Monday, February 06, 2023

The Victorio Peak Treasure Part Six

 

F. Lee Bailey, the famous lawyer, entered the arena in 1973, contacting officials in Washington, D.C., asking for help. His clients, according to him, had possession of several gold bars. Baily made it clear that forty of his clients lived in the White Sands area and knew the exact location of the gold.

Bailey was skeptical but was provided with one of the bars for analysis. He sent it to the Treasury for testing. It was sixty percent gold and forty percent copper. The problem is that fourteen-karat gold is about fifty-eight percent gold and forty-two percent copper. It was noted that the gold ingot was far from pure. No real conclusion was drawn from the tests, and no value was reported for the gold.

Bailey would eventually say that there were two groups involved; a small group who found the treasure and a larger group made up of businessmen who were financing various operations including the legal maneuvering involving ownership and permissions to enter the missile range.

It was also in 1973 that several people sneaked onto the missile range to dynamite a rock wall in a side canyon of Victorio Peak. They claimed that if you knew how to read the pictographs found on the rock wall, you could find the treasure. They wanted to destroy that information.

The San Andres Mountains, home of Victorio Peak. Photo 
copyright by Kevin Randle


Bailey and his group continued to make claims. The original story told, of 292 bars of gold, escalated into thousands of gold bars. At one point someone claimed that more than two hundred billion dollars were hidden in those caves. The more rational pointed out that Fort Knox held just over six billion dollars.

Others came forward, including Roscoe Parr, who claimed tht Noss had told him how to find the gold and how to divide it once it was recovered. There was nothing in writing from Noss but, according to Parr, Noss had asked him to make sure his wishes were carried out after his death.

Another group formed around Fiege. To complicate things, still another group formed around the second Mrs. Noss, Violet Noss Yancy. There was something called the Shriver Group and Expeditions Unlimited, which was a Florida-based treasure hunting group. And, of course, those involving Ova Noss.

Ova Noss tried to end it all by suing the Army for a billion dollars. In the documents filed with the court, she claimed that it would take no more than forty-eight hours to find the gold with four people to make the search. Once they had located the treasure, they would place the gold with the appropriate government agencies for safekeeping until ownership could be established.

The suit was dismissed.

A compromise among all the claimants was arranged by Norm Scott who used his Expeditions Unlimited to represent them all. The Army saw the wisdom in this and agreed to it. Operation Goldfinder was postponed twice but in March 1977, the search finally began.

And failed.

Just as the searches that had preceded, Operation Goldfinder failed to produce any evidence that gold, or anything else, was hidden on or in Victorio Peak. One group of claimants tried to salt the site with fake gold bars but were caught in the act and ordered out be Scott.

What was most valuable, from the Army’s position, was that those claiming something was hidden in the caves and tunnels of Victorio Peak had had their opportunity to search. They found nothing. The Army then shut down all operations, claimed that nothing was hidden, and that no additional searches would be allowed in the foreseeable future.

Scott held a final press conference after the failure to find anything to verify all the claims of treasure hidden there. Scott did not consider the search a failure. He pointed out that the objectives had been realized, with one exception.

That exception surrounded the claims of Doc Noss. Those accepting the Noss story pointed out that it wasn’t proven that the gold wasn’t there. This is arguing in circles because it was proven that “no treasure was found in the various locations where most of the claimants told us a cache of gold is hidden.” They were now claiming that the gold was hidden in an area that had not been searched.

Even with the negative results, without any physical evidence that the gold had ever been there, with only the testimony of a man who was a con artist and charlatan, there were still those who believed that a huge, multi-billion-dollar treasure was hidden in Victorio Peak.

Operation Goldfinder cost $87,000. Scott said that he had no plans for another search. Such a project would cost half a million dollars and would take a couple of months. At the conclusion of the press conference, the commanding officer of the White Sands Missile Range closed the range to any further searches for treasure.

But that wasn’t the end of it…

Ova Noss believed there was gold that belonged to her. For decades, others had believed as well, providing her with encouragement, legal advice and money. She was not going to let the dream die. In 1979, Ova Noss returned to Victorio Peak and posed for photographs. At that time, according to Jim Eckles in the Missile Ranger (the White Sands Missile Range newspaper), she said, “Like they say. There’s gold in them thar hills.” She died later that year without ever finding her treasure.

But, of course, the search didn’t die with her.

Her grandson, Terry Delonas, had accompanied Ova Noss to Victorio Peak. It was clear that he was going to continue the family tradition and the search. He formed the Ova Noss Family Partnership.

Coming up: Some Archaeological Evidence, Part Six

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