Twenty years ago, I went to southern New Mexico with an Orange County-based expedition searching for an estimated
$2.7 billion in gold bullion purportedly buried inside an inhospitable desert hilltop called Victorio Peak.
The searchers didn’t find it, and that 1992 excursion became another in a series of failed attempts to prove one of the Southwest’s greatest treasure tales.
But in covering that Orange County effort, people I trusted told me things that led me to believe that as fantastical as the well-publicized legend of Victorio Peak was already, an even more fantastical and bizarre tale awaited a researcher willing to give five or 10 years of his life to scouring far-flung government archives and trying to convince aging sources not to take their secrets to the grave.
That researcher, I knew, would not be me. For one thing, I had a mortgage and a life in Orange County. Also, I wasn’t convinced that even if I found what I thought to be conclusive evidence anyone would believe me, or that any reputable publisher would print it.
But in 2002, a writer named Jack Staley took up the challenge. He moved to Las Cruces, N.M., and has spent 10 years researching and writing. Under the pen name John Clarence, he has published “The Gold House,” a 1,683-page trilogy that takes the legend way beyond two earlier books, several “Unsolved Mysteries”-style TV features, and countless magazine and newspaper articles done on Victorio Peak in the past 75 years.
The rumors I heard in New Mexico that hot summer day 20 years ago – told by tired, grimy amateur miners after long days of fruitless search – involved one former U.S. president. “The Gold House” alleges the involvement of three U.S. presidents and the Pentagon in the theft of gold, an FBI investigation, and much, much more.
The legend that has been told for years begins on Nov. 7, 1937, in the Hembrillo Basin in New Mexico. That day, a man named Milton “Doc” Noss was hunting deer with his wife and some friends. About dusk, he climbed the only topographical feature of note, the 400-foot high Victorio Peak, to get a look around.
He noticed a flat rock that looked like it had been chiseled by hand. He moved it aside. Underneath was a hole that dropped into a small room. He descended and followed a narrow fissure that ultimately led to rooms with petroglyphs on the walls. He and his wife, Ova “Babe” Noss, returned on horseback many times to explore the caves and found artifacts such as statues, documents written in Spanish, bags of unopened U.S. mail from the 1800s, saddles and horse tack.
(In the “Gold House,” Clarence says Doc and Babe actually found this about 1935.)
One day, Doc emerged from the cave with a heavy black object that appeared about the size of a bar of soap. He and Babe scraped away the dirt and it glistened yellow. Doc had it tested. It was gold. It was, he said, “stacked like cordwood” inside. Doc took out dozens of bars, but he wanted to enlarge the opening to the hole to make access easier. In 1939, an engineer miscalculated the amount of dynamite he needed to do the job, and the cave completely collapsed, burying the treasure.
Doc spent the rest of his life trying to excavate it. It became massively more complicated when the military took the area as part of the White Sands Missile Range. Doc worked every angle he could to land financing and get permission to excavate. He entered partnerships with black-market gold buyers (gold was illegal to own then) to sell off the gold he had already extracted, and he got involved in deals with shady characters to finance more excavation.
In 1949, he got into a fight with one of the men with whom he was in business. The man, Charley Ryan, allegedly shot Doc to death as Doc was running to his pickup truck. Ryan was acquitted of murder. (Photos at the scene and more: ocregister.com/frank.)
Babe continued the effort to excavate the peak until she died in 1979, and some of her descendants continued afterward. One of them is Babe’s grandson, Terry Delonas of Laguna Beach, the man who introduced me to the legend in 1990.
Thursday: “Gold House” implicates JFK, LBJ and Richard Nixon.
Mickadeit writes Mon.-Fri. Contact him at 714-796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com.
