Mission 11: Tallow's Sand

The Mission 11: Tallow's Sand geocache (GC1412) was hidden on 3 August 2001 at the end of Tallow Beach Road, in Australia. It was the last international cache of Project A.P.E., the operation mounted by 20th Century Fox to launch Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes: fourteen ammo cans scattered around the world that summer, each holding a genuine prop from the film (Markwell listed them all).

It did not last the day. At 7:20 a.m., Geoff Phillips and “princess Carolyn” signed the first visit in a log written like a secret agent's report: setting off before dawn in fine rain, headlights they thought were on their trail and which turned out to be the milkman's, then the box opened in the scrub. Inside they found a cap, T-shirts, books, a pen “and an artefact whose use we have no idea of”. They took it away, left a T-shirt in its place and set off again, passing “government agents disguised as surfers”. Five hours later, a searcher down from the Gold Coast opened the can in turn and summed up his disappointment in one word: Curses! Nobody else ever reported it found. The container had disappeared by May 2002, and the cache ended up archived.

Ten years later, a local resident told of tracking down the first finder: he still had at home the horn taken from the box, the film prop. Attempts at resurrection never came to anything: in 2014, a geocacher combed the place with a metal detector and turned up coins, bottle caps and a car key, but no green can. The Australian shop Geostuff still offers a thousand Australian dollars for each of the two A.P.E. containers placed in Australia.