After he got back to the surface, Doc told Ova what he had seen, and almost as an afterthought mentioned the long row of metal bars. [3] Noss was ultimately killed by an associate, Charley Ryan, in 1949 after Ryan accused Noss of fraud and Noss threatened to kill Ryan and his family. About $250,000 was spent, core holes were drilled, seismic tests were taken, and nothing was found. Later, the wealth in the cave would be calculated to be worth more than two billion dollars. Dozens of people claim a piece of the actionthat is, gold bars and treasure said to be hidden on the missile range, and worth from a few million dollars to $1.5billion. At one end of the chamber, the shaft continued downward. Neither man being familiar with laws governing the discovery of treasure on a military base, Fiege went to the Judge Advocates Office at Holloman Air Force Base to confer with Colonel Sigmund I. Gasiewicz. The night before his death, perhaps sensing that a business deal was going sour, Doc enlisted the aid of a cowboy named Tony Jolley to shuffle the locations of various stashes of the bars. The gold concentrates by gravity in incised stream valleys and alluvial fans in deeply weathered highlands. Deferring to Docs belief that the gold would all be taken by the government should his find become too broadly known, the work force was confined to the immediate family and a couple of handfuls of trusted associates. Most deposits are thin and less than 45 ft below the surface, but thicker deposits are found in the Elizabethtown-Baldy district (up to 275 ft) and in the Rio Grande Valley district (up to 370 ft). Discovered by a . Published historic reserves exist for only two districts: Jicarilla with 5.4 million yd3 of 0.043 oz Au/yd3, or approximately 230,000 oz Au in place and Pittsburg with 2 million yd3 of 0.01 oz Au/yd3, or approximately 20,000 oz Au in place in 1936. In 1797, when the work of the Spanish missionaries had almost come to an end, there was an old Spanish soldier who was at his death bed. Another concerns renegades who robbed the Monterey Mint in 1743 and were in turn attacked by Apaches. The peak is riddled with a network of tunnels. Shriver estimated the total amount of gold removed from Victorio Peak at 25 million troy ounces, of which 10 million came out in 1976. Then in 1981, the construction crew found the gold bar, and today scientists have confirmed it was part of the Aztec treasures that Cortes hoped to steal away from Mexico for Spain. That while visiting Foss, a man we both knew, E.M. Guthrie, drove in to the station in a late model Ford Thunderbird. In December 1961, General Shinkle shut down the operation and excluded anyone from entering the base who was not directly engaged in the missile research activities. The future economic potential will depend upon the discovery of large-volume, medium-grade deposits that can be mined by bulk-mining methods. Beyond the Hembrillo Basin is a hundred-mile stretch of desert known as the Jornada del Muerto. Denied entry by the courts until legalities could determine the legal owner of the mine; Doc feared Ryan would back out of the deal. Forrest . Later, Fiege would take a lie detector test, which would allow Fiege back on the missile range. After the discovery, Fiege told several people that he had caved in the roof and walls to make it look like the tunnel ended. WHITE SANDS, N.M. Lost treasure stories are a dime a dozen in the Southwest. When the rain finally stopped, Doc returned to camp, telling Babe of the discovery. On August 5, Fiege and his party returned to Victorio Peak, accompanied by the commander of the Missile Range, a secret service agent, and 14 military police. But Doc Noss cared little about the historical value of the treasures inside Victorio Peak, mostly ignoring the pouches, packs, and artifacts. According to the security guard, Johnson and Connally headed a team which brought in sophisticated excavation equipment to remove gold from the peak, the most modern Ive ever seen, he said. But when the Army; Air Force; the White House; Congressmen; New Mexico's Governor and F. Lee Bailey and dozens of other lawyers get into a single treasure saga, only confusion and rumors remain cheap. We all dream of stumbling onto a map or riddle that will lead us on an adventure to find a treasure of glittering gold and jewels, but most of those tales only exist in bedtime stories and movies. Doc thought that he had discovered an old abandoned mineshaft. Leon Trabuco brought Mexico's gold to the US He buried 16 tons of gold bars in New Mexico CASE DETAILS Farmington, New Mexico, 1933. This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. Description: Victorio Peak is surrounded by inhospitable environment near Hot Springs, New Mexico. That about a month after that, I heard E.M. had been beaten to death in California. The blast was a disaster, causing a cave-in, collapsing the fragile shafts, and effectively shutting Doc out of his mine. Possession of gold was against the law at the time, and the men reasoned that the bar would provide evidence to bring about an authorized, legal expedition to remove the vast quantity of gold. The family believes that as much as 100 tons of gold, which would be worth $1.25 billion at today's closing price of $358.90 an ounce on the Commodity Exchange in New York, remains hidden in the cavern. He has recruited friends and investors to form the Ova Noss Family Partnership, named for his late grandmother, that is financing the new search. The secret stash of a gold mine owner? Now, researchers say the bar was. After much searching, he finally found a small iron bar to carry back through the narrow passageway. : Did 'Doc' Noss Really Find Caverns of Gold or Did He Pull Off a Hoax That Has Plagued His Kin for Years? White Sands, New Mexico by the National Park Service. The cave was covering a small tunnel, originally thought to be an abandoned mineshaft. Dangerous unexploded 20mm shells from Phantom jet target practice dot the range, the Army insists. By this time, Babes story had spread across the nation, profiled in several magazines and newspapers. He also found some old letters, the most recent of which was dated 1880. However, with the discovery of gold, the treaty was broken in 1878, and Victorio went on the warpath. Going public with information about the gold stored in Victorio Peak or removed from it, however, is something that people familiar with the subject are generally reluctant to do. Representative Harold Runnels, a Democrat whose district includes the White Sands range, has proposed a joint Federalstate search for the treasure. He told this writer that the gold bars in the cave were stacked like cordwood.. And we were poor and I guess a little dumb. Word of the Doc Noss treasure spread, and keeping people out of the area was no easy chore. In a deeper cavern, Doc found what he thought was a stack of worthless iron bars. According to members of the family, there would have been more, but Docs work was abruptly and unexpectedly brought to a halt in August 1939 when a dynamite blast, set to enlarge a narrow passage, instead caved the passage in, sealing off the main cavern. During fluvial events, large volumes of sediment containing free gold are transported and deposited in relatively poorly-sorted alluvial and stream deposits. One group of claimants took the flashlight and provided the photo as evidence that they knew the location of the treasure. Reached for comment in Cocoa Beach, Florida, General Shinkle adamantly denied any knowledge of the gold and refused to comment at all on the story. The gold was supposedly removed from the cave and sent to Fort Knox. Montgomery, the two went into the mountain to blast out the shaft. Maxmillian was assassinated in 1867. The room had been undisturbed for so long that the dust, according to Berlett, lay several inches thick. On each trip, Doc would retrieve two gold bars and as many artifacts as he could carry. They were searching in the wrong place, Mrs. Noss said. Reaching down, he could not budge it, but after digging around the rock, he got his hands under it. In 1981, a worker in Mexico City found a gold bar just north of Alameda Centralthe oldest public park in the Americasduring the construction of a bank. However, Doc was unable to capitalize on the gold bars, as four years before his discovery, Congress had passed the Gold Act, which outlawed the private ownership of gold. He was also known to take prisoners back to the Basin, where he subjected them to elaborate torture tests before killing them. Even though the military refused any of Babes efforts to work her claim, it did not refuse other military personnel from exploring portions of Victorio Peak. On the night of March 4, 1949, I went with Doc Noss and dug up 20 bars of gold at a windmill in the desert east of Hatch, New Mexico, and reburied them in the basin where Victorio Peak is. However, the business often passes the tax onto the consumer by adding it to the selling price. The higher gold values occur near the base of alluvial gravel deposits where the gold is trapped by natural processes such as riffles in the river bottom, fractures within the bedrock, along bedding or foliation planes, and/or structures that are transverse to the river flow. Testing the old wooden pole attached to one side of the passage, Doc rejected the idea of using it and dropped into the shaft with a rope instead. In the meantime, Mrs. Noss said her spies, illegally visited the peak and found military men excavating it. Only four districts have each yielded more than 100,000 oz of placer gold production: Elizabethtown-Baldy (DIS019), Hillsboro (DIS197), Old Placers (DIS187), and New Placers (DIS186). The fortune of a Mexican emperor? The affidavit states: I, Thayer Snipes, first being duly sworn, on my oath state: That in the latter part of 1972, I had stopped by the Airport Chevron Station at the corner of Airway Blvd. Searching with 15 people at a time to try to determine the size of the cave, the group in a few weeks plans to start drilling 6-inch holes several hundred feet deep into the areas where the soundings show the cave is. There is evidence to indicate that many gold bars were removed from Victorio Peak a short time after Lynn Porter brought the bar to the Fort Bliss provost marshals office. The daughter of another man, Harvey Snow, died from a gunshot wound in the head after Snow had disregarded repeated warnings in regard to the peak. The soldiers, Airman First Class Thomas Berlett and Captain Leonard V. Fiege said they had found approximately 100 gold bars weighing between 40 and 80 pounds each in a small cavern. Kathy Weiser-Alexander/Legends of America, updated November 2021. His main source of income cut off, and his marriage to Babe already deteriorated, Noss was desperate to sell his remaining gold bars on the black market. He stood guard while McDonald and the other man descended into a large cavern, returning with a crudely formed gold bar roughly 2 1/2 inches wide by 7 inches long. Gold Bars Dozens of people claim a piece of the actionthat is, gold bars and treasure said to be hidden on the missile range, and worth from a few million dollars to $1.5billion. Mr. Bailey will not say, but Mrs. Noss and, her dozen or so partners have filed a $1billion Federal Court suit charging that the Government, the Secretary of the Army, several military officers and 200 John Does were conspiring to bilk her out of the treasure. As far as I'm concerned, I've got more gold in my upper bridge than is in those mountains., The center of interest is Victoria Peak, a 1,500foot hill in the San Andres Mountains on missile range land about 25 miles northeast of Las Cruces. Our Mineral Museum Edward Atkins of Decatur, Illinois, had been a claimant to the peaks gold and was vigorously pursuing that claim via attorney Darrell Holmes of Athens, Georgia, when Holmes died under mysterious circumstances. Gold Bar Found Beneath Mexico City was Loot from Cortes' Aztec Retreat. Current environmental and permitting restrictions also have hampered recent production in the New Placers and Jicarilla districts. There were 110 gold bars moved that night, according to an affidavit obtained by this writer and sworn to by Jolley. The 1.93-kilogram bar was found by a construction worker during excavations for a new building along the Alameda, a picturesque park in the heart of the Mexican capital. A four-pound gold bar found on a building site in downtown Mexico City last month is believed to be part of the treasure seized from the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II by the Spanish. Exploring further, he found even more skeletons stacked in a small enclosure, much like a burial chamber. Noss claimed that he noticed a strange rock while taking shelter in a cave within Victorio Peak, in New Mexico in 1937. Chester Stout, for example, a retired Army sergeant, traced the removal of two large truckloads of gold from Victorio Peak, but later had to move out of New Mexico; his life was threatened because, as he was told, he knew too much.. 'Like Any Other Client'. Today, the Armys official position on the whereabouts of the gold remains cautious, maintaining that the burden of proof rests with the accusers. Another source confirmed the manner and the circumstances of E.M. Guthries death, noting that it was listed as just a natural death, but hed been worked over with a baseball bat. This source said that he had hired a team of experienced investigators to dig into Guthries death and more than 30 other deaths in connection with a massive, continuing cover-up of the removal of gold from Victorio Peak. We took 90 bars stacked by a mine shaft at Victorio Peak and reburied them 10 in a pile scattered throughout the basin with the exception of 30 bars that we buried in a grassy flat near the road we came out on.. Lindgren, W., Graton, L.C., and Gordon, C.H., 1910, The ore deposits of New Mexico: U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper 68, 361 p. McLemore, V.T., 1994, Placer gold deposits in New Mexico: McLemore, V.T., Dunbar, N., Heizler, L., and Heizler, M., 2014, Geology and mineral deposits of the Orogrande mining district, Jarilla Mountains, Otero County, New Mexico: New Mexico Geological Society, Guidebook 65, p. 247-259. [1][a] While there have been multiple documented expeditions to the peak, no gold has been officially recorded as being recovered from the site. A new chemical analysis of a large gold bar found under a Mexico City street in 1981 has shed light on its centuries-old origins. Just 12 years after discovering the treasure, Doc Noss died with just $2.16 in his pocket. Were taken, and nothing was found Hembrillo Basin is a hundred-mile stretch of desert known as Jornada... Is riddled with a network of tunnels a disaster, causing a cave-in, collapsing the fragile shafts and! Blast was a stack of worthless iron bars large gold bar found Beneath Mexico City Loot! 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