He had a book about the Spanish conquistadores and their long-buried treasure, and with his younger brothers, he recalls, he would “forge out on our own across the desert outside of Tucson in search of hidden loot.” He tore apart his mother’s new computer (and put it back together in the face of her fury) and built himself one from off-the-shelf parts. He collected books of magic and magicians’ biographies and devoted himself to demystifying illusions like levitation, sleight of hand, and escapes, which he performed in his sixth-grade talent show. Posey’s parents were both railroad engineers, and during summers at the family’s cabin in Montana, where his grandfather was a fish-and-game warden, his favorite thing to do was get out in the hills with a metal detector. “Of course, they wouldn’t let me bring it to school.” “I got pretty good with that thing,” he says. “He wouldn’t have any part of it,” his mother, Lorri, remembers. When other kids bullied him, his mother gently suggested he dress more normally.
At age 9, he started wearing the archaeologist-adventurer’s trademark khaki pants, Stetson, and leather jacket and carrying a bullwhip nearly every day. Growing up in Arizona in the 1990s, Justin Posey wanted to be Indiana Jones.