John O. O’Brien, author of the latest and most definitive book on Oak Island, was the eldest of ten children, born in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the close of WWII. His father, a pharmacist and to whom this book is dedicated, served in the Canadian Armed Services during that war and was a writer as well. John was only twelve years old when he first heard of the treasure of Oak Island, and visited the island with his father in his early and later teens, well before the causeway was constructed. As a result he had more than the usual boyhood dreams of pirates and buried treasure. Add to that the fact for much of his life he lived the wanderlust of adventure, spending many years in the great Canadian north, first as a logger in a remote region of B.C., but most as an underground miner in northern B.C. and the Alaskan panhandle..

At age twenty-two he served with the Canadian Army in West Germany during the cold war, but the call of the wild was still in his blood, so he returned to Halifax, and after finishing high school and attending Dalhousie, he returned to the north country for another twenty years – plus sixteen more in Ontario, Africa and Nova Scotia – a total of thirty-six (36) years underground, beginning as a laborer, but working his way up to mine superintendent. There is little John has not witnessed underground.

Along the way he developed a related hobby – prospecting – and founded the Nova Scotia Prospecting Association. He is also a genuine sourdough, beginning with a claim in the remote Cassair mountains of B.C., where he built a log cabin in Grizzly Bear country and worked the creek bed with a 44-Magnum on his hip. His current ‘man-cave’ in the basement of his Bridgewater, N.S. home resembles that earlier log cabin and is self-sufficient in all ways! But O’Brien also attained other skills from thousands of nights spend in remote locations before TV and the internet: a love of reading and the honing of his story-telling skills, which propelled him to write this current book. In the tradition of the great story-tellers, the manuscript weaves back and forth before revealing its ultimate conclusion.

After fifty-five years, many tens of thousands of miles, countless dozens of books devoured about Oak Island, other world mysteries and the Mesoamericans, John had much of the book in hand, but it was the support of his family (a few of which are also writers and poets, who encouraged him to complete the task) as well as a breakthrough in recent archeological research. The latter finally linked ritual mathematics with the findings on the island itself and cemented the conclusions found in this publication. Oak Island, simply put, is an underground operation! Some have suggested this story is the true ‘W-5’ plus one of Oak Island, the only original theory with supporting evidence and arguments that answers the who, what, where, why and when, as well as how – in a unique and comprehensive way.