with the whole idea of modern disclosure. In Lue’s book, one point I completely agree with is the idea of government figures muddying the water with the stigma of Ufology. Reports of sightings, for some time, had almost a McCarthyism to it. You listen to a broadcast of Coast to Coast with Art Bell from the mid-90s and people, anonymously, still were hesitant to tell their stories. 

Modern technology has made it easier to report and provide evidence of UAPs, UFOs, and USOs, but it’s still not taken as seriously as it should be. Nowadays, disclosure is gatekept by people like Elizondo, George Knapp, and many others, in a very intriguing way. (No hate toward George Knapp or Jeremy Corbell, but it’s a disclosure-wide problem.) In Imminent, Elizondo purposefully throws heaps of names, pseudonyms, acronyms, and dates at you willy-nilly. Within one page, Elizondo took us from the mid-aughts to the 90s, and then to the 70s, changing the character focal point at the drop of a dime, without lube or warning. 

When it comes to disclosure, if you don’t have a directory or index of abbreviations or names handy, you’re going to just get lost in the sauce. I get that to paint the full picture, you need to set the stage. But it’s not user-friendly. I read a good tweet, which I can’t find right now, basically saying that if you’re familiar with the past 40-ish years of Ufology then this book won’t do much for you. As someone fairly familiar with the majority of things discussed in Imminent, I too am finding myself frustrated with the deficit of attention from page to page. I know what AAWSAP, AARO, AATIP, UAPTF is. I know who Jay Stratton is. I know who “Rosemary” is, and that she’s more than likely the person who reported seeing Dino-Beavers on Skinwalker Ranch. But rather than disclosing information in a palatable way, Elizondo helps to muddy the water for even a fairly-studied person in the field of Ufology. 

That’s enough of that for now. Buy his book, don’t buy his book, I don’t care. Do what you want. Don’t let one side of the Ufology aisle tell you how to perceive something. Read it yourself, do your own research, and make your own conclusions. This is exactly what I will be doing now for Mystery at Blind Frog Ranch Season 1 Episode 3 “Mormon Gold.”

Dyeing To Get Into The Hills

We join Duane Ollinger, Chad Ollinger, Charlie Boy, and Eric Drummond at a cabin on the property. Chad is showing them the video he and Ryan Walsh took from their dive into the caverns. Everyone is in awe. In a talking head, Chad discusses something we didn’t really get to see much of in Episode 2 “Submerged Treasure” which is how Chad’s airline kept getting tangled up. The jagged rocks of the caverns created a tight and dangerous path, one wrong move could have caused Chad’s line to wrap around a rock and rupture. 

As they watch the cavern video, you can clearly see how uncomfortable Duane is. Yes, he’s ecstatic about this one-of-a-kind find, but Chad’s mortality rests deep behind Duane’s gaze. The video finally gets to the part where Chad and Ryan come across the wooden box. Eric’s first reaction is to call the box man-made. Duane just grins from ear to ear. He also says it must have been built before the cave was flooded.

In a talking head, Eric discusses that the Aztecs have been known to do this. They would hide objects of special value in caves and then purposefully divert water through and around them to keep people away from their treasures. What this also means, Eric states, is that a dry access must be around somewhere for the Aztecs to have gotten their building equipment in. Duane says they need to find that entrance. He also acknowledges what Chad and Ryan did was high-risk and that they won’t be doing it again for quite a while. It’s clear that between the wooden box, the natural gold, and the processed gold, there has to be a dry entrance. 

Eric hatches a plan. The four of them head over to the water pit. Eric has a natural and non-toxic dye that turns fluorescent green (kind of like that one time Dr. Travis Taylor poured a similar dye into that “endless” pit on Skinwalker Ranch). Eric says this will determine how the water flows in and out of the pit. 

Duane swivels the CAT excavator to the ridge overlooking the water pit and Chad hops in. Chad is maneuvered over the water pit and he dumps the dye in. It’s clear there is a heft current in the water as, even before the dye is mixed properly, it starts flowing fairly strongly. Chad gets out of the excavator’s bucket so Duane can use the bucket as a makeshift stirrer. Duane giggles like a kid in a candy shop the whole time. By the time the water is mixed, it looks like the kind of water you’d see at a UFO-themed minigolf course! Eric says the dye will stay in the water for about two days. 

There’s Dye (And Creatures) In Them Hills

After the dye is mixed, Eric, Chad, and Charlie Boy head out into the woods. They fly a drone up to see if any of the small bodies of water show any fluorescent green. Unfortunately, they don’t have any luck. But they do find quite a few beaver ponds around for them to check out at a later time. Eric tells them they will come back out here when it gets dark, at which point they can use a UV light to properly check for water. 

Night comes upon the ranch. Duane is still goofing around with the excavator bucket and the neon green water pit. Eric takes them down to the edge of the water to show what it will look like when dyed water interacts with UV light. It’s basically what the walls of a freshman frat guy’s dorm would look like. Or like a bioluminescent beach. Eric, Chad, and Charlie Boy head out into the woods. It’s unclear why Duane stays back. Before they embark on their night journey, Charlie Boy makes sure to remind everyone about the mutilated deer. 

Once they’re fairly deep in the woods, Eric has everyone extinguish their light sources when they reach the creekbed below the dig site. That’s when Charlie Boy makes a startling discovery; fresh mountain lion scat. Eric gets the bright idea to make themselves known to predators, which results in a fairly humorous cacophony of whistles, clinks, clanks, and hoots. 

They come across a pair of fresh tracks. Charlie Boy gets down to study them, only, he doesn’t recognize what animal these could be from. That’s when… GROWL. From over their shoulder, an ominous and gut-wrenching growl comes from somewhere in the woods. Everyone, including the camera crew, sprints for their lives. One cameraman takes a tumble, and they pretty much leave him for dead. Thankfully, no one ends up getting harmed by this. They all end up getting in a huge circle with their lights pointed outward. Nothing comes after them. 

We get an interview with one of the local residents Zoey Rock. Zoey recounts how, as a child, she was warned to not go outside between the hours of 11 P.M. and 1 A.M (which is presumably the time Chad, Eric, and Charlie Boy were in the woods). The reason? Well, that’s when the skinwalkers roam the streets. She also discusses how one of her friends was taken by a skinwalker, and, to date, they have not been able to find her. All that had been recovered from this disappearance was a tattered piece of her dress.

Back at the ranch, Charlie Boy says due to the nature of what just happened, the woods are temporarily off-limits. Eric wants to keep searching for any bodies of water that have green dye in them, so he and Eric make a compromise. Charlie Boy says they can examine any areas where they have a good visual of their surroundings. Shortly after searching in a few areas, Eric gets a hit with the UV light. The area they’re examining was hit really hard by wildfires years before, but there are still a few patches of healthy trees scattered about. In between patches of live trees is a dead spot. Coming from the dead center of that dead spot is a trickle of florescent green trickle of water. Eric takes a GPS mark of this location and they call it a night. 

Big Will’s Collectibles

The next day, Eric takes Duane to the spot where the water was found. Duane says he’s going to have the Rathole rig come back out to dig a new hole. He also clears a flat spot for the Rathole rig. 

Charlie Boy and Chad go out metal detecting. After some time, Charlie Boy gets a hit in an alcove. He pulls up a golden coin with the year 1849 on it and the words, “To the lord holiness.” Perfect timing, Chad also finds a coin from 1849. Charlie Boy and Chad head back to the Miner’s Shack and they show Duane the coins. The coins say they’re made of pure gold. Duane is beyond ecstatic. 

Charlie Boy takes the coins and heads into town. He arrives at Big Will’s Collectibles. At the store are Bob Campbell, coin expert, and Will Barton, presumable owner of Big Will’s Collectibles. Charlie Boy shows them the coins. Bob confirms the coins are Mormon gold pieces and if they’re real, he says, they are worth millions. Will tests the coins, and unfortunately finds out they are copper coins with a nickel coating. 

But we do get quite an interesting history lesson here. We learn about Brigham Young in 1858. He had sent Thomas Rhoades to befriend the Native Americans in the southern slopes of the Uintas. Two and a half weeks later, gold nuggets cascaded from Rhoades’s saddle bags as he left the area, this gold was the gold of the Spanish conquistadors (which Rhoades took from nowadays Mexico City). This is where Hernán Cortés had enslaved the Native Americans. Eventually, the Natives rebelled, killed the Spanish, took the gold, and hid it. There’s now a theory of the Lost Rhoades mine, which is where some of the gold came from to make the Mormon coins. It just so happens that Blind Frog Ranch is in the area of where the Lost Rhoades mine is rumored to be. 

Could this gold be in the wooden box they saw in the underwater cavern? 

Drill O’Clock

Duane, Chad, Charlie Boy, and Eric are at the new drill spot when the Rathole rig shows up. Duane talks frequently about the expenses of a project like this and it’s refreshing to see this side of things. It turns out the cost of a 30-foot hole is about $5,000. The drill is all set up and the drilling starts. Eric takes soil samples every few feet. They hit eight feet. Soil sample of the dry dirt. They eventually hit 24 feet and are still hitting nothing but dry dirt. Off-screen, a producer asks Duane for an update, and it’s clear Duane isn’t too happy with the lack of findings at this point. By the time they reach 35 feet, they don’t hit any voids. Duane calls off the drilling. 

We get another interview with a local resident, D. Ray Cesspooch. D. Ray recounts driving at night and seeing a worm-like creature on the road. It was roughly eight feet high and five feet in diameter. D. Ray is certain this is a creature from another universe. 

The next day, Charlie Boy is by the water pit, cleaning up. Suddenly, he sees a strange-looking worm. There are tons of them. They are long, flat-ish, translucent worms. Charlie Boy collects some in a mason jar and takes them back to the Miner’s Shack. Eric takes one look and is completely dumbfounded. Duane wonders if the constant plunging of the bucket into the water pit acted as a vacuum and pulled the worms up. 

Eric has an idea. If these things are living in the silt, they could possibly have gold in them. I mean, they’re extracting the nutrients and minerals from the dirt. Eric puts the worm under the microscope. Unfortunately, there is no gold. But the worm does look pretty interesting under the scope. 

Final Thoughts

The worm thing at the end felt a bit over the top, especially with the wild story from D. Ray. But the finding of Mormon gold is definitely a step in the right direction! Although, I did wish it would have turned out to be real gold. Part of me is curious as to how a trickle of the water could have come out from that one singular location, even when there was no void of water beneath it. I hope they continue to dig in this area to see if they were maybe just in a bad spot.

Needless to say, I can’t wait to continue watching this show!