Snake Hunter's Swamp Find Is Likely Plane Crash Gold

The first part is an interesting enough tale: A guy hunting pythons in the Everglades instead finds a piece of gold jewelry that might be from one of two old plane crashes. But the best part of the story in the Miami Herald is that Mark Rubinstein says he will not keep the pendant. If he can't track down a relative of the owner, Rubinstein will donate it to a museum or the Archdiocese of Miami. "It was part of a situation that caused so much sorrow," he says.

“It didn’t belong to the swamp and it doesn’t belong to me." The best guess is that the partially melted pendant—which has a sapphire Celtic cross inside a circle of diamonds—is from either the 1996 crash of a ValuJet plane that killed 109 or from the 1972 crash of an Eastern flight that killed 99. The pendant wouldn't bring life-changing money, with one jeweler pegging the value at $1,500. But to loved ones of a victim, "it's priceless," he adds. (More Florida stories.)