B5F11I1

Transcribed Text (OCR)

GARY MANGIACOPA ARCHIVE
============================================================
Title:      B5F11I1
Slug:       b5f11i1
Categories: Lost Treasure
Source:     https://garymangiacopraarchive.com/b5f11i1
Pages:      3 scanned, 3 extracted
OCR:        Google Vision API (document_text_detection)
Processed:  2026-06-06
============================================================

12 July 2000 Wed her day pago A16
Bridgeport, CoNN
CONNECTICUT POST
Your Wor
NATION
Diamond finder now keeper
SANTA FE. N.M. Janitor Bruce Buck could
soon be the owner of a 9.72-carat diamond, and all
he did was fish it out of his vacuum cleaner.
Buck found the gem in February after vacuum-
ing four homes and an insurance office. He
thought it was fake and gave it to his daughters to
play with, but later got curious and tested it by us-
ing it to scratch glass.
He turned it over to police, and city officials
told him that if the owner wasn't found they would
have to auction the stone and put the money into
the city treasury.
But now, with none of the homeowners or of-
fice workers claiming ownership, Mayor Larry
Delgado says that because of Buck's honesty the
city will wait until July 24 and then hand the jewel
back to him.
Buck said he would sell the diamond and use
the money to take his children to Disneyland and
start his own carpet-cleaning business. He said a
jeweler told him it was worth $19,000.
Despondent mechanic kills 2
DALLAS- A mechanic who had recently suf

[PAGE BREAK]

Search Continues For Gold Bars
By BRAD SMITH
WHITE SANDS, N.M. (UPI) - It had been 16 years
since Leonard Fiege was inside a large cavern in
Victorio Peak searching for a legendary gold treasure.
He returned to the cave Sunday, but he didn't find the
piles of gold bars he said he saw there on his last visit.
Fiege was one of three men, part of a search.
organized by Norman Scott, who crawled on their
"bellies and backs" 320 feet into a domed room inside
the small desert peak.
They found no treasure, but enough clues to get them
to continue the search with heavy equipment.
"It is entirely different," Fiege said. "There are
timbers in there now. It's all shored up.
Fiege, a retired Air Force captain, said he found
stacks of gold bars in the peak, located on the White
Sands Missile Range, in the late 1950s. He said the last
time he was in the cave was 1961.
Fiege is one of many persons who have said they saw
a treasure spotted by Milton E. "Doc" Noss in 1937.
Scott has been hired by several of the claimants to
conduct this 10-day search, which ends March 28.
After digging with shovels and crow bars for four
hours Sunday, Fiege, Jerry Lee and Jack Hull crawled
through the entrance of a fault for a 45-minute search
just before nightfall.
Lee, a spelunker with Scott's Expeditions Unlimited,
said someone had done a lot of work in the cave.
March 21, 1977 M.
zen, Conn.
Mond
"There's even a campsite in there with a tea kettle, a
No. 5 can that was used as a fireplace to cook canned
food-peas, beans and one No. 5 can that still has
about five sticks of dynamite and some old rotted
fuse," Lee said.
"There's even a pair of red corduroy pants," he said.
A geophysicist, Lambert Dolphin of Stanford
Research Institute, used ground-penetrating radar to
verify locations of several faults in the peak.
Reports of the treasure date back to the 1500s when
the area was visited by Spanish conquistadores
traveling northward from Mexico. Among the more
recent alleged discoverers of the gold were Noss and
Joe Newman of El Paso, Tex., who said he was in the
cavern in 1974.
Noss, who was shot and killed in 1949, had said he
accidentally sealed the cavern while trying to clear
some of the rocks away with dynamite. His widow,
Ova, 80, is along on the search.
Newman said on his 1974 visit he and three other man
sneaked inside the range after dark. He said his
companions were discovered by soldiers on patrol but
he hid inside a cave and escaped.
He also brought out a gold bar he said he found in-
side.
The Army permitted the current expedition but says
even if gold is found, it cannot be removed until the
claims are legally settled.

[PAGE BREAK]

A-14
Bridgeport Conn
BRIDGEPORT SUNDAY POST, March 31, 1974
Elderly Widow and U.S. Army Clash
Over Ownership of Buried Treasure
some with
ALAMOGORDO, N.M. (UPI) bars, coins, swords, and other, Evicted by the military, Mrs.
-The Army refers to it as, relics.
"simply a bad case of gold fev-
Noss hired Kansas City attorney
Noss, who never allowed any- Phil Koury to seek permission
er," but an elderly Clovis, N.M., one else to enter the caves, also for her to pursue her claim for
the richest woman in the world. human skeletons,
widow claims it would make her told his wife he had found 27 the treasure she claims is worth
The "it" in both cases is the their hands and feet tied.
no less than $500 million.
legendary Doc Noss treasure Mrs. Noss now quotes her late
Nineteen years later, the is-
story, a tale of gold and relics husband as telling her the gold sue remains unresolved. There
mountain peak on what is now "load 60 to 80 mules and make;
allegedly buried within a small inside the caves was enough to, of the story, and attorney Koury
the White Sands Missile Range John D. Rockefeller look like a is among the believers.
in southern New Mexico.
tramp."
are believers and non-believers
"I feel the Army is wooling us
Although the treasure story For the next two years, Noss, around, they are not sincere,"
dates back 37 years, it has been his family and a few hired hands says Koury. "For a period of al-
kept alive by the untiring legal worked diligently to remove the most a year, I have been ex-
efforts of Mrs. Ova Noss, the "treasure" from the small peak. changing letters with the Army.
77-year-old widow of the man Mrs. Noss said her husband But each time they pose new
who claimed to have discovered managed to take out 88 bars of conditions. They treat us like
the buried riches while on a deer gold, and some of the other rel- servants.'
hunting trip in the San Andres ics, hiding them in other parts of
mountain range.
Milton E. (Doc) Noss, a small-
town foot doctor and onetime in-
the area.
Shaft Cavein
Legal Setback
Mrs. Noss also suffered a
legal setback in January when
Federal Judge Edwin L. Mech-
However, in an effort to en-
mate at the New Mexico Peni- large the opening of the shaft, am dismissed a $1 billion suit
tentiary, claimed he found gold the story goes, Noss accidentally the widow had filed against the
bars, coins, jewelry, old swords, caved in the passage with a Army.
guns and saddles in a series of faulty dynamite blast. He never The Army's stand is that the
small caves hundreds of feet be- was able to reopen the shaft and area is a primary target area
torio Peak.
low a small mountain called Vic- 10 years later, he was shot to for weapons testing at the mili-
death in a bar in an argument tary installation and Victorio
over some gold bars.
Peak is surrounded by un-
Mrs. Noss, who possesses sev- exploded shells and other dan-
eral swords, bowls and gold gerous explosives..
pieces which she says are part "There has never been any
Mrs. Noss says her husband of the treasure, continued to concrete evidence of any gold
top of the peak while searching 1955 when
told her he had climbed to the work on the Noss claim until there," says Col. William A.
the Army's ex- Walker, deputy commander at
opening. He reported he could Victorio Peak.
for deer and had found a small of the WSMR engulfed the range. "I feel it is simply,
see a vertical shaft with an old
The discovery was reported
made in 1937, when the area was
still open land.
Climbed the Peak
pole ladder leading down.
Returning to the area several
days later with his wife, Noss
reportedly managed to lower
himself down the shaft to the
caves within the peak. Inside, he
said he found a treasure of gold
bad case of gold fever."