"Operation Dungeon Storm" is a regular report based on years of personal research into the subject of underground anomalies. These reports may range anywhere from fact to fantasy, however most of the accounts related here have at least some 'suggested potential' of having been based in objective reality. We will leave the reader to determine for themselves just what implications this information might present on an individual and/or collective basis. - Alan

More from Bourke Lee's book 'DEATH VALLEY MEN'... and ALSO [following] a report from yet another exploration party who claims to have investigated the outskirts of this ancient underground city of the Panamints...

In his chapter 'OLD GOLD' the author of 'DEATH VALLEY MEN', Bourke Lee, relates the allegedly-true account of two prospectors who claimed to have discovered an ancient, abandoned 'city' within huge caverns inside the heart of the Panamint mountains. Take special note of the INCREDIBLE similarity between this account and the one given to the Navajo Oga-Make by an old Paihute sage, as recorded in the article 'TRIBAL MEMORIES OF THE FLYING SAUCERS'. We will take up the story where two Death Valley residents by the name of Bill and Jack are having a conversation with two prospectors, 'Thomason' and 'White', from whom the author 'apparently' learned the details of the following discussion, if not present at the discussion himself:

...Thomason looked from Jack to Bill and asked, 'How long have you men been in this country?'

Jack spoke before Bill had a chance. 'Not very long,' said Jack quietly. Bill glanced curiously at Jack but said nothing. If Jack thought that 30 years was not very long, that was all right with Bill.

Thomason said, 'I've been in and out of the Death Valley country for 20 years. So has my partner. We know where there is lost treasure. We've known about it for several years, and we're the only men in the world [?] who do know about it. We're going to let you two fellows in on it. You've been good to us. You're both fine fellows. You haven't asked us any questions about ourselves, and we like you. We think you can keep a secret, so we'll tell you ours."

Jack blew smoke and asked, "A lost mine?"

"No, not a mine," said Thomason. "A lost treasure house. A lost city of gold. It's bigger than any mine that ever was found, or ever will be."

"It's bigger than the United States Mint," said White, with his voice and body shaking with excitement. "It's a city thousands of years old and worth billions of dollars! Billions of Dollars! Billions! Not Millions. Billions!"

Thomason and White spoke rapidly and tensely, interrupting each other in eager speech.

Thomason said, "We've been trying to get the treasure out of this golden city for years. We had to have help, and we haven't been able to get it."

"Everybody tries to rob us," put in White. "They all want too big a share. I offered the whole city to the Smithsonian Institution for five million dollars -- only a small part of what it's worth. They tried to rob us, too! They said they'd give me a million and a half for a discovery that's worth a billion dollars!" he sneered. "I had nothing more to do with them."

Jack got up and found his plug of tobacco. He threw away his cigarette and savagely bit off an enormous chew. He sat down and crossed his legs and glowered at White as he worked his chew into his jaw.

Bill's voice was meek as he asked, "And this place is in Death Valley?"

"Right in the Panamint Mountains!" said Thomason. "My partner found it by accident. He was prospecting down on the lower edge of the range near Wingate Pass. He was working in the bottom of an old abandoned shaft when the bottom fell out and landed him in a tunnel. We've explored the tunnel since. It's a natural tunnel like a big cave. It's over 20 miles long. It leads all through a great underground city; through the treasure vaults, the royal palace and the council chambers; and it connects to a series of beautiful galleries with stone arches in the east slope of the Panamint Mountains. Those arches are like great big windows in the side of the mountain and they look down on Death Valley. They're high above the valley now, but we believe that those entrances in the mountain side were used by the ancient people that built the city. They used to land their boats there."

"Boats!" demanded the astonished Bill, "boats in Death Valley?"

Jack choked and said, "Sure, boats. There used to be a lake in Death Valley. I hear the fishing was fine."

"You know about the lake," Thomason pointed his blue chin at Jack. "Your geology would tell you about the lake. It was a long time ago... The ancient people who built the city in the caverns under the mountain lived on in their treasure houses long after the lake in the valley dried up. How long, we don't know. But the people we found in the caverns have been dead for thousands of years. Why! Those mummies alone are worth a million dollars!"

White, his eyes blazing, his body trembling, filled the little house with a vibrant voice on the edge of hysteria. "Gold!" he cried. "Gold spears! Gold shields! Gold statues! Jewelry! Thick gold bands on their arms! I found them! I fell into the underground city. There was an enormous room; big as this canyon. A hundred men were in it. Some were sitting around a polished table that was inlaid with gold and precious stones. Men stood around the walls of the room carrying shields and spears of solid gold. All the men -- more than a hundred -- had on leather aprons, the finest kind of leather, soft and full of gold ornaments and jewels. They sat there and stood there with all that wealth around them. They are still there. They are all dead! And the gold, all that gold, and all those gems and jewels are all around them. All that gold and jewelry! Billions!" White's voice was ascending to a shriek when Thomason put a hand on his arm and White fell silent, his eyes darting about to the faces of those who sat around the table.

Thomason explained quietly, "These ancient people must have been having a meeting of their rulers in the council chamber when they were killed very suddenly. We haven't examined them closely because it was the treasure that interested us, but the people all seem to be perfect mummies."

Bill squinted at White and asked, "Ain't it dark in this tunnel?"

"Black dark," said White, who had his voice under control again. His outburst had quieted him. "When I first went into that council room I had just some candles. I fumbled around. I didn't discover everything all at once like I'm telling you. I fell around over these men, and I was pretty near almost scared out of my head. But I got over that and everything was all right and I could see everything after I hit the lights."

"Lights? There were lights?" It was Bill asking.

"Oh, yes," said White. "These old people had a natural gas they used for lighting and cooking. I found it by accident. I was bumping around in the dark. Everything was hard and cold and I kept thinking I was seeing people and I was pretty scared. I stumbled over something on the floor and fell down. Before I could get up there was a little explosion and gas flames all around the room lighted up. What I fell over was a rock lever that turned on the gas, and my candle set the gas off. That was when I saw all the men, and the polished table, and the big statue. I thought I was dreaming. The statue was solid gold. It's face looked like the man sitting at the head of the table, only, of course, the statue's face was much bigger than the man's, because the statue was all in perfect size, only bigger. The statue was solid gold, and it is 89 feet, six inches tall!"

"Did you measure it," asked Jack, silkily, "or just guess at it?"

"I measured it. Now you'll get an idea of how big that one room -- the council room -- is. That statue only takes up a small part of it!"

Steady and evenly, Jack asked, "Did you weigh the statue?"

"No," said White. "You couldn't weigh it."

Bill was puzzled. "Would you mind telling me how you measured it?" asked Bill.

"With a sextant," said White. "I always carry a sextant when I'm on the desert. Then if I get lost, I can use my sextant on the sun or moon or stars to find myself on the map. I took a sextant angle of the height of the statue and figured it out later."

"A sextant," said Bill, frowning heavily.

Jack said, "It's a part of the church, Bill. Never mind that.... Tell us some more about this place. It's very interesting."

Fred Thomason said, "Tell them about the treasure rooms."

"I found them later." White polished his shining pate with a grimy handkerchief. "After I got the lights going I could see all the walls of this big room and I saw some doors cut in the solid rock of the walls. The doors are big as slabs of rock hung on hinges you can't see. A big rock bar lets down across them. I tried to lift up the bars and couldn't move them. I fooled around trying to get the doors open. I must have been an hour before I took ahold of a little latch like on the short end of the bar and the great bar swung up. Those people know about counter-weights and all those great big doors with their barlocks -- they must weigh hundreds of tons -- are all balanced so that you can move them with your little finger, if you find the right place."

Thomason again said, "Tell them about the treasure."

"It's gold bars and precious stones. The treasure rooms are inside these big rock doors. The gold is stacked in small bars piled against the walls like bricks. The jewels are in bins cut out of rock. There's so much gold and jewelry in that place that the people there had stone wheelbarrows to move the treasure around."

Jack sat up in sudden interest. "Wheelbarrows?" he asked...

"We don't know how old they are," said Thomason, "but the stone wheelbarrows are there."

"Stone wheelbarrows," marveled Jack. "Those dead men must have been very powerful men. Only very strong men could push around a stone wheelbarrow loaded with gold bars. The wheelbarrows must have weighed a tone without a load in them."

"Yes," said Thomason, slowly, "the wheelbarrows are stone and of course they are very heavy--"

"But they're very easy to push around even with a load in them," White explained. "They're scientific wheelbarrows."

"No," objected Jack in a low tone of anguish.

"Yes," insisted White, pleasantly sure of himself. A small boy could fill one of those stone wheelbarrows full of gold bars and wheel it around. The wheelbarrows are balanced just like the doors. Instead of having the wheel out in front so that a man has to pick up all the weight with his back, these wise people put the wheel almost in the middle and arranged the leverage of the shafts so that a child could put in a balanced load and wheel the barrow around."

Jack's heart was breaking. He left the table and threw his chew out the door. He went over to the stove with his cup. "Anybody want more coffee?" he asked. No one did.

Bill studied Thomason and White for several minutes. Then he asked, "How many times have you been in this tunnel?"

"I've been there three times," said White. "That's counting the first time I fell in. Fred's been in twice; and my wife went part way in the last time we was in."

Mrs. White stroked her blond hair and said, "I thought my husband was romancing when he came home and told me what he found in the mountains. He always was a romancer. I was sure he was just romancing about this city he said he found. I didn't believe it until they took me into it. It is a little hard to believe, don't you think?"

Bill said, "It sure is." Jack stirred sugar into his coffee and sat down at the table again. Bill asked, "Did you ever bring anything out of the cave?"

"Twice," said Fred Thomason. "Both times we went in we filled out pockets with gems, and carried out a gold bar apiece. The first time we left the stuff with a friend of ours and we went to try and interest someone in what we'd found. We thought the scientists would be interested or the government. One government man said he'd like to see the stuff and we went back to our friend to get the gold and jewels and he told us he'd never seen them; and dared us to try to get them back. You see, he double crossed us. We were in a little trouble at the time and the loss of that stuff just put us in deeper. We couldn't get a stake because we were having hard work making anyone believe us. So we made another trip out here for more proof. That time we brought out more treasure and buried it close to the shaft entrance to the underground city before we went back to the Coast. I persuaded some university officials and some experts from the Southwest Museum to come out here with me. We got up on the Panamints and I could not find the shaft. A cloud-burst had changed all the country around the shaft. We were out of luck. The scientists became unreasonably angry with us. They've done everything they can to discredit us ever since."

Jack watched Thomason and White across the rim of his coffee cup. Bill said, "And now you can't get into your treasure tunnel. It's lost again. That's sure too bad."

Thomason and White smiled. "We can get in all right," said Thomason in a genial voice his cold eyes did not support. Mrs. White smiled confidently and her husband bobbed his head. Thomason went on: "You've forgotten about the old boat landings on the Death Valley side of the Panamint Mountains. All we have to do is climb the mountain to the openings where the galleries come out of the city on the old lake shore. Do you know the mountains along the west side of Death Valley?"

"I've been down there," said Bill.

Thomason turned to White: "How high do you think those galleries are above the bottom of Death Valley?"

White said, "Somewhere around forty-five hundred or five thousand feet. You looked out of them; what do you think?"

"That's about right," agreed Thomason. "The openings are right across from Furnace Creek Ranch. We could see the green of the ranch right below us and Furnace Creek Wash across the valley. We'll find those windows in the mountains, all right."

"You goin down there now?" asked Bill.

"That's it," said White. "We're through with the scientists. We tried to make a present of our discovery to science because we thought they would be interested. But they tried to rob us, and then they laughed at us and abused us..."

Saying thanks and farewell the treasure hunters left, promising to return, and drove in their car down to Emigrant Canyon towards Death Valley. Later that same afternoon Bourke Lee, the author of DEATH VALLEY MEN, allegedly met the three of them on the floor of the valley. Their car was parked beside the road between Furnace Creek Ranch and the Salt Beds. The men were patching a tube. They did not need any help, so he wished them well and said goodbye and went on towards the southern part of the barren valley. He never saw Fred Thomason, Mr. White nor his wife again, and ten days later when he again visited Bill Cocoran and Jack Stewart they told him that they hadn't seen them since either. When another week went by and the proprietors of the 'lost city' did not appear, the author and Bill made a trip down into Death Valley in their car and took along a pair of field glasses, hoping to see some sign of the explorers or of the 'windows' or 'quays' allegedly hid among the shadows of the eastern slope of the sun- blistered Panamints. They failed to find any sign of either.

The following account which appeared in the Winter '92 issue of 'FAR OUT' Magazine, in an article by H. Leo O'Neal titled 'THE LEGEND OF THE DEATH VALLEY MUMMIES', was apparently an attempt to classify the following tale as 'fantasy' even though the author of the article does admit that SEVERAL people (witnesses) have reportedly been in these ancient chambers below the Mojave, mentioned in the story.

These (more) recent events surrounding the Death Valley catacombs, mentioned in the article, are as follows. We ask the readers simply to make their own determination as to the authenticity of the account based on other similar reports which we have related earlier.

In 1946, Dr. F. Bruce Russell, a retired Beverly Hills physician, struck of a conversation with a Mr. Howard E. Hill in the city of Los Angeles. Russell informed Hill that in 1931, while sinking a shaft in a claimsite of his in Death Valley, he broke through to an underground cavern. After finding some lights he entered and found himself in a cavern with two passages, one heading 'left' and the other 'right'. Exploring the left-hand passage he came to a cave-in, some 25 yards from the entrance shaft. The right-hand path however continued at a steep angle downward for about a quarter of a mile. Although some of the passages seemed natural, others appeared to have been expanded by artificial means, but all of these went off in several directions. One tunnel eventually led to a large room, and this room also had branch tunnels leading off in all directions. Laid out in this chamber were 3 'mummies' and several strange artifacts, some of which appeared 'Egyptian' while others were more 'American Indian' like in construction. The strange and shocking thing about the mummies however, according to Russell, was that many of them were nearly 8 foot long or tall! He described the underground system as a kind of 'underground city'.

The inhabitants must have been very advanced, Russell concluded from what he observed, and he was certain that the find was much more important than the famous King Tut's Tomb itself. Following the passages he eventually discovered other openings to the surface, but most of these were in obscure places, yet all that he explored were within 7 miles of the 'shaft' through which he had first entered the underground complex.

Eventually, Russell discovered 32 caves in all throughout the area. Although he could not prove it, since many of them had collapsed, he supposed that many of them might have at one time connected with the underground system. These 32 caves were all within 180 SQUARE miles of each other, and were located in Death Valley and the extreme southwest region of Nevada.

He also stumbled across a large chamber which he referred to as the 'ritual hall', and which contained strange markings and symbols. Another tunnel, according to Russell, went from this room to another underground hall where well-preserved bones of dinosaurs, sabre-toothed tigers, mastodons and other extinct animals were displayed in hollowed areas along the walls.

In 1946, after years of private investigation and secrecy, Russell decided to exploit the find. After gathering a group of potential investors he held a meeting in which he displayed some of the artifacts which he had taken out of the underground system. Mr. Hill was invited to the meeting provided that he could help out as an investor. He accepted the invitation and attended the meeting. The company was called 'Amazing Explorations', and the 'Investors' meeting took place at a suite in Beverly Hills, although all of the investors were sworn to absolute secrecy. Hill and the rest of the investors were taken, after this meeting concluded, to the underground complex itself, to where Russell returned the artifacts which he had displayed to the investors as he was convinced that the protected atmosphere of the caves would preserve them. The group was taken into the cavern in which the 'bones' and the 'temple' were located. According to witnesses, it was "chock full of bizarre artifacts of all kinds." Russell told them that they could look but not touch, as he realized the necessity of preserving such a find in its original condition, both for archaeological as well as monetary reasons.

On August 4, 1947, Howard Hill, acting as spokesman for 'Amazing Explorations', issued a brief statement to the press announcing the discovery. The story received minimal coverage, to his surprise, and only appeared in a few newspapers in which the story was 'balanced' with very derogatory and skeptical statements from the 'scientific' community.

After this, a live press conference was planned, in which Russell planned to display a skeleton and/or several artifacts which would "convince even the most skeptical reporter." And from that they could discover for themselves the reliability of the find. For this, Russell had to return once again to the caves to retrieve the necessary artifacts. He also planned before leaving or shortly after his return to open a bank account at Barstow bank to deposit investment capital. Russell left for Death Valley but was never seen again. His CAR was later discovered with a busted radiator in a seldom travelled part of Death Valley. Although some suspect that he left with the money of the investors, this is unlikely since the investors' money which he possessed at the time was not nearly enough to warrent his disappearance, or the discontinuance of plans to commercialize the site as one of the wonders of the world, and the potential wealth that this might bring.

The investors attempted to re-locate the underground chambers that Russell had shown them, but claimed that they could not remember the exact route since they did not pay much attention to landmarks on the first trip, and besides this, the shifting sunlight and shadows and the uniformity of the vast landscape made that difficult. So ended the brief but interesting events surrounding what might have turned out to be one of the most popular wonders of the world, a 'potential' Federally-protected museum invaluable to archeologist, anthropologist and historian alike, as well as millions of potential tourists. In spite of the corroborating "circumstantial" evidence for the existence of these ancient ruins, this "world" (or perhaps its present for former inhabitants?) seems to continually resist all efforts of us "outsiders" to probe its secrets in any dramatic way, at least (perhaps) until its "protectors" feel that we are ready to discover these historical treasures. Perhaps the "greed" that such treasures often arouse in human hearts is in itself the very force that prevents their acquisition. Perhaps when we set our hearts to search for Truth -- not for our own personal greed or profit, but for the benefit of all humanity -- perhaps only then will the TRUTH make itself available to those who are "ready" to recieve it.

-------

[Note: I recently came across a report from a confidential source of a woman who claims to have been abducted into underground caves beneath Death Valley, or at least that is where her abductors told her she was taken. She met the 'leader' who was a reptilian dressed in an 'Egyptian' looking uniform, head-dress and all, who told her some of the history of its species, how they were descended from bi-pedal saurians {like the Velociraptors!?} who were driven under ground in ancient times and were waiting for the time that they could emerge and re-claim their ancient home for themselves. The reptilian put on an aire of benevolence but was insistent that the surface world would be theirs one day because they felt that they were the original inhabitants and were unjustly driven off the surface by our ancestors. This really got me to thinking, are the Federation 'non-interventionists' still in control of the Panamint / Death Valley base!? This base sits right in between the Nevada and California underground networks which are apparently jointly run by a fascist military-industrial fraternity AND reptilian type aliens. More on that in future O.D.S. reports. Another possibility is something which certain 'contactees' are claiming, i.e. that in recent years many of the 'Federation' personnel stationed on/under the earth have been called back to help defend their home worlds from major 'draconian' offensives. Also reports that a Federation blockade of our system has all but failed as millions of 'dracos' are beating their way into our system to join-up with their counterparts in the underground systems. If that's the case then we should at least consider the possibility that some of the underground systems beneath Death Valley may have come under 'draconian' control. At least that's what I would attempt to do if I were a Lucifer-worshipping, blood-sucking reptilian parasite. IF these contactees are correct then this might tie in with the Revelation 12 prophecy concerning Luciferian dracos/serpents who, after losing a 'war in heaven' beyond our world, begin retreating en mass to planet earth as their "last stand", joining with their infernal comrades in the underground systems in hopes of infiltrating and invading our surface world {before we invade theirs!?}, which they then hope to turn into a staging ground from which to launch their last-ditch attack on the forces of light!? One must wonder if the "electronic assimilation" of humanity is all part of this... i.e. to create a controlled society that they hope will ASSIST them in their war against their enemies in 'the heavens'!? Just WHAT is currently going on beneath Death Valley today!? Inquiring minds want to KNOW - Alan]