The mystery is over.
Dan Leonard, a meteorologist who lives in Andover, was identified Monday as the person who found a small, golden trophy valued at $26,000 in Wendell State Forest in western Massachusetts last Tuesday. The treasure hunt called Project Skydrop began on Sept. 19, with a red dot on an online map covering most of the northeast. That dot shrank slightly each day, and players paid a $20 entry fee for daily clues.
Leonard told WCVB he solved the mystery by studying cloud patterns and temperature on a camera that was trained on the trophy.
‘“I analyzed any time where it was sunny and any time where it was cloudy and sort of lined that up to possible areas where it could be, so I slowly whittled it down,” he told the news outlet. “It was a process of elimination.”