Hi John,
I also live in MA and would be very willing to meet you at your convenience to do the most basic test of your abilities. Not for the money, I have precious little of it myself, but just for the chance to show whether or not these abilities exist.
As luck would have it I have property with buried bottles and have dug a few of them myself. Finding the spots where the bottles were discarded 100 years ago is very easy so we would not use those spots. I would dig several new holes and place either broken bottles, whole antique bottles, or no bottles and re-fill the holes with the same soil. Could you tell which were which?