I do believe it was a hoax and that he used it to sell copies of his books and make appearances and drive traffic to his website that he was making revenue off of. I think that when people started to die searching for it that he quite clearly could not admit it was a hoax from that point forwards.

The reason I believe this is because when the family members of the deceased were to find out that their loved ones died searching for nothing, they would undoubtedly be angry, upset and seeking retribution against the man who sent their loved ones to die.

Also you have to consider that had someone actually "found" this treasure they would have to prove in some way that its worth the 2 million dollars or whatever the estimate was.

The way its framed now, some anonymous "man" finds the "treasure" and all bets are off. No one sees it, no one knows where it was , no one knows who collected it. nothing.

I do believe it was a hoax and unless we have some evidence to prove otherwise I will still maintain that.

What I do believe truly is that Forrest Fenn did lie AND profit from this bullshit story and he had to keep the farce running for reasons I've already mentioned.