A mammoth tusk collector has sparked a “bone rush” in New York City’s East River after telling podcast host Joe Rogan that a huge cache of the incredibly valuable tusks was dumped there roughly 80 years ago.
Millionaire gold miner John Reeves, whose company, Fairbanks Gold LLC. owns thousands of acres of patented mining grounds in Alaska, quoted a draft report from the Fairbanks mining District Alaska, which related how 500,000 tusks were taken from Fairbanks to New York City’s American Museum of Natural History in 1940.
“They’re finders keepers. If any of you guys want to go out and find some bones I’ll tell you exactly where the f*** they’re at, but I’ll only tell Joe Rogan,” Reeves said.
Then he quoted from the report:
Mistakes made in the field as to acceptable condition of the bones shipped to New York City were dumped in the East River. The dump site at that time was off the East River Drive at about 65th Street. The common New York City Hospital dump site as well for difficult to dispose of materials, potentially a challenging archaeological dig for archaeologists in the distant future.
“They were of no value to these guys,” Reeves asserted. “But you got to remember this was in 1928 to 1958. People, you know miners, didn’t collect the bones. That’s what makes me such an oddball. I had friends going — when I first started this 15 years ago — going, ‘What the f*** are you doing?’ Fifteen years later, I’m sayin’, ‘We’ll get the goddamn gold, don’t worry about it.”
Since the tusks can be sold for tens of thousands of dollars apiece, Reeves estimated the value of the missing tusks at roughly $1 billion.
“Dude. let me tell you something about mammoth bones, mammoth tusks, they’re extremely valuable,” Reeves informed Rogan. “I don’t know what kind of current that river has, if it even has a current, all I know is this is where they say they dumped them, and I’ve gotta go with that. If this is where they say they dumped them, this is where they dumped them.”
#1918 – John Reeves, from The Boneyard Alaska – John Reeves is an Alaskan gold miner who first came to public prominence on the 2012 National Geographic docu-series "Goldfathers." More recently, his ongoing search for https://t.co/le2yYqd6BC pic.twitter.com/302kU3OsSq
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“You can take an underwater camera and drop it over with your fishing pole,” Reeves suggested.
In October, an Alaskan couple hiking together found a long 7-foot blue mammoth tusk weighing 105 pounds. “Depending on the state and wholeness, [it’s worth] somewhere upwards between $20,000 and $70,000,” the husband said.
Vice reported that a 130-pound tusk can be sold to middlemen in Russia for roughly $20,000 and that the middleman can turn around and sell it in China for as much as $160,000.