Man's Metal Detector Sounded Deep In The Woods. Then He Dug Up This Mysterious Chest‏

This treasure hunter goes by the online name of Cornetto153, and his YouTube channel,“World War II Relic Hunting,” showcases the old battlefields of Europe and the treasures they contain. Now in January 2016 Cornetto153 was combing a forest in the Netherlands, filming an episode for his show, when he stumbled upon an unprecedented object.

His past discoveries include artillery shells and ammunition dumps – the decaying remnants, essentially, of skirmishes between Allied and Nazi forces. On this particular expedition, though, Cornetto153 had located the indentation of what appeared to be a foxhole or machine-gun position. Buried nearby, however, there was something altogether more unusual.

“Over here,” he said, casting his metal detector over the wet mulch of fallen leaves. “I got a very big signal.” What could possibly be producing such a large signal? An unexploded bomb? An artillery cannon? Or perhaps it was something the nature of which he could never have guessed.

“I already tried to dig it out, but look at it,” he said, tapping the surface with the head of his shovel. But whatever lay hidden beneath the earth was apparently very solid and quite large – and so Cornetto153 set about clearing the leaves.

Fortunately, the mystery object was not buried very deep. Brushing away the shallow covering of damp leaves and soil, Cornetto153 uncovered the outline of something flat, metallic and rectangular. This, indeed, was clearly an uncommon find.

“Looks like some sort of plate or something,” Cornetto153 speculated. “Look at that; what is that? It’s in the middle of the forest as you can see, in the middle of nowhere, there’s nothing else here.” Indeed, the object was as baffling as it was intriguing.

“There’s a handle over here,” the explorer continued. “Let’s open it.” And so, reaching down in his heavy-duty gloves, he gripped the handle and carefully lifted the plate. Hopefully it wouldn’t be wired to any Second World War grenades.

“Woah, what the hell? That looks like a treasure chest to me,” Cornetto153 exclaimed. “Oh my god; what is that?” Indeed, the object hidden beneath the plate was no abandoned war relic. In fact, it looked like something from the age of piracy.

As he lifted the treasure chest out of the hole, he noticed that it was tantalizingly heavy. Pillaged, perhaps, centuries ago from the New World, what swashbucklers’ plunder lay within? Gold, maybe, or silver? One could only imagine the dazzling booty stashed inside.

On closer examination, however, the chest was not as it seemed. For one thing, it was secured with a modern combination lock. Whoever had buried it here did not want it to be easily opened. So, Cornetto153 would need bolt cutters – or, indeed, the correct combination – to get inside.

Likewise, a second padlock was fixed to the rear of the box along with a trailing wire that tethered it to the inside of the hole. Thus the treasure chest could not be easily removed from the site – not, at least, without tools and planning.

At the other end of the box, curiously, was an empty plastic bottle with obscure numerical scales running along its sides. Was this a clue, perhaps, to the lock’s combination?

Examining the back of the chest, Cornetto discovered a faded sign with several paragraphs of typed words. By now it was therefore clear that this was no antique treasure chest but, rather, something else entirely.

“Congratulations you found it! Intentionally or not! What is this hidden container sitting here for? What the heck is this thing doing here with all these things in it?” Good questions, most people who stumble across the chest probably wonder the same thing.

“It is part of a worldwide game dedicated to GPS (Global Positioning System) users called Geocaching,” continued the notice. “The game basically involves a GPS user hiding treasure (this container and its contents) and publishing the exact coordinates so other GPS users can carry on a ‘treasure hunt’ to find it.”

In fact, Cornetto153 had inadvertently stumbled upon just one of thousands of hidden caches. A Geocaching player typically uses a phone app to locate the hidden treasures; then, on finding them, they remove or deposit the keepsakes inside and sign the logbook with their name and comments.

The game has some three million players across the globe, but it is still a relatively obscure pastime. Unsurprisingly, some caches have been mistaken for drug stashes by concerned citizens who summoned law enforcement agents for a closer look; others have even been investigated by bomb squads.

Unfortunately, since Cornetto153 didn’t have the code for the padlock, he was unable to open the chest to see what trinkets it held. Instead, then, he returned it to the hole. Prospective treasure hunters should know, however, that the objects in a cache tend to have a sentimental rather than monetary value.

With amateur treasure hunting on the rise, Cornetto has been wary of would-be seekers that aren’t heedful of the many potential dangers. As a pro, the adventure lover feels obligated to warn the uninitiated—especially young people—of all the things that could possibly go wrong. However one day in June of 2020, Cornetto saw his worst fears realized. After he heard the news, only one thought raced through his mind: Why couldn’t I have done something to stop it?

The teenage friends huddled together as crime scene investigators stepped over the police tape. They still couldn't wrap their heads around the mess they'd wandered into, but they all agreed on one thing: they wish they never downloaded Randonautica.

Randonautica was developed by Joshua Lengfelder and became a huge hit soon after its 2020 launch, especially with teens tired of staying home amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The app calls itself “the world's first quantumly-generated ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ reality game."

The program’s functions are pretty simple in terms of mechanics. Users (also known as Rando Nauts) are sent random coordinates and told to travel there. Players don’t have to go far; typically the destinations are within a ten-minute drive of a user’s location.

However, teens don’t merely show up and then go home. The true genius of Randonautica is that users are told to think of an “intention” before embarking on their journey. These can be anything from getting over heartbreak to the much simpler “flowers." Occasionally, intentions can be of the more morbid variety.

According to Lengfelder, “It’s sort of a perfect storm of easy tools to create little vignettes.” The hope is that Rando Nauts will keep their intention in mind throughout the adventure and ultimately encounter a location that mirrors their goal. Some pretty unbelievable coincidences have arisen through this process.

One user, for example, chose “red” as their intention and completely shocked when the app sent them to a location that was an isolated patch of grass with nothing else around it besides a bright red couch. Kinda eerie, right? But it gets stranger.

Another adventurer chose a more bittersweet intention: her best friend, who had committed suicide several years prior. Her quest sent her to a spot with a raven flying by, and the animal dropped a feather. According to the user, “She had said if she were to have a spirit animal it would be a raven.”

And while Randonauting has become vastly more popular in recent times (the app has been downloaded by upwards of 8 million people globally), the pursuit itself is actually nothing new. In fact, people have been practicing the hobby in some form for years.

According to the founder himself, “Before the app, the community was smaller and generally made up of curiosity seekers.” Of course, these previous adventurers didn’t have exact locations to visit; they simply explored on their own. The addition of set coordinates lends itself to some pretty creepy occurrences.

One Rando Naut was led directly to the grave of her late grandfather. Another followed the navigator straight to the headstones of two relatives she’d never heard of until then. A third one chose "joy" as her intention and wound up in front of the grave of a woman named — you guessed it — Joy.

While these events are undoubtedly spine-chilling, one physics professor from the University of Illinois, Smitha Vishveshwara, has an explanation for them. "When you are truly observing, [the mind] can experience wonderful, strange feelings in and of themselves,” she says. However, the traumatic journey that one group of teens was led on simply can’t be explained away.

Some young friends from Seattle were out exploring using the app, just to break up the quarantine blues. They set their intention and ended up driving out near the shoreline, via Randonautica’s instructions. So far, everything was fun and games. Who doesn’t like the beach?

Piling out of the car, the teens talked excitedly about what they might find when they arrived at the coordinates. Whatever they were expecting, it surely wasn’t what they ultimately found. They noticed a nearby bridge, and wandered towards it. They were nearing the spot.

To their delight, beneath the bridge was a large black suitcase. This was really happening—they’d found something! The friends discussed what might be inside. Perhaps they had stumbled upon a bag full of money, they thought.

One brave member of the group picked up a nearby stick and began to jokingly poke at the bag. Then, they decided to unzip it. What they noticed next will likely stay with them for the rest of their lives.

Inside the suitcase was a black garbage bag. All of a sudden an overwhelming stench rose into the air. It smelled like something rotten. Quickly the mood shifted from childish excitement to something closer to fear. “Wait, open it. It stinks y’all!” one of them encouraged.

However the rest of the group knew they’d gone too far. They had a nasty feeling about what might be lurking inside the bag, but they didn’t want to confirm their worst suspicions. Instead, they called the police.

Stunningly, Seattle officers would go on to confirm that the contents of the bag were in fact human remains, belonging to 35-year-old Jessica Lewis and 27-year-old Austin Wenner — victims of an ongoing murder case. The teens were traumatized, but the story doesn’t end there.

Apparently, there was more than one bag containing human corpses in the area. The victims had all died from gunshot wounds, and their killer was yet to be found. No one could have expected this, least of all the app creators themselves. Randonautica quickly responded to the tragic events.

“Our first reaction was to reach out to the teenagers to make sure they were doing alright. We sent a message letting them know the intention of Randonautica is not to find something disturbing like this,” it said. Unfortunately, the kids didn’t escape unchanged from the terrifying events.

”Something traumatic happened that changed my life” remarked user ughhenry, seen below, who documented the events and uploaded the video to popular social media app TikTok. Randonautica isn't the first app to come under fire for putting users in danger, of course.

In 2017, a photo-transformation program called FaceApp hit the marketplace, and two years later it exploded into a viral phenomenon. But the app's creators were hiding a secret that people were never made aware of.

The main draw of the app was users' ability to take photos of themselves and completely change how they looked. They could swap their gender or change their hairstyle with the press of a button. That wasn't all either.

The feature that gained the most attention in 2019 was the aging simulator. In vividly realistic detail, it applied a layer to selfies to simulate what the subject would look like as an old timer.

The results were impressive, if not a little bit creepy. Once FaceApp caught on in the celebrity community, stars shared the hilarious pics of their older selves. It then spread like wildfire.

From then on, everybody was downloading the app and sharing their augmented photos online. It became so popular so fast that hardly anyone stopped to consider they were putting their futures at risk.

Every app comes with terms and conditions, though users seldom stop to read through them. With so many of these agreements practically reaching the length of a novel, who has the time?

However, Faceapp fans missed one catch buried in the legalese. It stated that developers owned the rights to any user photos — possibly any in users' photo libraries as well. When this news broke, many panicked when they learned where the images were going.

These photos were all going to Russia, home of the company Wireless Labs. An international tech firm is no big deal in the modern age, but many Americans found this connection troubling.

The Russian government wasn't afraid to bend technology — and the law — to their advantage. It was entirely possible this FaceApp fad was a way to trick the West into signing away their images.

Many tech experts sounded off on the grave implications. In the wrong hands, these photos could be used to build a massive information database or train artificial intelligence facial recognition. It got worse.

Experts fear the database — or similar tech — is the first very steps in creating a dystopian world similar to that seen George Orwell's 1984. People willingly signed away their photos to a "Big Brother" organization just to take funny photos!

Will there be other apps or technologies in the future that ask for even more from us — like text messages or locations? By then, will we be comfortable giving up that information, too? These problems caught the eyes of powerful people in the U.S. government.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer didn't take these warnings lightly. He recognized this fad as a potential crisis and demanded an explanation. After all, popular apps have misused data in the past.

Pokemon Go, for instance, previously came under fire for collecting user information and location date so the creators could sell it to third-party companies. That was purely for profit, but FaceApp could be aiming for political leverage.

In the hands of Russian hackers, Schumer warned, millions of Americans could be at risk. Even scarier, there didn't appear to be any way for FaceApp users to protect themselves after downloading the app.

Deleting the app — or destroying your cell phone — wouldn't do a thing. Wireless Labs already added all those photos to their cloud the moment users downloaded FaceApp. However, someone stepped forward to offer an explanation.

Yaroslav Goncharov, founder of Wireless Labs, assured the world that FaceApp wasn't behaving nefariously. He promised that his company wasn't giving data to the Russian government and explained that most photos got deleted from their cloud after 48 hours.

Still, Yaroslav's guarantee wasn't enough for Senator Schumer. Calling upon the FBI to launch an official investigation into FaceApp, he explained that its security concerns could particularly endanger a select group of American citizens.

If the Kremlin did pull the strings on FaceApp, it would be a disaster for the future President to be implicated. That's why Schumer pleaded with all 2020 candidates, as well as the larger public, to steer clear of the trend.

While it remains to be seen whether or not FaceApp is an actual threat, there is an easy way to protect your data. Simply stop downloading new apps, or just put your cellphone away! You might actually enjoy the real world.

Besides, there's an easy way to find out what you'll look like when you're older. Wait! Time moves rapidly enough as it is, so no need to speed up the effects of aging. Nevertheless, the FaceApp bandwagon is difficult to stop.

Tons of users, famous or not, continue to share their older doppelgängers. Some of the world's most iconic celebs have been enjoying the app — and fans are going crazy for more. And when you see some of the best, it's easy to see why.

1. Courteney Cox: As hard as it is to imagine the 'Friends' star out of a crop top and the 90s, It's probably about time we all face the facts. At least all those years in comedy paid off, looks like Monica has some hard earned laugh lines to look forward to.

2. Ryan Gosling: When it comes to signature looks, it's hard to compete with Ryan's signature smolder. But even that iconic stare must fall when confronted by age. Good thing he still looks good in grey.

3. Kate Middleton: The Duchess of Cambridge is one of the most iconic beauties. Unfortunately, it looks like all that royal business catches up with her. But by the time she looks like this, she'll have most likely taken over the title of Queen Consort, so she’s probably not complaining.

4. Prince George: Speaking of future royals, if this little prince takes after his grandma, we'll all see the day when he is looking something like this. Hopefully he'll sprout a few more inches so he can live up to his royal highness.

5. LeBron James: LeBron's infamous hairline has always given him a bit of a more mature look. No doubt he's still on the court, playing beside his grandson, putting up 30 points per night.

6. Miley Cyrus: Miley definitely seems to have kept her cool; she’s even giving off a bit of a Madam Secretary vibe. Secretary Cyrus could definitely negotiate a ceasefire and then meet the British ambassador for lunch — all before noon!

7. Hilary Duff: It turns out even Lizze McGuire isn't wrinkle-proof. At least girl is still keeping it fresh by rocking those hoops. Age ain't nothing but a number after all...

8. Lady Gaga: Everyone's favorite glam girl has been keeping it funky and fresh for over decade now. Looking forward, it seems that we can still put our money on this silver foxy to keep it up. Some people really are just born a star.

9. Justin Bieber: The Biebs has gone through a lot of looks during his career, but this future "dad going through a midlife crisis" thing we're not so sure about. Unfortunately, we think it is too late now to say sorry.

10. Barack Obama: The 44th U.S. President loves basketball, so he managed to stay in shape. But even so, holding office has some crazy aging effects. And father time can do even more damage than overseeing a powerful nation, apparently.

11. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson: His workout and diet routines are legendary (seriously, he eats 10 pounds of cod per day), and he's clearly in great shape. But even his immense strength can't hold back Father Time.

12. Meghan Markel: She captured the world's attention after marrying into the Royal Family. It's too bad the pressures of Duchess life will eventually take their toll. But hey if a little sunken-in face is the price to live like a royal, sign us up!

13. Betty White: The Golden Girls actress is a true icon, and at her age, she's still looking pretty incredible. But what happens when she goes from old to really old? Woof. We're sorry, Betty.

14. Beyoncé: When it comes to the pop culture landscape, no one's bigger than Queen Bee. But what does age do to her royal looks? Well the aging tech just reveals she can still kick your butt regardless of her age. Bow down.

15. Harry Potter: Wait, wait, wait. Isn't there supposed to be some kind of polyjuice potion that makes you stay young forever? If Harry Potter can't figure it out, there really is no hope for the rest of us.

16: Emma Stone: When you're named one of Time's Most Influential People, you know you've had a pretty impressive run. But on the personal front, will Emma's looks hold up as well as her career? You decide.

17. Kim Kardashian: You better believe that Kim Kardashian isn't being seen in public looking anything less than her best. In the future, however, a visit to Dr. Fisher is 100% on the cards.

18. Kanye West: He's looking more like a grandpa, but he still has that intense focus in his eyes. He’s undoubtedly the type to tell you about how rap music was better back in his day.

19. Gigi Hadid: Older Gigi's fashion is on point, but her skin has taken a toll from all those bright, hot runway lights. Well, any skin care regimen crumbles over time.

20. Eminem: Remember when Eminem burst onto the scene with bleached blonde hair and baggy pants? Well he's matured a bit since then. He'll definitely join Kanye in complaining about the golden years of rap.

21. Drake: Drake might still be hanging with the biggest stars, but with a little help from our aging technology, he appears to have progressed from "sad boy" to "sad grandpa." His hair's still looking good, too.

22. Cardi B: Cardi's still rocking the bright colors, but age has gotten to her face. In fact, this look is giving us a bit of a technicolor Disney villain vibe. Look out, Dalmatians.

23. Cristiano Ronaldo: While Cristiano's body is probably still in great shape, age has taken its toll on his face. Still, hopefully he shares that workout routine, 'cause that six pack's gotta be impressive.

24. Pete Davidson: The Saturday Night Live star has been cycling though a few different looks lately, but he’s yet to try the old age aesthetic. Let's see how that will work out.

25. Ariana Grande: To be fair, the former Disney star has aged pretty gracefully; other than some wrinkles, she could step right onto the stage in her golden years. If the voice holds her, the career will, too.

26. Taylor Swift: Taylor Swift has fully transitioned from the girl in the bleachers to a total stage mom. The giant sequins even fit the look perfectly — she's definitely bringing orange slices to her kids' soccer games.

27. Gaten Matarazzo: Honestly? Gaten actually doesn’t look so out of place as a grandpa; maybe he's got some future roles as a kindly old man coming down the pipeline. What about his pal, though?

28. Finn Wolfhard: Age has really done some strange things to Finn. While his hair is still going strong, his face is definitely starting to show some wear and tear, giving him a Howard Stern mixed with a grandma look.

29. Selena Gomez: Even in the future, the former Nickelodeon star is still looking pretty screen ready. To be fair, she was always one of the more composed young stars — and it's paid off in the skin-care department.

30. Harry Styles: Harry has cool dad look in his future. Look for this guy on the One Direction revival tour, coming summer 2036. Will the ladies still be screaming for him?