Whether it's the fabled Russian Amber Room, gold or even scrap metal isn't known. But treasure hunter Christian Hanisch hopes to snake a camera into an underground cavern to prove he has discovered Nazi plunder buried in the final weeks of World War II.
"I am sure that there is gold or silver down there," said Hanisch, who hopes to begin drilling as early as next week.
Hanisch was led to the spot on the fringes of Deutschkatharinenberg, about 100 yards from the Czech Republic, by a set of coordinates he found in a notebook belonging to his father, a former Luftwaffe radio operator who died last year.
He joined forces about two months ago with the town's mayor, Hans-Peter Haustein, an amateur treasure hunter who is also a member of Germany's parliament for the opposition Free Democratic Party.
Last week there was a breakthrough: A scan of the cavern with a sophisticated metal detector showed a big rectangle in red, indicating metal, likely gold or silver, Hanisch said.
Earlier this week, Haustein said he was convinced they had found the Soviet Union's storied Amber Room treasure, which he has been seeking for 12 years.
The Amber Room, completed in 1711 after a decade of work, was installed in a palace the czar built for his wife, Catherine I, outside St. Petersburg.
The ornate, 1,300-square-foot hall including a gold-framed mosaic of marble and semi-precious stones was a gift of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I to Russia's Peter the Great. The wall panels were made from golden brown amber, with four mosaics representing the human senses.
The Amber Room was moved to a castle in Koenigsberg, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad, when retreating Nazi troops looted the palace in World War II. It disappeared in 1945 and though some pieces have been found, nobody has ever been able to locate the rest, despite massive search efforts.
The claim to have discovered the Amber Room treasures, first reported by German media this week, has been met with skepticism by experts. They point out that stories of the Amber Room surface regularly, only to be proven wrong.
"I don't think it exists," Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the Russian state agency for culture, bluntly told Russian media on Friday. And even if pieces of the Amber Room are still hidden away, he said, they would be in such fragile condition from such a lengthy storage that they wouldn't survive being unearthed.
"The amber will turn to ash if brought to open light," he said.
But Haustein defended his theory, saying that even if the find turns out not to be the Amber Room treasure, he is on the right track.
"People are being ridiculed all the time — Columbus had to wait for 20 years before he got his ship to go to the New World," Haustein said. "I don't mind if people make fun of me — I'll keep on searching."
Even if the find does not turn out to be from the Amber Room, Hanisch said he was convinced that what they have found is plundered treasure hidden by the Nazis in some form.
The Hanisch family lived in northwest Germany and they were not able to go to Saxony in eastern Germany where the treasure is suspected to be until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Even then, Hanisch said his father never expressed an interest in searching for the plunder. But after he died, Hanisch said he was excited to see that his father had jotted down map coordinates in a notebook.
"When I found my father's book, I decided to go treasure hunting," he said.
The coordinates led Hanisch to the nondescript spot behind a row of garages and near a railroad station that has been long abandoned.
A spokesman for the state's department that regulates drilling in the mountains said an application had been filed and that the pair were expected to be given permission to drill next week.
"My father and other soldiers have spoken about the gold that was brought to (the area), and I have no reason to doubt my father," he said.