After nearly ten years, the Forrest Fenn Treasure has been found. The find was on or before June 6, 2020, as confirmed at Fenn’s personal website. Details are pending, but it has been confirmed in various semi-official places and the Santa Fe media. Santa Fe media indicate it was found “a few days ago.”
I previously attempted to predict when the treasure would be found and created a graph of the predicted clue progress based on a few data points of clue solving progress provided by Forrest Fenn. I have updated the graph with the actual find (assuming a June 6, 2020 find date) above. My prediction was formulated almost exactly a year ago, and it appears it was found earlier than predicted. Back then I did state:
Our power law clue solving model may well accelerate towards the upper clue numbers. It could be that a solution to all nine clues is relatively imminent. With snow covering much of the northern and high elevation Rocky Mountains as of this writing, it could simply be a matter of the snow clearing to open the 2019 search season. It is unknown whether a searcher would know how many clues they have solved, but if they know they have seven clues solved, they have incentive to work very hard and accelerate the find, which is likely not captured by the model.
That scenario did in fact happen. Unfortunately my overall prediction that the treasure would be found before MH370 has also come true. The MH370 search has lost all momentum. More thoughts to come.