Continued :
That night, when my friend went to clean up and study his finds, he came to the owl thing. Turns out it was only gold plate. Not gold. And the red stones in the eyes were just red glass chip. Not rubies. It was just 1920s costume jewelry junk. So he promptly threw it in the trash.
The next day, he was back on the project again. And out of the corner of his eye, he saw a tractor driver eyeing him intently. Every time my friend would stop to dig a target, the tractor driver would become riveted to watching him. The const. worker got off his tractor and approached my friend, from a polite distance, to get a closer look. Eventually, he got brave and came up to talk to my friend. Turns out it was a new worker, that had not been on this job on any of the previous days.
He asked what my friend had found. As it turns out, my friend had ZERO coins , so far, that day. So he told the guy that he had only found some junk so far. When the worker heard that, he broke out into a story about how, the previous day, someone had found gold coins there ! My friend was shattered !! Because he'd left right after mid-day, so ... he figured that someone must have come along after him, and found "gold coins" !
So he began to pepper the fellow for details. Ie.: What did the guy look like ? (so that he could tell if it was someone he knew). And "where were the coins found" and "how many ", etc... The worker poured out the story of the "gold coins" found the "previous day" by this mysterious md'r ! But a curious word came forth during this description : "OWL" !!
Thus my friend busted up laughing, when he realized that the worker was talking about HIM ! So he told the fellow : Hey, that was ME ! And no, no gold coins were found. And no, the owl wasn't "solid gold". And no, it was not 1800s, nor rubies. Just costume jewelry junk.
But the worker would NOT BE DISSUADED . Because he had gotten it on good authority that morning, by his fellow workers, around the water cooler. They had seen the gold and the coins, and owl thing , with their own eyes ! So the worker assumed that it must be someone else that "found gold coins". Even though my friend could put 2+2 together, and realize that this was all just telephone game gone awry.
So the point being is this : Notice how quickly (over a single night !) a story can get embellished. So go figure what can happen to this O.I. thing in the 200 yrs. leading up to the Readers Digest article ? So I have been accused of "calling these boys liars " (or... the persons who wrote down their recollections of what they figured was said or seen). And I always say : No. I have NO DOUBT that the persons passing on the original 1700s story were TOTALLY SINCERE ! Just as the const. worker in my story was NOTHING LESS THAN 100% sincere. I mean, shucks, he was talking to eye-witnesses. They were duly appointed to be on-that-job. Yet you can see how things can easily be construed .
So too do I put no stock in the O.I. story. Barring evidence to the contrary, it has more plausible explanations. Just as my friend's demo. story turned out to have the "more plausible" explanation.