Alex Lagina's Biggest Finds on 'The Curse of Oak Islands'

The Lagina family has become synonymous with Oak Island, thanks to the History Channel reality TV series The Curse of Oak Island. The cast of the show includes numerous family members of brothers Rick and Marty Lagina, who have led the island’s treasure-hunting operation for more than a decade.

Among the team is Alex Lagina, Marty’s son, who has played an active role in some of the show’s most significant field discoveries.

One of Alex’s most notable contributions on the show was helping discover the cobblestone pathway beneath the island’s swamp. Alex and his cousin David Fornetti, the son of Rick Lagina’s sister, used ground-penetrating radar to trace the path of its eastern end. Marty Lagina led a dig to follow where it led, but winter conditions forced the team to suspend work on the site before they could determine its full significance.

On Lot 32 on the island, Alex worked alongside a metal detecting expert Gary Drayton to recover a musket ball. Researchers on the show dated the ball to somewhere between the 1500s and 1800s, prompting the team to question why a musket ball would have been brought to the island in the first place.

A similar question arose when Alex and the team found what appeared to be a 19th-century British Naval officer’s button. Researchers dated it to the first quarter of the 1800s. At that time, the land on which it was found belonged to Samuel Ball, a Black Loyalist who had been born into slavery in South Carolina, gained his freedom by fighting for the British during the American Revolution, and later became one of Oak Island’s largest landowners and most prosperous farmers. The team could not explain what a British Naval officer would have been doing on his property.

A coin tentatively dated to the reign of William III of England, who ruled from 1689 to 1702, was also found on Ball’s property.

Rick, Marty, and the broader team have documented a range of findings over the course of the series. Among the most discussed are a Spanish 8-maravedis coin dating to 1652, coconut fiber not native to Nova Scotia, and a medieval lead cross.

The lead cross has drawn particular interest for its potential connection to the Knights Templar, a medieval Catholic military order. That theory was further explored after human bones recovered from the island’s swamp were DNA-tested and found to have origins consistent with the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, a result the team presented as potentially supporting the hypothesis of a Templar presence in Nova Scotia centuries ago.