Washington, D.C.--Claiming that he is ready to search for things that he might have a better chance of actually finding, David Kay announced his resignation from the Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-member team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Instead, Kay said he plans on focusing his energies on more realistic goals like finding sunken treasures and the key to perpetual youth.

Kay told reporters that at his age he cannot continue the hunt for such elusive and fanciful items as chemical and biological weapons in Iraq that were clearly found and destroyed by UN weapons inspectors more than 10 years ago.

“I don’t think (WMD) existed. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the 1990s. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production and that's what we're really talking about," Kay said.

The former director of the ISG expressed disappointment that he came up empty handed after months of scouring the desert for even a scrap of evidence supporting Bush administration justifications for invading Iraq.

"What a big waste of time that was," he said. "But I'm putting all of that behind me. Now I'm much more interested in continuing the important work of the 16th century explorer, Ponce de Leon. I will be retracing his steps in a new quest for the fountain of youth."