JFK The Enduring Secret

In Episode 14 of the Noss Gold Treasure, the investigation shifts to the early 1970s as President Richard Nixon positions himself to gain access to the vast fortune hidden inside Victorio Peak. The episode explores a pivotal July 6, 1970 meeting at Nixon's Western White House in San Clemente, California, where geologist Keith Alexander—representing a coalition of treasure hunters known as the "Filthy 50"—met with Nixon and Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman. Alexander revealed secret knowledge of 742 gold bars weighing 40 to 50 pounds each (totaling over 3 million troy ounces) stockpiled at White Sands, seeking executive immunity and an official agreement to monetize the gold through the U.S. Mint.
Three days after the San Clemente meeting, Ehrlichman dispatched a personal memorandum to Treasury Secretary David M. Kennedy inquiring how the group could legally recover and sell the treasure. On July 17, 1970, Secretary Kennedy responded with an accommodating roadmap, noting that no federal license was required to search for or possess buried treasure, while proposing a 50/50 split with the government based on the prior Fort Huachuca precedent. However, when Kennedy proved too rigid regarding strict regulatory compliance, Nixon replaced him on February 11, 1971, with former Texas Governor John Connally—a close associate of Lyndon B. Johnson and an alleged co-incorporator of the LaRue Corporation, an entity formed in 1967 to manage and launder Victorio Peak gold proceeds.
The episode then unpacks one of the most consequential economic maneuvers in modern American history: Nixon's live televised address on Sunday, August 15, 1971, closing the gold window and ending the direct convertibility of U.S. dollars into gold. By dismantling the Bretton Woods monetary system, Nixon eliminated international audits and physical reserve accountability, effectively creating a systemic blind spot where missing national reserves or illicitly extracted military gold could no longer be tracked or audited.
Connecting internal White House memorandums, Treasury Department correspondence, corporate records, and Watergate-era disclosures, Episode 14 details how Nixon installed key gatekeepers and altered global monetary policy to set the stage for the massive thefts that followed. From San Clemente to the Oval Office, this episode exposes how presidential authority and monetary policy intersected with the covert plundering of America’s most controversial treasure. Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by  author John Clarence.

In Episode 13 of the Noss Gold Treasure, we delve into one of the most audacious gold smuggling operations in modern history: the post-presidential pipeline orchestrated under Lyndon B. Johnson between 1969 and 1970. Drawing on direct video interviews with vintage WWII B-24 Liberator pilot Fern Hamill, this episode exposes how 130 tons of ancient gold bars stolen from Victorio Peak were covertly transported out of the United States. Weekly shuttle runs using official U.S. government vehicles—bearing White Sands Missile Range stickers on their windshields—hauled 500 to 800 pounds of gold per week directly across the Mexican border to General Roberto Fierro Villalobos International Airport in Chihuahua City.
At the Chihuahua City airport, crew member Arturo weighed each gold bar on the tarmac before loading it directly into the bomb bay racks of the B-24 bomber under 24-hour Mexican military guard. To conceal the massive four-engine bomber from aerial observation when it was not flying, LBJ utilized Department of Defense resources to construct a private airstrip and a massive Quonset hangar 114 miles south at his 108,724-acre Las Pampas Ranch. This dual-location infrastructure provided the perfect covert staging network, allowing the crew to execute month-long loading cycles for 13 separate ten-ton missions.
The episode breaks down the long flight paths along the Pacific corridor to refineries in Vancouver, Canada, where 11 flights successfully delivered 110 tons of gold into international channels. However, the operation was not without catastrophic failures: during the 7th and 9th flights, severe engine failures forced Hamill and Arturo to trip the bomb bay doors, ditching 20 tons of gold into the Pacific Ocean off the coast near Carmel, California.
Connecting direct video testimony from pilot Fern Hamill, tape recordings of LBJ, and revelations from Bill Gulley’s White House exposé Breaking Cover, Episode 13 pulls back the curtain on high-level executive and military corruption. Featuring operational oversight from former White Sands commander Major General John Shinkle and high-ranking military handlers, this episode demonstrates how official government vehicles, defense resources, and presidential authority were leveraged to pull off what Hamill called the world's biggest gold heist. Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by  author John Clarence.

In 1958, Air Force Captain Leonard Fiege, Airman Tom Berlett, and civilian Bill Schriever entered a cave at Victoria Peak, discovering massive, pyramid-shaped stacks of gold bars stamped with Spanish double crosses alongside the remains of 29 human skeletons. Choosing to act honorably and follow proper legal procedures rather than stealing the gold, Fiege and Berlett left the cave untouched. They subsequently hired senior Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps colonels to form "The Seven Heirs" corporation to legally assert their rights as the discoverers of the treasure.
Seeking official permission to complete their recovery, the airmen presented their findings in Washington, D.C., leading the U.S. Secret Service to administer federal polygraph examinations to both Fiege and Berlett on September 5, 1961. Both officers passed without any indication of deception, providing official, government-verified proof that the massive gold cache inside Victoria Peak was real. However, instead of granting legal access, Secret Service Agent Lilburn "Pat" Boggs issued a chilling warning directly to Captain Fiji: "The government will never let you get to the gold".
Behind the scenes, federal authorities were already executing a covert extraction. Transcribed phone calls from July 31, 1961, between White Sands Commander Major General John Shinkle, Leland Howard of the U.S. Mint, and Agent Boggs reveal a top-secret military operation set for August 1, 1961, to excavate and seize the gold while strictly barring Fiji and Berlett from the base. Shortly after, a special Pentagon team led by Captain William Orby Swanner inspected, photographed, and inventoried the gold, allegedly shipping portions to Fort Knox without any official public accounting or receiving records.
The aftermath exposed a ruthless cover-up designed to erase the discovery and silence all witnesses. Base photographer Charles Abston later recalled seeing General Shinkle personally using a forklift to load heavy, sealed containers into a moving van prior to transferring commands, while Captain Fiji and his family endured decades of relentless death threats whenever he attempted to go public. Episode 12 lays bare how federal agencies used lie detector technology to confirm the reality of the Victoria Peak treasure—only to secretly steal it and threaten the service members who found it.  Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by  author John Clarence.

On June 5, 1963, President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson made a highly orchestrated visit to White Sands Missile Range. While the official itinerary claimed the 139-minute stop was merely to witness a missile demonstration and inspect an unpaved desert runway known as the Northrup Strip, the reality was far more secretive. The trip—which required nine months of meticulous preparation—was actually an elaborate cover allowing the President and Vice President to personally inspect the Noss treasure at Victoria Peak, located just a five-minute helicopter ride away.
Following this secret inspection, a plan was set in motion to settle the decades-long treasure dispute. By November 1963, Ova Noss was waiting at the prestigious Brown Palace Hotel in Denver for a direct meeting with President Kennedy, arranged by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The plan was for the President to take control of the treasure and finally ensure the Noss family received a fair share. However, on November 22, the tragic news of JFK’s assassination in Dallas shattered those hopes. Watching the fateful broadcast, Ova devastatingly realized that once again, getting close to a settlement had been derailed by murder.
Even more chilling than the canceled meeting is the military cover-up that concluded just 24 hours before the assassination. During the summer of 1963, the Museum of New Mexico conducted an authorized excavation at Victoria Peak under strict military control. When the museum's archaeologist drafted a truthful report documenting previous military excavations, secret polygraph tests, and Treasury Department involvement, army officials ordered it to be heavily censored. All incriminating evidence was scrubbed from the record, and the falsified report was finalized on November 21, 1963—exactly one day before Kennedy was killed.
This episode unravels the haunting six-month timeline leading up to the JFK assassination and explores the dark questions surrounding the military's actions. The censored scientific report didn't just hide past military thefts; it created the plausible deniability that protected Lyndon B. Johnson's upcoming operations. Tune in to discover how the tragedy in Dallas effectively handed the most powerful office in the world to LBJ, paving the way for him to systematically loot the Victoria Peak treasure using military aircraft over the next decade. Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by  author John Clarence.

In the summer of 1976, an Illinois oilman named Ed Atkins received a tape containing an explosive conversation: former President Lyndon B. Johnson admitting to moving stolen gold from White Sands Missile Range to his ranch in Mexico. Discussing the heist with Fred Drolte, LBJ explicitly detailed using a big plane—later identified as a B-24 Liberator bomber—to transport the gold, cementing the tape as a "smoking gun" of presidential theft. However, after Atkins handed the tape to his lawyer, Daryl Holmes, for safekeeping, Holmes died under mysterious circumstances in 1977. Following his death, the LBJ tape and Atkins' White Sands files were the only items stolen from the lawyer's office.
This episode begins to dive deep into the origins of these presidential gold heists, proving the corruption began well before the 1973 Nixon theft. We trace the pattern back to the early 1960s at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, where President John F. Kennedy authorized $10,000 in taxpayer money to fund a treasure excavation. When Ed Atkins and his son John finally gained access to dig at the base years later, they found nothing. A base security guard later revealed the shocking truth: the military had previously cordoned off the area and extracted the gold using military trucks and helicopters.
At the center of the Fort Huachuca extraction was Bill Shriver, a civilian operative working under military and CIA supervision. Schriever secretly extracted an estimated 3.5 million troy ounces of gold from Fort Huachuca long before civilian treasure hunters were granted permission to dig, laundering the proceeds through a company called Pyramid Enterprises. In a sworn 1981 affidavit, Schriever confessed that a staggering 11 million troy ounces of gold were taken from Fort Huachuca and Victoria Peak combined, exclusively using military aircraft.
The pursuit of this truth came with a deadly price. Less than a year after giving his sworn testimony, Bill Shriver was beaten to death in Los Angeles. Ed Atkins himself had been warned that his entire family would be killed if he didn't stop investigating White Sands, and he later died in 1979 under circumstances a CIA operative suspected was murder. Tune in to uncover how Fort Huachuca established the dark, deadly template for presidential treasure theft that ultimately paved the way for the Victoria Peak heist. Join us for this latest episode as we tell the story so well documented by  author John Clarence.