America's Book of Secrets (2012) s01e04 Episode Script
Fort Knox
NARRATOR: It is one of the most secure structures in the world.
It safeguards the vast wealth of the United States.
And its name is synonymous with one of the most precious commodities in the history of the world: gold.
But behind this building's stone exterior are secrets.
Secrets so outrageous BILL STILL: Is there any gold in Fort Knox? We just don't know.
NARRATOR: so controversial ALLAN HALVERSON: In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impregnable vault.
NARRATOR: so potentially dangerous CHRIS POWELL: You cannot get answers, because the secret history would explode the markets.
NARRATOR: that they must be kept hidden from the public.
DAVID GANZ: If I tell you about Fort Knox, it's gonna blow your socks off.
NARRATOR: There are those who believe in the existence of a book.
A book that contains the most highly guarded secrets of the United States of America.
A book whose very existence is known to only a select few.
But if such a book exists, what would it contain? Secret histories? Secret plans? Secret lies? Does there really exist America's Book of Secrets? (bell clanging) July 2007.
Major banking institutions across America announce a series of financial setbacks.
It is the first public indication of an economic crisis-- one that will hurl the United States and Europe into the worst financial recession since the 1930s.
Over the next four years, the price of gold skyrockets to nearly $2,000 an ounce-- its highest price in recorded history.
Gold's unprecedented value draws attention to the U.
S.
government's secret holdings of RON PAUL: For far too long, the United States government has been less than transparent in releasing information relating to its gold holdings.
Not surprisingly, this secrecy has given rise to a number of theories about the gold at Fort Knox.
And the government owes it to the people to provide them with the details of these holdings.
NARRATOR: America's gold reserves are held in four U.
S.
Mint depositories: Denver, West Point, New York's Federal Reserve, and the largest, Fort Knox.
The nature and extent of these reserves are as secret as they are secure.
POWELL: You are more likely to obtain from the United States government the blueprints for the construction of a nuclear weapon than you are to obtain any accurate detailed accounting of the disposition of the United States gold reserve and the gold reserve of other Western nations.
NARRATOR: Only a presidential order can open the Fort Knox vault.
And no audit of the contents of the vault has been conducted since 1953.
STILL: Certainly there's evidence that the government is hiding something.
NARRATOR: By law, the U.
S.
Treasury operates under the direct orders and supervision of the president.
And not only does the Treasury print money, collect taxes and enforce trade agreements, it also oversees America's most precious commodity: its gold.
POWELL: Militaries will pack their pilot survival kits with gold coins, not with paper currency, because gold is the universal money.
And its value determines the value of government currencies.
Gold's value also profoundly influences interest rates and the price of government bonds.
This is the primary reason why governments have always tried to control the price of gold.
The gold price is the determinant of the value of all capital, labor, goods and services in the world.
There is nothing else.
NARRATOR: The origin of America's gold reserves dates back to 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlawed the private ownership of gold by U.
S.
citizens in an effort to jumpstart the economy during the Great Depression.
GANZ: In 1933, America nationalized its gold.
In essence, it stole it from the American people.
PAUL URBAHNS: Roosevelt realized that the only way in order to bring the country out of that depression was for the federal government to control the money.
NARRATOR: Under the watchful eye of federal marshals, citizens were required to turn in their gold coins, bullion and even gold paper certificates at the then-current exchange rate of $20.
67 per troy ounce.
Failure to comply was punishable by heavy fines and up to ten years in prison.
Almost overnight, U.
S.
gold reserves swelled to 5,000 tons, melted into 368,000 uniform bars, each weighing 27.
5 pounds.
One year later, Roosevelt raised the new fixed price for U.
S.
gold to $35 an ounce.
URBAHNS: Once he acquired all the gold in the country, he doubled its value.
You could do that when you own it all.
GANZ: The difference is the government had the profit, not the individual people.
And that was the way that the New Deal attempted to jumpstart the economy.
NARRATOR: In less than 24 months, Franklin Roosevelt had consolidated the single greatest concentration of wealth in modern history.
And to store it, he constructed the country's strongest fortress: Fort Knox.
URBAHNS: In the 1930s, we were concerned about rumblings of war in Europe, and the federal government was concerned about our gold being stored in New York and Philadelphia, which are both coastal locations and subject to attack.
Roosevelt decided to build a vault to put the gold in, and it had to be a reasonable distance away from the Atlantic Coast.
NARRATOR: Not only was Roosevelt's choice of location far from the ocean, it stood adjacent to the Fort Knox military base.
And while the depository remains under the sole control of the U.
S.
Treasury, the Army's 10,000 soldiers and M-1 Tanks still provide a clear deterrent to anyone with designs on America's gold.
WALTER HUDDLESTON: There's a military unit at Fort Knox that is at all times responsible if any attack was made on the gold vault.
NARRATOR: Secret guards, a top-secret vault and a wall of silence surrounding the true contents of Fort Knox have led some to speculate that Roosevelt's choice of location might be linked to one of Kentucky's more colorful legends.
RON BRYANT: There's a story that the Founding Fathers actually thought during the Revolutionary period that the United States Treasury needed to be hidden somewhere from the British.
And Kentucky seemed to be a very likely place, because it was still part of Virginia at that time.
ROBERT PRATHER: George Washington would have realized that there was no fortification available during that time that you could safeguard such a treasury.
But one thing that they did have was Kentucky, the wilderness of Kentucky, and caves in abundance.
NARRATOR: Regional folklore has long held that the deep caves surrounding Fort Knox were an ideal place for pirates and others to stash their precious valuables.
BRYANT: The pirate legends do get some credence, because through the years, there have been pieces of gold and silver found in central Kentucky.
NARRATOR: But could a cave like this really have served as the first gold depository of the United States? Some believe the answer is yes.
And for proof, they point to a colonial Englishman named Jonathan Swift-- a mysterious associate of General George Washington, who owned extensive land in Kentucky.
Swift may also have served as the model for one of the most famous pirates in literature.
BRYANT: When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the famous Treasure Island, he knew about the legend of Jonathan Swift.
And many people think that he actually did take that legend and create Long John Silver.
If you look at the map that was drawn for the book, it looks like the United States of America.
And then if you look where X marks the spot, where the treasure is, it looked geographically where it would have been Kentucky.
NARRATOR: Using maps and letters of the era, author Robert Prather suggests that gold may have been smuggled in salt barrels to secret caves on tracts of land owned by Swift-- land located only miles from the current gold depository.
PRATHER: I think it's a possibility that the gold vault was built where it is due to events of the late 18th century.
The fact that Jonathan Swift owned this property, which was nearly in the backyard of the bullion depository, the fact that we're not allowed to know very much about the contents today, perfectly demonstrates that secrecy has always been maximum when it comes to our national treasury.
NARRATOR: Today, official Treasury records set the Fort Knox gold reserves at 147.
3 million troy ounces-- worth trillions of U.
S.
dollars.
More gold than the entire reserves of China, Japan, Switzerland, Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.
Coming up HALVERSON: In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impregnable vault.
GANZ: People have done everything that you can imagine in order to acquire gold.
DOUG SIMMONS: You'll get in, but you'll never get out alive.
NARRATOR: Antwerp, Belgium.
February 2003.
(sirens wailing) Thieves break into the vault at the Antwerp Diamond Center and escape with more than $100 million in gold, diamonds and other precious items.
According to authorities, the vault was impenetrable, featuring the most advanced hi-tech security in the world.
It is called the heist of the century.
And even now, no one is certain how it was done.
But if such a secure facility could be breached, could the vast gold reserves at Fort Knox be equally vulnerable? GANZ: People have done everything that you can imagine in order to acquire gold and some things that are best left to the imagination.
NARRATOR: Officially, the Treasury Department acknowledges only a single attempt to break in to Fort Knox.
The perpetrator? Goldfinger.
JAMES BOND: I think you've made your point, Goldfinger.
Thank you for the demonstration.
NARRATOR: James Bond's arch-nemesis from the 1964 hit movie.
JAMES BOND: You expect me to talk? GOLDFINGER: No, Mr.
Bond, I expect you to die.
NARRATOR: For the movie's producers, the challenge was clear: how best to portray Fort Knox and its top-secret interior? JOHN CORK: They, of course, like everybody else, asked if they could get in.
The request was denied.
So, the word goes to the production design department.
What are the, what's the interior of Fort Knox going to look like? We need to draw something up.
And one of the James Bond producers somewhat famously remarked, what he wants to see is a cathedral of gold.
(screaming) There were, of course, a number of people who thought that Goldfinger was allowed to film inside of Fort Knox.
But the reality, of course, is just very different.
NARRATOR: Just how accurate was the film's portrayal of Fort Knox? Doug Simmons is one of the few former Fort Knox employees willing to speak on the record about what it's like behind the depository's forbidden walls.
SIMMONS: In Goldfinger, when Bond goes into the building, you can see through all the floors and see the gold.
Of course, when we got in there, it turned out to be just a standard, typical United States government boring facility.
It's an impressive building, but nothing like Goldfinger.
NARRATOR: Questions concerning the actual security at Fort Knox are so classified that, despite requests, no Treasury Department official will address them.
BRYANT: Fort Knox is so protected, I don't believe a fly could get in there.
It is one of the most secure areas in the United States.
NARRATOR: What is known about the depository's security begins at the perimeter.
Four layers of fence and a lawn of more than 100 yards surround the depository-- enough room for minefields and trip wires and automated guns.
Guard shacks provide 360-degree coverage and maximum firing capabilities.
The windows are fake, disguising barriers of Kevlar and steel.
Even the cover of darkness is used to defend the structure.
URBAHNS: Various lighting techniques have been used so that the gold vault actually disappears at night.
NARRATOR: To step inside the building is to enter a maze of 21,000 cubic feet of granite and concrete and more than 1,400 tons of steel.
Past offices that line the first floor is the elevator that leads to the gold vault below.
The vault door is 21 inches thick and weighs more than 20 tons.
To unlock it requires multiple Treasury officials, each with a unique, secret combination.
Once inside, the vault is divided into individual cells, said to measure ten feet by ten feet, stacked from floor to ceiling with gold.
But are there still other, more secret security measures that protect the gold? HALVERSON: As to the deterrents, gas does exist so that if the door or the lock is attacked in such a way as to activate the gas charge, it would fill up that room.
URBAHNS: There's multiple rumors about the gold vault.
One of them is that it can be flooded.
And that is backed up by the original newspaper clippings from the 1930s.
It was designed after a method used by the Bank of France.
Now, whether that feature was incorporated in the final construction, only the Treasury Department knows, and they're not saying.
GANZ: If I tell you what surprised me most about Fort Knox, it's gonna blow your socks off.
It's the fact that there are escape tunnels inside the facility.
Nobody talks about 'em.
They had to do that as a safety precaution because the vaults have 72-hour time locks on them, and if they're shut, you're stuck for three days.
This doesn't get you outside the building, it doesn't get you outside the perimeter.
This is just to get you from an interior vault into an exterior vault.
NARRATOR: Yet ever since the Depository was constructed in 1937, rumors have persisted about its vulnerabilities including this never-before-revealed letter.
In 1998, local Fort Knox historian Paul Urbahns received a letter from a private investigator in Durango, Colorado.
The investigator claimed to represent a man who, as a child, helped police apprehend a murderer in possession of stolen bars of Fort Knox gold.
The year was 1946.
PAUL URBAHNS: The judge allowed him to return to Fort Knox when they returned some of the Fort Knox gold that these criminals had stolen to the gold depository.
His description of the facility was quite credible.
Whether it's true or not, I don't know.
NARRATOR: Does this letter reveal that Fort Knox security has been breached? Could its gold have been stolen? Are these claims real? The U.
S.
Government has never acknowledged the disappearance of any Fort Knox gold.
Yet can any vault ever be 100% secure? ALLAN HALVERSON: In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impregnable vault.
Given the opportunity, time, means, you can circumvent just about anything.
NARRATOR: Today, the motives to destroy or rob Fort Knox are many, including the very real possibility of a terrorist attack.
DOUG SIMMONS: In the '70s and '80s we would drive right up to the depository.
There was one wrought iron fence.
And now there's multiple fences and concrete barricades.
They might have ground-to-air missiles and, you know, pop-up guns.
And who knows what's out there? The guards used to tell me: You'll get in, but you'll never get out alive.
NARRATOR: Coming up MAN: Can you believe that? Look at that, they're clear to the ceiling.
BILL STILL: Once again, the government caught in a lie? Okay why? Why are they doing this? Obviously, they're hiding something.
NARRATOR: Of the U.
S.
Presidents who have taken office since Franklin D.
Roosevelt shut the vault doors at Fort Knox in 1937, not one of them has ever visited the famous gold depository.
At least none that we know of.
And never has a President opened the doors to the public in order to verify the status of its solid gold contents, except for one time: in the fall of 1974.
SIMMONS: Suddenly Americans lost faith in the government, and they started putting this big focus on Fort Knox, that that building was empty, that this is a ruse.
It's like our government's become a lie.
NARRATOR: In 1971, after a bruising economic battle with France, President Richard Nixon had taken the U.
S.
dollar off the international gold standard.
No longer was the U.
S.
dollar to be valued based on gold.
URBHANS: During the 1960s when Charles de Gaulle was Prime Minister of France, he told other countries, "If you owe me money, pay me in American dollars.
" And then he would turn those American dollars in for gold.
That probably caused the biggest drain of gold out of the Bullion Depository.
NARRATOR: But how much of America's national treasure was left? An anxious public demanded to know.
On September 23, 1974, Director of the U.
S.
Mint Mary Brooks led a carefully selected group of lawmakers and the news media on a half-hour tour of the Fort Knox vault, as seen here, in this incredibly rare footage.
GANZ: We arrived by bus, up Bullion Boulevard, aptly named.
And as you approach the depository, you see signs that warn that federal officers inside are authorized to shoot to kill, and that admission is absolutely forbidden.
MARY BROOKS: Come on, gentlemen.
WALTER HUDDLESTON: We went down from the first floor on an elevator, down to the lower level where the gold is actually stored.
And as we got off the elevator, and we just walked in right next to the vaults themselves, the cells full of gold.
BROOKS: 136 gold bars.
MAN: Ready to start counting, boys? NARRATOR: Inside the Vault Room were 13 cells.
Across each locked door hung a delicate ribbon with a wax seal, signed and dated as to the last time the cell was accessed.
A primitive method, perhaps, but nevertheless effective.
SIMMONS: You can barely touch those and you can break a seal.
A seal is broken, no one is leaving that building.
Because they're going to have to send people down and audit that compartment to make sure that nobody stole anything out of it.
NARRATOR: The delegation was ushered in toward the smallest of the compartment cells.
Why that one, and not one of the purportedly larger ones, remains a mystery, but at the moment, no one seemed to care.
BROOKS: There, we're cutting the ribbon.
Now, we have to be very careful of this document.
GANZ: There's nothing that was as breathtaking as having the seal cut on that door, the vault door open, and the floodlights from the television and from the still cameras, flashbulbs popping, going off the gold.
MAN: Can you believe that? Look at that, they're clear to the ceiling.
HUDDLESTON: We had an opportunity to pick it up, feel it and make sure it was gold.
It was a little bit awe-inspiring, and I just wanted to sit and look at it for a few minutes.
MAN 2: Uh, it says approximately 22 pounds.
NARRATOR: Most of the visitors left satisfied, having seen firsthand the magnificent contents of the cell.
REPORTER: Are you satisfied all the gold is here? MAN: Well, I am, and, uh, I was before we came.
NARRATOR: But to some observers, not all that glittered was gold.
SIMMONS: They opened up the Bullion Depository.
And on that night, they showed for the first time since the 1930s, opening these compartments up and letting everybody see.
But what they did was they opened Pandora's box.
Because, yeah, everybody saw a bunch of bars stacked up in a room and then immediately started saying, "What you're looking at is probably fake.
" NARRATOR: But why had the visitors been shown only one cell? And why was access to certain corners of the vault complex denied? Over time, photos taken during the event begin to circulate in newspapers and magazines.
But rather than reassure skeptics, as the Mint had hoped, still more questions arose.
Some questioned the quality of the gold based on its color.
Others suggested that according to this AP Photo, the bars didn't weigh 27.
5 pounds as reported, but less STILL: Of course, the Treasury came out with a press release and said, "Oh, well, it was just some cheap scale, and so the scale was inaccurate.
" But if you magnify the photograph, you see that it was not a cheap scale.
It was a standard-issue U.
S.
Postal scale.
NARRATOR: Most intriguing of all was the possibility of a secret vault-- one hidden not only from visitors that day, but one whose very existence is denied even now.
STILL: There is this famous picture of Mary Brooks taken by an AP photographer saying, "Look, all the gold's here.
" The room that they showed was gold vault number 13, and if you just do a simple napkin-like calculation of how many bars you see, uh, there are about a million ounces of gold in that room.
And yet the latest Treasury figures from the Treasury Web site show that there are 150 million ounces of gold in Fort Knox.
So it would take 150 of those gold vault 13s, so clearly, something's amiss.
NARRATOR: But did this single photograph really prove the existence of another, even more secret vault? STILL: Unfortunately for Treasury, the former commanding general of Fort Knox, General John Ryan, wrote a letter saying that, "No, Treasury's wrong.
There is a central core vault, and I was in it.
" And then he made a hand-drawn map showing where vault 13 was, which is on the ground floor, uh, and showing where the central core vault, which was in a subterranean area of Fort Knox, which is much bigger, which comprised almost the entire perimeter of the building, but it was underground.
So, once again, the government caught in a lie? Okay, why? Why don't they just fess up? So, obviously, they're hiding something.
NARRATOR: Why would the government refute the existence of a central core vault? Is it part of their security protocol? And if each of the vault compartments only holds a million ounces, then where is the rest of the gold that the government claims is being stored at Fort Knox? HUDDLESTON: I think it might be a good policy if, every few years, the Treasury Department brought down a few people to take a look at it.
But I don't think it's going to happen.
GANZ: When I was on the congressional inspection tour, there was gold in Fort Knox and a lot of it.
I can tell you that being there was an intense experience.
But knowing that the gold was there in September of 1974 doesn't mean that it's still there today.
NARRATOR: Coming up: SIMMONS: If somebody wants into the Bullion Depository, it's not going to be for the gold.
BRYANT: Fort Knox held some things that people would be a little frightened of now.
NARRATOR: Government officials had hoped that the public inspection of the U.
S.
gold depository at Fort Knox in 1974 would silence those who doubted that gold was even being stored there.
But for some, the tour of the otherwise off-limits facility only fueled even more intense speculation and skepticism.
SIMMONS: I was looking for a summer job, and, uh, I got a phone call at home one day, and, uh, there was a man on the other end of the phone, and he asked me, he said, "Are you interested in a job?" And I said, "Yes, I'm I'm interested in a job.
What kind of job is it?" And he said, "I can't tell you.
" NARRATOR: The call Doug Simmons received was from the Gold Bullion Depository at Fort Knox.
The job was simple: lift and move the gold from one room to another, where it would be cleaned and counted.
SIMMONS: I started there in 1975.
They briefed us that we were not to discuss with anybody what we saw inside the building.
Of course, we were 18 years old, so, you know, by that afternoon, we had already told all our girlfriends what we had seen, you know.
NARRATOR: But what Doug Simmons discovered was that Fort Knox was more than a depository for gold.
Much more.
During World War II, Fort Knox served as a secret depository for the U.
S.
government's most important and cherished documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
And as the Battle of Britain raged, the English government requested Fort Knox be the hiding place of the Magna Carta.
SIMMONS: It's always been a storage place, so when you saw those boxes, you can only conjecture what was inside of there.
Now, I was there when the crown of Saint Stephen was pulled out and was given back to the Hungarian government.
There was the crown and, uh, his sword and his scepter, and, you know, these things are just priceless.
NARRATOR: The presence of additional sealed boxes convinced Simmons that perhaps the real purpose of Fort Knox wasn't the secure storage of gold at all, but the secret storage of items of even greater historic and strategic value.
SIMMONS: I don't think that anybody would ever try to break in that building to steal the gold because, one, it would take an incredible operation to get that out of there because of the sheer weight of it.
If somebody wants into the Bullion Depository, it's not going to be for the gold.
NARRATOR: But what else, besides gold, could be so valuable, so top secret that it would require the most stringent security measures that the U.
S.
government could offer? BRYANT: Fort Knox held some things that, of course, people would be a little frightened of now.
Opium, for example, was stored there.
URBHANS: The U.
S.
Army and federal government has stored drugs and chemicals in the gold vault in case of the next war or time of war.
SIMMONS: That was kind of a reality check when we saw that, because it kind of let you know that-- did our government ever think we were going to be involved in a nuclear war? Absolutely, we did.
Because they were stockpiling painkilling drugs.
NARRATOR: According to a 1993 report, Fort Knox contains nearly 70,000 pounds of opium and morphine.
It also houses 900,000 carats of diamonds, a treasure trove of precious stones that rivals that of England's crown jewels.
But there are those who believe that Fort Knox also houses something even more valuable, more strategically important to our nation than any amount of gold or jewels.
In 1948, Kentucky Air National Guard Captain Thomas Mantell was ordered to investigate a strange sighting over Fort Knox.
KEN STORCH: Two important things about Thomas Mantell.
Number one, he was a decorated pilot of World War II and had many hours of flying time.
He was leading a squadron, uh, down to Goddard, Kentucky, which is near Fort Knox.
During the early morning hours, an unidentified object was seen over the airfield, and Thomas Mantell was requested by the air traffic controller to take a look at this object.
JASON MARTEL: Now, he describes this craft as being a very large, orange, luminous ball, and he decides to approach it to figure out what this is.
STORCH: There was some exchanges that took place between the captain and the air traffic control.
We're not sure exactly what those communications were, because they-- the government-- won't release them to us.
What we do know is that a Kentucky farmer heard a noise and looked up and saw a P-51 fighter plane come crashing down.
There's speculation as to what happened.
Initially, it was that Captain Mantell was shot down by this unidentified flying object, that he was hit with a ray of some sort that knocked out his engine and he crashed.
MARTELL: A lot of UFO cases don't involve parameters that involve death.
And unfortunately, the pilot, Thomas Mantell, in pursuing this craft actually lost his life.
And that's a pretty dramatic circumstance.
NARRATOR: Some researchers speculate that the wreckage of Captain Mantell's aircraft is kept hidden at Fort Knox.
But if so, why? Could the incident have really involved a UFO, as some suggest? A UFO searching the skies for gold? MARTELL: What's really intriguing about this is, it happened directly over Fort Knox.
Is there some tie-in to the fact that we store large amounts of gold at Fort Knox? Was the UFO perhaps interested in some of this gold as a reservoir? STORCH: It doesn't corrode, it's an excellent conductor of electricity, and it's one of the natural forming elements in the universe.
And here you have this huge deposit of gold.
And so there were a number of sightings in and around Fort Knox.
NARRATOR: Could Fort Knox really be the top-secret hiding place for material evidence that extraterrestrials exist? SIMMONS: I don't know if they've got the Roswell aliens hidden up there or Jimmy Hoffa's in there or Amelia Earhart's hidden in there.
I don't know who's in there.
But, boy, they're sure spending a lot of money to guard something.
NARRATOR: Coming up POWELL: You could go into Fort Knox tomorrow and be shown a lot of gold.
Just seeing that gold in Fort Knox doesn't dispel questions.
NARRATOR: It is considered the most impenetrable vault in the world.
A fortress of granite and steel.
And armed with high-tech defense mechanisms.
But the questions concerning Fort Knox have never been about its level of security.
The real questions concern the mystery of what, if anything, is actually being stored there.
POWELL: Secret things are done with that gold reserve.
That gold reserve is the, is public property.
It's the property of all the people of the United States.
And the things that are done with it are meant to undertake secret policies without any accountability to Congress, to the people of the United States.
That's objectionable.
NARRATOR: In 1980, newspaper reporter Bill Still received an envelope.
The sender: a wealthy Ohio businessman named Edward Durrell.
In it, Durrell detailed how he had spent tens of thousands of dollars researching Fort Knox and had come to one explosive conclusion: There was no gold being stored there at all.
STILL: The way that the gold was removed, as I understand it, was by truck and rail.
It was sent to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and then shipped over to the London Gold Pool.
It was sold into the market at $35 an ounce.
Immediately thereafter, the price started shooting up.
And by 1980, it topped out at over $900 an ounce.
So, you can imagine, if you bought tons and tons and tons of gold out of Fort Knox via the London Gold Pool at $35 an ounce that there was a considerable profit when you sold it at $800 or $900 an ounce.
All it ended up doing was draining hundreds of millions of ounces of America's gold, and we'll never get it back.
NARRATOR: Could America's entire gold supply really have been moved, one shipment at a time? Photographic evidence does reveal the existence of loading docks on the far side of the depository, invisible from any public road.
Nevertheless, there are those who remain skeptical.
SIMMONS: For all our technology today, there's still only one way to get that gold out of the depository, and that is to load it on trucks again and take it back to the railhead.
And to put an operation like that into effect, how would you hide that from media scrutiny? So, if they've taken all that out, boy, they must of done it with a cloaking device, because there is no way that they could have done that without somebody noticing.
NARRATOR: The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee is an organization dedicated to investigating the exact nature and extent of gold being reported by the world's central banks and commodities exchanges.
They strongly maintain that the amount of gold being reported to exist in the global marketplace has been deliberately and grossly exaggerated, in an effort to keep the price artificially low.
Based on materials gathered from public records and Freedom of Information lawsuits, GATA co-founder Chris Powell believes that even if there is gold in Fort Knox, it may no longer be property of the United States.
Someone else may own it.
POWELL: Governments need to control gold in order to sustain the value of their currencies and sustain the value of their bonds.
And to do this now, the U.
S.
government has resorted to rigging the gold market.
We believe that the primary purpose of these gold swaps is surreptitious intervention in the gold market.
For example, the United States may decide that in February it needs 50 tons of gold to be sold in the London market, in order to keep the gold price under control, but does not want to be the central bank identified doing this.
So the United States could call up the German Central Bank and say, "Listen, we'd like you to sell 50 tons of gold in London.
Would you please do that, and we will give you, in exchange, title to 50 tons of gold vaulted at the depository in Fort Knox.
" You could go into Fort Knox tomorrow and be shown a lot of gold.
That would not dispel every secret about Fort Knox unless you also knew to whom that gold belonged.
Just seeing that gold in Fort Knox doesn't dispel the questions.
SIMMONS: People will look me square in the eye and tell me that I've been duped, that none of that's real.
I've been listening to pundits for the last 30 years tell me that what I saw wasn't real.
Now, I don't know what they're holding now inside that building.
But I know that if you cross onto their land, they'll kill you.
They're protecting something, and there's a secret there somewhere.
NARRATOR: Is the gold in Fort Knox ours? Or is the depository really empty? Is it only a myth, intended to bluff foreign nations into thinking that the United States has been stockpiling vast gold reserves? Or is the maximum security installation really housing another, even more audacious secret? Perhaps one involving evidence of UFOs or something even more profound? One thing is certain: Fort Knox remains one of the most highly protected and closely guarded locations in the world.
Few have ever been inside.
And fewer still have ever lived to reveal its secrets.
Captioned sponsored by A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS
It safeguards the vast wealth of the United States.
And its name is synonymous with one of the most precious commodities in the history of the world: gold.
But behind this building's stone exterior are secrets.
Secrets so outrageous BILL STILL: Is there any gold in Fort Knox? We just don't know.
NARRATOR: so controversial ALLAN HALVERSON: In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impregnable vault.
NARRATOR: so potentially dangerous CHRIS POWELL: You cannot get answers, because the secret history would explode the markets.
NARRATOR: that they must be kept hidden from the public.
DAVID GANZ: If I tell you about Fort Knox, it's gonna blow your socks off.
NARRATOR: There are those who believe in the existence of a book.
A book that contains the most highly guarded secrets of the United States of America.
A book whose very existence is known to only a select few.
But if such a book exists, what would it contain? Secret histories? Secret plans? Secret lies? Does there really exist America's Book of Secrets? (bell clanging) July 2007.
Major banking institutions across America announce a series of financial setbacks.
It is the first public indication of an economic crisis-- one that will hurl the United States and Europe into the worst financial recession since the 1930s.
Over the next four years, the price of gold skyrockets to nearly $2,000 an ounce-- its highest price in recorded history.
Gold's unprecedented value draws attention to the U.
S.
government's secret holdings of RON PAUL: For far too long, the United States government has been less than transparent in releasing information relating to its gold holdings.
Not surprisingly, this secrecy has given rise to a number of theories about the gold at Fort Knox.
And the government owes it to the people to provide them with the details of these holdings.
NARRATOR: America's gold reserves are held in four U.
S.
Mint depositories: Denver, West Point, New York's Federal Reserve, and the largest, Fort Knox.
The nature and extent of these reserves are as secret as they are secure.
POWELL: You are more likely to obtain from the United States government the blueprints for the construction of a nuclear weapon than you are to obtain any accurate detailed accounting of the disposition of the United States gold reserve and the gold reserve of other Western nations.
NARRATOR: Only a presidential order can open the Fort Knox vault.
And no audit of the contents of the vault has been conducted since 1953.
STILL: Certainly there's evidence that the government is hiding something.
NARRATOR: By law, the U.
S.
Treasury operates under the direct orders and supervision of the president.
And not only does the Treasury print money, collect taxes and enforce trade agreements, it also oversees America's most precious commodity: its gold.
POWELL: Militaries will pack their pilot survival kits with gold coins, not with paper currency, because gold is the universal money.
And its value determines the value of government currencies.
Gold's value also profoundly influences interest rates and the price of government bonds.
This is the primary reason why governments have always tried to control the price of gold.
The gold price is the determinant of the value of all capital, labor, goods and services in the world.
There is nothing else.
NARRATOR: The origin of America's gold reserves dates back to 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt outlawed the private ownership of gold by U.
S.
citizens in an effort to jumpstart the economy during the Great Depression.
GANZ: In 1933, America nationalized its gold.
In essence, it stole it from the American people.
PAUL URBAHNS: Roosevelt realized that the only way in order to bring the country out of that depression was for the federal government to control the money.
NARRATOR: Under the watchful eye of federal marshals, citizens were required to turn in their gold coins, bullion and even gold paper certificates at the then-current exchange rate of $20.
67 per troy ounce.
Failure to comply was punishable by heavy fines and up to ten years in prison.
Almost overnight, U.
S.
gold reserves swelled to 5,000 tons, melted into 368,000 uniform bars, each weighing 27.
5 pounds.
One year later, Roosevelt raised the new fixed price for U.
S.
gold to $35 an ounce.
URBAHNS: Once he acquired all the gold in the country, he doubled its value.
You could do that when you own it all.
GANZ: The difference is the government had the profit, not the individual people.
And that was the way that the New Deal attempted to jumpstart the economy.
NARRATOR: In less than 24 months, Franklin Roosevelt had consolidated the single greatest concentration of wealth in modern history.
And to store it, he constructed the country's strongest fortress: Fort Knox.
URBAHNS: In the 1930s, we were concerned about rumblings of war in Europe, and the federal government was concerned about our gold being stored in New York and Philadelphia, which are both coastal locations and subject to attack.
Roosevelt decided to build a vault to put the gold in, and it had to be a reasonable distance away from the Atlantic Coast.
NARRATOR: Not only was Roosevelt's choice of location far from the ocean, it stood adjacent to the Fort Knox military base.
And while the depository remains under the sole control of the U.
S.
Treasury, the Army's 10,000 soldiers and M-1 Tanks still provide a clear deterrent to anyone with designs on America's gold.
WALTER HUDDLESTON: There's a military unit at Fort Knox that is at all times responsible if any attack was made on the gold vault.
NARRATOR: Secret guards, a top-secret vault and a wall of silence surrounding the true contents of Fort Knox have led some to speculate that Roosevelt's choice of location might be linked to one of Kentucky's more colorful legends.
RON BRYANT: There's a story that the Founding Fathers actually thought during the Revolutionary period that the United States Treasury needed to be hidden somewhere from the British.
And Kentucky seemed to be a very likely place, because it was still part of Virginia at that time.
ROBERT PRATHER: George Washington would have realized that there was no fortification available during that time that you could safeguard such a treasury.
But one thing that they did have was Kentucky, the wilderness of Kentucky, and caves in abundance.
NARRATOR: Regional folklore has long held that the deep caves surrounding Fort Knox were an ideal place for pirates and others to stash their precious valuables.
BRYANT: The pirate legends do get some credence, because through the years, there have been pieces of gold and silver found in central Kentucky.
NARRATOR: But could a cave like this really have served as the first gold depository of the United States? Some believe the answer is yes.
And for proof, they point to a colonial Englishman named Jonathan Swift-- a mysterious associate of General George Washington, who owned extensive land in Kentucky.
Swift may also have served as the model for one of the most famous pirates in literature.
BRYANT: When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the famous Treasure Island, he knew about the legend of Jonathan Swift.
And many people think that he actually did take that legend and create Long John Silver.
If you look at the map that was drawn for the book, it looks like the United States of America.
And then if you look where X marks the spot, where the treasure is, it looked geographically where it would have been Kentucky.
NARRATOR: Using maps and letters of the era, author Robert Prather suggests that gold may have been smuggled in salt barrels to secret caves on tracts of land owned by Swift-- land located only miles from the current gold depository.
PRATHER: I think it's a possibility that the gold vault was built where it is due to events of the late 18th century.
The fact that Jonathan Swift owned this property, which was nearly in the backyard of the bullion depository, the fact that we're not allowed to know very much about the contents today, perfectly demonstrates that secrecy has always been maximum when it comes to our national treasury.
NARRATOR: Today, official Treasury records set the Fort Knox gold reserves at 147.
3 million troy ounces-- worth trillions of U.
S.
dollars.
More gold than the entire reserves of China, Japan, Switzerland, Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.
Coming up HALVERSON: In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impregnable vault.
GANZ: People have done everything that you can imagine in order to acquire gold.
DOUG SIMMONS: You'll get in, but you'll never get out alive.
NARRATOR: Antwerp, Belgium.
February 2003.
(sirens wailing) Thieves break into the vault at the Antwerp Diamond Center and escape with more than $100 million in gold, diamonds and other precious items.
According to authorities, the vault was impenetrable, featuring the most advanced hi-tech security in the world.
It is called the heist of the century.
And even now, no one is certain how it was done.
But if such a secure facility could be breached, could the vast gold reserves at Fort Knox be equally vulnerable? GANZ: People have done everything that you can imagine in order to acquire gold and some things that are best left to the imagination.
NARRATOR: Officially, the Treasury Department acknowledges only a single attempt to break in to Fort Knox.
The perpetrator? Goldfinger.
JAMES BOND: I think you've made your point, Goldfinger.
Thank you for the demonstration.
NARRATOR: James Bond's arch-nemesis from the 1964 hit movie.
JAMES BOND: You expect me to talk? GOLDFINGER: No, Mr.
Bond, I expect you to die.
NARRATOR: For the movie's producers, the challenge was clear: how best to portray Fort Knox and its top-secret interior? JOHN CORK: They, of course, like everybody else, asked if they could get in.
The request was denied.
So, the word goes to the production design department.
What are the, what's the interior of Fort Knox going to look like? We need to draw something up.
And one of the James Bond producers somewhat famously remarked, what he wants to see is a cathedral of gold.
(screaming) There were, of course, a number of people who thought that Goldfinger was allowed to film inside of Fort Knox.
But the reality, of course, is just very different.
NARRATOR: Just how accurate was the film's portrayal of Fort Knox? Doug Simmons is one of the few former Fort Knox employees willing to speak on the record about what it's like behind the depository's forbidden walls.
SIMMONS: In Goldfinger, when Bond goes into the building, you can see through all the floors and see the gold.
Of course, when we got in there, it turned out to be just a standard, typical United States government boring facility.
It's an impressive building, but nothing like Goldfinger.
NARRATOR: Questions concerning the actual security at Fort Knox are so classified that, despite requests, no Treasury Department official will address them.
BRYANT: Fort Knox is so protected, I don't believe a fly could get in there.
It is one of the most secure areas in the United States.
NARRATOR: What is known about the depository's security begins at the perimeter.
Four layers of fence and a lawn of more than 100 yards surround the depository-- enough room for minefields and trip wires and automated guns.
Guard shacks provide 360-degree coverage and maximum firing capabilities.
The windows are fake, disguising barriers of Kevlar and steel.
Even the cover of darkness is used to defend the structure.
URBAHNS: Various lighting techniques have been used so that the gold vault actually disappears at night.
NARRATOR: To step inside the building is to enter a maze of 21,000 cubic feet of granite and concrete and more than 1,400 tons of steel.
Past offices that line the first floor is the elevator that leads to the gold vault below.
The vault door is 21 inches thick and weighs more than 20 tons.
To unlock it requires multiple Treasury officials, each with a unique, secret combination.
Once inside, the vault is divided into individual cells, said to measure ten feet by ten feet, stacked from floor to ceiling with gold.
But are there still other, more secret security measures that protect the gold? HALVERSON: As to the deterrents, gas does exist so that if the door or the lock is attacked in such a way as to activate the gas charge, it would fill up that room.
URBAHNS: There's multiple rumors about the gold vault.
One of them is that it can be flooded.
And that is backed up by the original newspaper clippings from the 1930s.
It was designed after a method used by the Bank of France.
Now, whether that feature was incorporated in the final construction, only the Treasury Department knows, and they're not saying.
GANZ: If I tell you what surprised me most about Fort Knox, it's gonna blow your socks off.
It's the fact that there are escape tunnels inside the facility.
Nobody talks about 'em.
They had to do that as a safety precaution because the vaults have 72-hour time locks on them, and if they're shut, you're stuck for three days.
This doesn't get you outside the building, it doesn't get you outside the perimeter.
This is just to get you from an interior vault into an exterior vault.
NARRATOR: Yet ever since the Depository was constructed in 1937, rumors have persisted about its vulnerabilities including this never-before-revealed letter.
In 1998, local Fort Knox historian Paul Urbahns received a letter from a private investigator in Durango, Colorado.
The investigator claimed to represent a man who, as a child, helped police apprehend a murderer in possession of stolen bars of Fort Knox gold.
The year was 1946.
PAUL URBAHNS: The judge allowed him to return to Fort Knox when they returned some of the Fort Knox gold that these criminals had stolen to the gold depository.
His description of the facility was quite credible.
Whether it's true or not, I don't know.
NARRATOR: Does this letter reveal that Fort Knox security has been breached? Could its gold have been stolen? Are these claims real? The U.
S.
Government has never acknowledged the disappearance of any Fort Knox gold.
Yet can any vault ever be 100% secure? ALLAN HALVERSON: In my opinion, there is no such thing as an impregnable vault.
Given the opportunity, time, means, you can circumvent just about anything.
NARRATOR: Today, the motives to destroy or rob Fort Knox are many, including the very real possibility of a terrorist attack.
DOUG SIMMONS: In the '70s and '80s we would drive right up to the depository.
There was one wrought iron fence.
And now there's multiple fences and concrete barricades.
They might have ground-to-air missiles and, you know, pop-up guns.
And who knows what's out there? The guards used to tell me: You'll get in, but you'll never get out alive.
NARRATOR: Coming up MAN: Can you believe that? Look at that, they're clear to the ceiling.
BILL STILL: Once again, the government caught in a lie? Okay why? Why are they doing this? Obviously, they're hiding something.
NARRATOR: Of the U.
S.
Presidents who have taken office since Franklin D.
Roosevelt shut the vault doors at Fort Knox in 1937, not one of them has ever visited the famous gold depository.
At least none that we know of.
And never has a President opened the doors to the public in order to verify the status of its solid gold contents, except for one time: in the fall of 1974.
SIMMONS: Suddenly Americans lost faith in the government, and they started putting this big focus on Fort Knox, that that building was empty, that this is a ruse.
It's like our government's become a lie.
NARRATOR: In 1971, after a bruising economic battle with France, President Richard Nixon had taken the U.
S.
dollar off the international gold standard.
No longer was the U.
S.
dollar to be valued based on gold.
URBHANS: During the 1960s when Charles de Gaulle was Prime Minister of France, he told other countries, "If you owe me money, pay me in American dollars.
" And then he would turn those American dollars in for gold.
That probably caused the biggest drain of gold out of the Bullion Depository.
NARRATOR: But how much of America's national treasure was left? An anxious public demanded to know.
On September 23, 1974, Director of the U.
S.
Mint Mary Brooks led a carefully selected group of lawmakers and the news media on a half-hour tour of the Fort Knox vault, as seen here, in this incredibly rare footage.
GANZ: We arrived by bus, up Bullion Boulevard, aptly named.
And as you approach the depository, you see signs that warn that federal officers inside are authorized to shoot to kill, and that admission is absolutely forbidden.
MARY BROOKS: Come on, gentlemen.
WALTER HUDDLESTON: We went down from the first floor on an elevator, down to the lower level where the gold is actually stored.
And as we got off the elevator, and we just walked in right next to the vaults themselves, the cells full of gold.
BROOKS: 136 gold bars.
MAN: Ready to start counting, boys? NARRATOR: Inside the Vault Room were 13 cells.
Across each locked door hung a delicate ribbon with a wax seal, signed and dated as to the last time the cell was accessed.
A primitive method, perhaps, but nevertheless effective.
SIMMONS: You can barely touch those and you can break a seal.
A seal is broken, no one is leaving that building.
Because they're going to have to send people down and audit that compartment to make sure that nobody stole anything out of it.
NARRATOR: The delegation was ushered in toward the smallest of the compartment cells.
Why that one, and not one of the purportedly larger ones, remains a mystery, but at the moment, no one seemed to care.
BROOKS: There, we're cutting the ribbon.
Now, we have to be very careful of this document.
GANZ: There's nothing that was as breathtaking as having the seal cut on that door, the vault door open, and the floodlights from the television and from the still cameras, flashbulbs popping, going off the gold.
MAN: Can you believe that? Look at that, they're clear to the ceiling.
HUDDLESTON: We had an opportunity to pick it up, feel it and make sure it was gold.
It was a little bit awe-inspiring, and I just wanted to sit and look at it for a few minutes.
MAN 2: Uh, it says approximately 22 pounds.
NARRATOR: Most of the visitors left satisfied, having seen firsthand the magnificent contents of the cell.
REPORTER: Are you satisfied all the gold is here? MAN: Well, I am, and, uh, I was before we came.
NARRATOR: But to some observers, not all that glittered was gold.
SIMMONS: They opened up the Bullion Depository.
And on that night, they showed for the first time since the 1930s, opening these compartments up and letting everybody see.
But what they did was they opened Pandora's box.
Because, yeah, everybody saw a bunch of bars stacked up in a room and then immediately started saying, "What you're looking at is probably fake.
" NARRATOR: But why had the visitors been shown only one cell? And why was access to certain corners of the vault complex denied? Over time, photos taken during the event begin to circulate in newspapers and magazines.
But rather than reassure skeptics, as the Mint had hoped, still more questions arose.
Some questioned the quality of the gold based on its color.
Others suggested that according to this AP Photo, the bars didn't weigh 27.
5 pounds as reported, but less STILL: Of course, the Treasury came out with a press release and said, "Oh, well, it was just some cheap scale, and so the scale was inaccurate.
" But if you magnify the photograph, you see that it was not a cheap scale.
It was a standard-issue U.
S.
Postal scale.
NARRATOR: Most intriguing of all was the possibility of a secret vault-- one hidden not only from visitors that day, but one whose very existence is denied even now.
STILL: There is this famous picture of Mary Brooks taken by an AP photographer saying, "Look, all the gold's here.
" The room that they showed was gold vault number 13, and if you just do a simple napkin-like calculation of how many bars you see, uh, there are about a million ounces of gold in that room.
And yet the latest Treasury figures from the Treasury Web site show that there are 150 million ounces of gold in Fort Knox.
So it would take 150 of those gold vault 13s, so clearly, something's amiss.
NARRATOR: But did this single photograph really prove the existence of another, even more secret vault? STILL: Unfortunately for Treasury, the former commanding general of Fort Knox, General John Ryan, wrote a letter saying that, "No, Treasury's wrong.
There is a central core vault, and I was in it.
" And then he made a hand-drawn map showing where vault 13 was, which is on the ground floor, uh, and showing where the central core vault, which was in a subterranean area of Fort Knox, which is much bigger, which comprised almost the entire perimeter of the building, but it was underground.
So, once again, the government caught in a lie? Okay, why? Why don't they just fess up? So, obviously, they're hiding something.
NARRATOR: Why would the government refute the existence of a central core vault? Is it part of their security protocol? And if each of the vault compartments only holds a million ounces, then where is the rest of the gold that the government claims is being stored at Fort Knox? HUDDLESTON: I think it might be a good policy if, every few years, the Treasury Department brought down a few people to take a look at it.
But I don't think it's going to happen.
GANZ: When I was on the congressional inspection tour, there was gold in Fort Knox and a lot of it.
I can tell you that being there was an intense experience.
But knowing that the gold was there in September of 1974 doesn't mean that it's still there today.
NARRATOR: Coming up: SIMMONS: If somebody wants into the Bullion Depository, it's not going to be for the gold.
BRYANT: Fort Knox held some things that people would be a little frightened of now.
NARRATOR: Government officials had hoped that the public inspection of the U.
S.
gold depository at Fort Knox in 1974 would silence those who doubted that gold was even being stored there.
But for some, the tour of the otherwise off-limits facility only fueled even more intense speculation and skepticism.
SIMMONS: I was looking for a summer job, and, uh, I got a phone call at home one day, and, uh, there was a man on the other end of the phone, and he asked me, he said, "Are you interested in a job?" And I said, "Yes, I'm I'm interested in a job.
What kind of job is it?" And he said, "I can't tell you.
" NARRATOR: The call Doug Simmons received was from the Gold Bullion Depository at Fort Knox.
The job was simple: lift and move the gold from one room to another, where it would be cleaned and counted.
SIMMONS: I started there in 1975.
They briefed us that we were not to discuss with anybody what we saw inside the building.
Of course, we were 18 years old, so, you know, by that afternoon, we had already told all our girlfriends what we had seen, you know.
NARRATOR: But what Doug Simmons discovered was that Fort Knox was more than a depository for gold.
Much more.
During World War II, Fort Knox served as a secret depository for the U.
S.
government's most important and cherished documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
And as the Battle of Britain raged, the English government requested Fort Knox be the hiding place of the Magna Carta.
SIMMONS: It's always been a storage place, so when you saw those boxes, you can only conjecture what was inside of there.
Now, I was there when the crown of Saint Stephen was pulled out and was given back to the Hungarian government.
There was the crown and, uh, his sword and his scepter, and, you know, these things are just priceless.
NARRATOR: The presence of additional sealed boxes convinced Simmons that perhaps the real purpose of Fort Knox wasn't the secure storage of gold at all, but the secret storage of items of even greater historic and strategic value.
SIMMONS: I don't think that anybody would ever try to break in that building to steal the gold because, one, it would take an incredible operation to get that out of there because of the sheer weight of it.
If somebody wants into the Bullion Depository, it's not going to be for the gold.
NARRATOR: But what else, besides gold, could be so valuable, so top secret that it would require the most stringent security measures that the U.
S.
government could offer? BRYANT: Fort Knox held some things that, of course, people would be a little frightened of now.
Opium, for example, was stored there.
URBHANS: The U.
S.
Army and federal government has stored drugs and chemicals in the gold vault in case of the next war or time of war.
SIMMONS: That was kind of a reality check when we saw that, because it kind of let you know that-- did our government ever think we were going to be involved in a nuclear war? Absolutely, we did.
Because they were stockpiling painkilling drugs.
NARRATOR: According to a 1993 report, Fort Knox contains nearly 70,000 pounds of opium and morphine.
It also houses 900,000 carats of diamonds, a treasure trove of precious stones that rivals that of England's crown jewels.
But there are those who believe that Fort Knox also houses something even more valuable, more strategically important to our nation than any amount of gold or jewels.
In 1948, Kentucky Air National Guard Captain Thomas Mantell was ordered to investigate a strange sighting over Fort Knox.
KEN STORCH: Two important things about Thomas Mantell.
Number one, he was a decorated pilot of World War II and had many hours of flying time.
He was leading a squadron, uh, down to Goddard, Kentucky, which is near Fort Knox.
During the early morning hours, an unidentified object was seen over the airfield, and Thomas Mantell was requested by the air traffic controller to take a look at this object.
JASON MARTEL: Now, he describes this craft as being a very large, orange, luminous ball, and he decides to approach it to figure out what this is.
STORCH: There was some exchanges that took place between the captain and the air traffic control.
We're not sure exactly what those communications were, because they-- the government-- won't release them to us.
What we do know is that a Kentucky farmer heard a noise and looked up and saw a P-51 fighter plane come crashing down.
There's speculation as to what happened.
Initially, it was that Captain Mantell was shot down by this unidentified flying object, that he was hit with a ray of some sort that knocked out his engine and he crashed.
MARTELL: A lot of UFO cases don't involve parameters that involve death.
And unfortunately, the pilot, Thomas Mantell, in pursuing this craft actually lost his life.
And that's a pretty dramatic circumstance.
NARRATOR: Some researchers speculate that the wreckage of Captain Mantell's aircraft is kept hidden at Fort Knox.
But if so, why? Could the incident have really involved a UFO, as some suggest? A UFO searching the skies for gold? MARTELL: What's really intriguing about this is, it happened directly over Fort Knox.
Is there some tie-in to the fact that we store large amounts of gold at Fort Knox? Was the UFO perhaps interested in some of this gold as a reservoir? STORCH: It doesn't corrode, it's an excellent conductor of electricity, and it's one of the natural forming elements in the universe.
And here you have this huge deposit of gold.
And so there were a number of sightings in and around Fort Knox.
NARRATOR: Could Fort Knox really be the top-secret hiding place for material evidence that extraterrestrials exist? SIMMONS: I don't know if they've got the Roswell aliens hidden up there or Jimmy Hoffa's in there or Amelia Earhart's hidden in there.
I don't know who's in there.
But, boy, they're sure spending a lot of money to guard something.
NARRATOR: Coming up POWELL: You could go into Fort Knox tomorrow and be shown a lot of gold.
Just seeing that gold in Fort Knox doesn't dispel questions.
NARRATOR: It is considered the most impenetrable vault in the world.
A fortress of granite and steel.
And armed with high-tech defense mechanisms.
But the questions concerning Fort Knox have never been about its level of security.
The real questions concern the mystery of what, if anything, is actually being stored there.
POWELL: Secret things are done with that gold reserve.
That gold reserve is the, is public property.
It's the property of all the people of the United States.
And the things that are done with it are meant to undertake secret policies without any accountability to Congress, to the people of the United States.
That's objectionable.
NARRATOR: In 1980, newspaper reporter Bill Still received an envelope.
The sender: a wealthy Ohio businessman named Edward Durrell.
In it, Durrell detailed how he had spent tens of thousands of dollars researching Fort Knox and had come to one explosive conclusion: There was no gold being stored there at all.
STILL: The way that the gold was removed, as I understand it, was by truck and rail.
It was sent to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and then shipped over to the London Gold Pool.
It was sold into the market at $35 an ounce.
Immediately thereafter, the price started shooting up.
And by 1980, it topped out at over $900 an ounce.
So, you can imagine, if you bought tons and tons and tons of gold out of Fort Knox via the London Gold Pool at $35 an ounce that there was a considerable profit when you sold it at $800 or $900 an ounce.
All it ended up doing was draining hundreds of millions of ounces of America's gold, and we'll never get it back.
NARRATOR: Could America's entire gold supply really have been moved, one shipment at a time? Photographic evidence does reveal the existence of loading docks on the far side of the depository, invisible from any public road.
Nevertheless, there are those who remain skeptical.
SIMMONS: For all our technology today, there's still only one way to get that gold out of the depository, and that is to load it on trucks again and take it back to the railhead.
And to put an operation like that into effect, how would you hide that from media scrutiny? So, if they've taken all that out, boy, they must of done it with a cloaking device, because there is no way that they could have done that without somebody noticing.
NARRATOR: The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee is an organization dedicated to investigating the exact nature and extent of gold being reported by the world's central banks and commodities exchanges.
They strongly maintain that the amount of gold being reported to exist in the global marketplace has been deliberately and grossly exaggerated, in an effort to keep the price artificially low.
Based on materials gathered from public records and Freedom of Information lawsuits, GATA co-founder Chris Powell believes that even if there is gold in Fort Knox, it may no longer be property of the United States.
Someone else may own it.
POWELL: Governments need to control gold in order to sustain the value of their currencies and sustain the value of their bonds.
And to do this now, the U.
S.
government has resorted to rigging the gold market.
We believe that the primary purpose of these gold swaps is surreptitious intervention in the gold market.
For example, the United States may decide that in February it needs 50 tons of gold to be sold in the London market, in order to keep the gold price under control, but does not want to be the central bank identified doing this.
So the United States could call up the German Central Bank and say, "Listen, we'd like you to sell 50 tons of gold in London.
Would you please do that, and we will give you, in exchange, title to 50 tons of gold vaulted at the depository in Fort Knox.
" You could go into Fort Knox tomorrow and be shown a lot of gold.
That would not dispel every secret about Fort Knox unless you also knew to whom that gold belonged.
Just seeing that gold in Fort Knox doesn't dispel the questions.
SIMMONS: People will look me square in the eye and tell me that I've been duped, that none of that's real.
I've been listening to pundits for the last 30 years tell me that what I saw wasn't real.
Now, I don't know what they're holding now inside that building.
But I know that if you cross onto their land, they'll kill you.
They're protecting something, and there's a secret there somewhere.
NARRATOR: Is the gold in Fort Knox ours? Or is the depository really empty? Is it only a myth, intended to bluff foreign nations into thinking that the United States has been stockpiling vast gold reserves? Or is the maximum security installation really housing another, even more audacious secret? Perhaps one involving evidence of UFOs or something even more profound? One thing is certain: Fort Knox remains one of the most highly protected and closely guarded locations in the world.
Few have ever been inside.
And fewer still have ever lived to reveal its secrets.
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