Frank Ney was a real person. He was mayor of Nanaimo, BC, Canada and was known for dressing as a pirate. There is a statue of Pirate Frank in a city park.
The REAL "money pit" is not on Assateague Island. It is on Oak Island, a privately owned island in Lunenburg County on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. The tree-covered island is one of about 360 small islands in Mahone Bay and rises to a maximum of 11 meters above sea level.
When Bones is asking Hodgins where he has gone cave diving, she asks if he has ever dived Naharon, and then remarks that she named Naharon. This would be appropriate to her character because that underwater cave was where "Eve of Naharon" was discovered. Dated at 13,600 year old, this female skeleton is the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas, as well as containing the oldest DNA yet extracted.
The top worn by Lindsey Stoddart as Katie Ney (the Mayor's wife) is the same top worn by Alyson Hannigan as Vampire Willow in the episodes The Wish (1998) and Doppelgangland (1999) of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.
When Brennan is unable to follow Booth's metaphors explaining that someone salted the dive shaft in order to keep the search going, Dr. Goodman tells her it's Piltdown man - a reference she understands. Piltdown man was an anthropological hoax committed around 1912 in which several skull and jaw fragments were found and believed for about 40 years to be evidence of an evolutionary "missing link" between ape and man. In the 1950's, it was proven that the bones were actually a medieval era human skull, a 500-year-old orangutan jaw along with fossilized chimpanzee teeth. The bones were aged chemically and manually modified and filed to make them appear as parts of one skull from a human-like, yet-unknown species. Though several people are suspected in the hoax, knowing participation by any person / persons has never been proven.