So You Found Something That Will Change Everything!

[Dyna]

So suppose you are hiking in Utah and you lay back to rest a moment in the shade deep into a red walled canyon. Behind you the soft wall gives way and you fall through into a hidden cave. You get out the flashlight you were smart enough to have included in your backpack and proceed to investigate.

Inside you find a long hallway disappearing into the blackness far distant, ancient looking torches covered in cobweb line the walls every 8 feet high above you on both walls. You make your way carefully and fearfully, keeping eyes to the floor as this you know is perfect snake habitat, but the wide hall is actually clean and clear as though it were in use just yesterday and nary a snake appears.

You eventually reach an opening to your left after a good fifty feet of traverse, it is an arched doorway through which you peer timidly and boldly enter. You find yourself in a cavernous room the ceiling disappearing far above into the darkness. It is filled with two long rows upon each side of the wide room with stone cots cut from the cavern walls, upon each lyes the body of a magnificent skeleton approximately 20 ft long.  Each skeleton holds a glorious 6 ft long golden shield across the chest intricately detailed with decoration.

The center skeleton however which is upon a taller, wider and longer stone bed, holds what appears to be a book which both his enormous hands crossed over it in seeming reverence or protection.

You gaze around in wonder careful not to touch anything, you move back out to the long hall and proceed past many rooms without glancing into but a few which hold various large objects for living and many golden and jeweled treasures.

You reach the end at last and enter a monstrous cavern which is completely filled with what appears to be a large silver, oval craft the form fitting the common UFO descriptions perfectly with the exception of perhaps the height which is very, very tall and you cannot see to the top with your light nor the sides as the size is so tremendous!

You leave the cave in stunned silence and do what you can to recover and hide the narrow entrance. You know it is getting late and you are expected home before dark and did not prepare to stay longer. as you travel homeward you think, what am I to do?

If you try to contact a reporter about this will the invisible forces directing all knowledge in our world, simply make this reporter disappear? Will he/she say I was insane and they saw no such thing to protect their Family from harm? Will they have an accident? If I show them what I found will the cave and all of the objects simply disappear?

Do I call a Friend who is and Anthropologist? Will He simply disappear, have an accident?

I did take pictures with my phone do I simply put them on the internet in various places? Will they be removed, will they be "proved" hoaxes?

Phone calls are not safe, e-mail is not safe, snail-mail is not safe if this is something that wants to be hidden.

If I arrange to have many at once reporters eager to see what I say what I have found and prepare to release it all to numerous persons and publicly at one time, will I be made to appear a fool at the last moment? Will there appear a label on my photo of the skeleton saying it is but a mockup for an exhibit? Will I be told to go along if I want Friends and family safe?

Will I be taken and waterboarded to give up the location? Will my Family be in danger? Will we disappear or get cancer soon after disclosing the location to the "Men in Black"?

Would perhaps my safest and only option be to release my story and my photos only to websites setup to carry stories for entertainment purposes only and not to be taken as truth? The Hoax forums and little backstreet journals, the Inquirers of the world? Then leave it as it is hidden?

My conclusion is that this is really my only option in this, today's world.

What would you do?

[zorgon]

Simple

You call several media networks and have them all show up at the same time  Safety in numbers as it were



Now then  where exactly did you say this cave was?

[Dyna]

In order to arrange that would you not need time, I doubt they would all just believe and show up? If any of them spoke to anyone else before showing well arrangements are made by the controllers but of course that would be IF all news reporters were not all ready under control of various types.

Location is forever mine alone 

Like this hoax? try to imagine if you will, some of these hoaxes are not hoaxes at all but made to look so.

2008 hoax[edit]
In August 2008, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer of Georgia announced that they had discovered the carcass of a 7-foot-7-inch, 500-pound Bigfoot-like creature while hiking through the northern mountains of their state. They said they had placed the body in a freezer in an undisclosed location. They also claimed to have seen three similar creatures when they found the body.[9] Biscardi teamed up with Whitton and Dyer to promote the claim that they had a Bigfoot corpse, and promised the media DNA evidence. The three held a press conference in Palo Alto, California, where they showed photographs of the alleged creature. Whitton boasted, "Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words."[10] Biscardi also tried to reassure the media of the corpse's authenticity, saying, "Last weekend, I touched it, I measured its feet, I felt its intestines."[11]
Whitton and Dyer have since admitted that it was a rubber costume.[9]
Whitton, a police officer in Clayton County, Georgia, put his career in jeopardy after participating in the hoax. Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner said, "Once he perpetrated a fraud, that goes into his credibility and integrity. He has violated the duty of a police officer."[12] Biscardi claimed that he was deceived, and that he was seeking justice.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Biscardi

[Ellirium113]

In order to arrange that would you not need time, I doubt they would all just believe and show up? If any of them spoke to anyone else before showing well arrangements are made by the controllers but of course that would be IF all news reporters were not all ready under control of various types.

Location is forever mine alone 

Like this hoax? try to imagine if you will, some of these hoaxes are not hoaxes at all but made to look so.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Biscardi

When a person claims to have unquestionable proof of this, you will have no problem rounding up media if you want them. You can also release it all through torrents on a public network. Information can be released and the identity of people can stay hidden. Somehow I think a video of the discovery would be far better than pictures as pictures are easily manipulated.

[Dyna]

When a person claims to have unquestionable proof of this, you will have no problem rounding up media if you want them. You can also release it all through torrents on a public network. Information can be released and the identity of people can stay hidden. Somehow I think a video of the discovery would be far better than pictures as pictures are easily manipulated.

You don't think that today anonymous posting is pointless if talking the Gov being interested? I have the feeling there is no where and no way you could remain unknown to them now days. If you found something in your back yard is that what you would do? Release an anon. video?

How easy is it to make fakes very like your real images and thus discredit you?


Video can be manipulated to I guess.

[Eighthman]

I appreciate this topic. I have a similar puzzlement: how would you reveal a free energy device that could be built by talented amateurs?

If you post it on free energy websites, you will be identified.  Shills will suddenly appear online to deny that the device works and provide ridicule.  You may be hunted down and 'disappeared'.  Anyone you trust with plans might betray you, even unintentionally.  Academics will refuse to even examine it.  Attempts to patent it will be denied or shunted off into secrecy classification.  Any use of radioactive materials, no matter how tiny or safe (alpha radiation) will trigger SWAT teams looking for 'terrorists'.

How to solve this?  Adopt a false identity and give the plans to isolated counterculture groups, including religious or political fanatics.  Give it to Iceland. Communicate only by snail mail with known talented amateurs (with no return address ). 

Any other thoughts?

[Ellirium113]

You don't think that today anonymous posting is pointless if talking the Gov being interested? I have the feeling there is no where and no way you could remain unknown to them now days. If you found something in your back yard is that what you would do? Release an anon. video?

How easy is it to make fakes very like your real images and thus discredit you?


Video can be manipulated to I guess.

I certainly would not release an anonymous video. I would make sure my family would be safe, Then I would most likely get as much footage of everything I could without disturbing anything. Then I would determine everything that would get taken in a raid and figure out if I would hang on to any of it myself (Yes I most likely would take something). Then I would go public Artifacts I had in my possession would stay that way to ensure my safety and that of my family. Some people wouldn't want to take any chances and perhaps would just rather chance an anonymous video...there are enough skilled analysts out there to pick it apart to tell if it is going to be a fake or not so that wouldn't really concern me. Only a hoaxer would need to worry about that. Sure someone else might try and discredit it, but your going to get that no matter which way you run with it.

[Dyna]

Then I would go public Artifacts I had in my possession would stay that way to ensure my safety and that of my family

I think today with no protections by law you would be taken after going public, waterboarded into giving up artifacts even though they would only "prove" them fake anyway.

I don't see any means of keeping anyone safe myself sadly.

[zorgon]

I appreciate this topic. I have a similar puzzlement: how would you reveal a free energy device that could be built by talented amateurs?
Any other thoughts?

Do like IBM did  give the plans away to everyone

They knew that people would copy their PC so they gave the design away free to everyone.  In their case the sly part was they also made software   so all those clone computers would need their programs

Uless your goal is to get rich   just share the plans with as many as you can... THEY cans stop them all

provided of cource that it actualy works and can be reproduced

[astr0144]

Sounds like the start of a Indiana Jones story Dyna..

Utah Caves, Snakes, Skeletons and Ufos ! 

A boyhood or even adult desire ! that Im sure many of us would day dream to come across..

Trying to decipher if this is something you experienced or are aware about or  if its just something for us to think about  at the moment ! 

but initially its seems an interesting and thought provoking post..

So suppose you are hiking in Utah and you lay back to rest a moment in the shade deep into a red walled canyon. Behind you the soft wall gives way and you fall through into a hidden cave. You get out the flashlight you were smart enough to have included in your backpack and proceed to investigate.

That's the sort of question that I have pondered on before if not of a direct similar story but of certain types of situations where its   found very hard to conclude..some things are or appear so complex its hard to make a clear decision..

My conclusion is that this is really my only option in this, today's world.

What would you do?

Reminds me of this sort of story...

David Hahn rose to notoriety in 1996 when neighbors reported his 'glowing potting shed' where he had been trying to build a nuclear reactor. He was also arrested in 2007, right, for stealing 27 smoke detectors. People at the time assumed the lesions on his face were from exposure to radiation

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2506549/Uh-oh-Radioactive-Boy-Scout-built-nuclear-reactor-Detroit-shed-sparking-evacuation-40-000-wants-invent-lightbulb-lasts-100-years.html


8thman

Any use of radioactive materials, no matter how tiny or safe (alpha radiation) will trigger SWAT teams looking for 'terrorists'.

[Eighthman]

I hate to admit this but it's true: I deeply wish I would be motivated by a love of humanity if I had a free energy device but frankly, I feel most people are fools.  OTOH, I feel enormous hatred for the Elite. If free energy was mine, I would feel great joy in ruining their sick dominance. I enjoy Trump just because he wields a verbal baseball bat across US politics and they deserve it.

yeah, I feel guilty saying that but.....

[space otter]

What would you do?

get the long and lat..pictures, video..make a map and see exactly who owns the place
put all the originals in a safety deposit

translate it into a story as you did in the op using copies
get a sci fi publisher and market it
tell everyone you fell when out hiking and came up with this story

leave the safety deposit box to a major news/magazine  in your will

enjoy the profits of your book and let the chips fall as they may

but that's just me

[Dyna]

space otter I like it! I doubt i would make any profit from the book though.

[astr0144]

Not exactly along the lines of your story Dyna,

But maybe with some similarities of what could happen on a story that I recall that had a few similarities....it makes an interesting tale that I believe has truth in it.. with a mystery as to what may have happened or if it really happened and is their still treasure remaining hidden their that is now concealed or taken by the Govt...once they got to know about it they claimed the land...











White Sands, New Mexico, is an inhospitable environment, home only to rattlesnakes and sagebrush, vultures and mule deer.  In November of 1937, a man named Doc Noss was deer hunting there.  He hiked to the top of a hill known as Victorio Peak.  As thirst and fatigue set in, Doc searched for fresh spring water.   Instead, he discovered a mysterious hole in the ground—the hidden entrance to a tunnel.  There was a ladder in the opening and Doc climbed inside.  A maze of tunnels led into a large cavern.  In one chamber of the cavern, Doc found an old chest.  On the lid were the words "Sealed Silver," written in Old English inscription script.  The chest was only a small part of the treasure that Doc Noss claimed he found.  There was gold, silver, jewels, and gold bars that today, would be worth and estimated $1.7 billion dollars.  Even now it may still be hidden beneath the craggy slopes of Victorio Peak.



Doc Noss had been a traveling medicine-show man.  In 1933, he married Ova Beckwith, whom he nicknamed Babe.  They settled down and opened a foot clinic in Hot Springs, New Mexico.  Doc's grandson, Terry Delonas, heard incredible stories of his grandfather his entire life:



"He loved adventure and was fascinated with history.  Babe was very strong-willed, ardent might be a word to describe her."


After Doc discovered the treasure at Victorio Peak, he and Babe spent every free moment exploring the tunnels that led deep inside the mountain.  Doc found that the passageways in the mountain led to several caverns.  In one of them he found 79 human skeletons stacked in a small enclosure.  In a deeper cavern, Doc found what appeared to be a stack of worthless iron bars.  He brought the bars home for his wife Babe to inspect:



"I said, well Doc, this is yellow, look at it.  And he looked at that and the sun was right at the right hour to shine right down on it. And he rubbed his head and he said, well Babe, if that's gold, and all that other is gold like it, we can call John D. Rockefeller a tramp."

Doc told Babe that inside the cavern, there were as many as 16,000 bars of gold.  How had this enormous treasure come to be deep inside the caverns of Victorio Peak? There are four theories. The treasure could have belonged to Juan de Onate, the man who founded New Mexico as a Spanish colony.  Reportedly, Onate had amassed an Aztec treasure of gold, silver, and jewels.  Another theory is that a Catholic missionary named Father LaRue, who operated gold mines in the late 18th century, stored his gold in a cavern there.  It could have belonged to Maximillian, the Emperor of Mexico, who tried to remove wealth out of Mexico when he learned of an assassination plot.   Finally, it may have belonged to an Apache tribe that raided stagecoaches filled with gold mined in California.


The gold was found by military airmen

But Doc was unconcerned as to how the gold arrived there.  And in the spring of 1938, six months after his discovery, he and Babe went to Santa Fe to establish legal ownership of their claim.  According to their grandson Terry, Doc and Babe filed a lease with the state of New Mexico for the entire section of land surrounding Victorio Peak:

"They filed a treasure trove claim, which has become the historic Noss family claim to the treasure in Victorio Peak."

Over a period of two years, Doc mined the peak.  Witnesses say he took out more than 200 gold bars, and then hid them from everyone, even his family.  Back then, it was illegal to own gold that was not in the form of jewelry.  According to Terry, Doc hid the gold bars in a variety of locations all across the desert:

"Some were hidden right by the county roads... Some were dropped in horse tanks at the nearby ranches.  Some were just buried in the sand and Doc would put a different colored rock over the top of it than was natural to that surrounding."

Finally, in the fall of 1939, Doc decided to try opening a larger passageway into Victorio Peak.  He hired a mining engineer named Montgomery to assist him.  Together, the two men used dynamite to blast through a large boulder that was blocking the lower portion of the shaft.  The blast caused a massive cave-in, which collapsed the fragile shaft.  Doc had permanently shut himself out of his own mine.  According to his grandson, Terry, even worse was the fact that now Doc only had a few gold bars to draw from:

"He only had those few dozen or hundred or so that he'd brought to the surface and he became very protective of those bars."

For nine years, Doc Noss attempted to sell his gold bars on the black market.  Then in 1948, he met a man named Charlie Ryan and struck a deal to sell him 51 of the bars.
But at the last minute Doc feared that Charlie Ryan would double cross him.  He asked an acquaintance named Tony Jolly to help him re-bury the gold in a new hiding place:

"We went out across the desert, a little ways, we started digging and we dug 20 bars of gold out of the ground.  It turned out to be 90 more and we buried those bars of gold.  I handled and saw 110 bars of gold.

The next day, Doc and Charlie Ryan got into an argument.  According to Terry, Ryan pulled out a gun:

"Ryan accosted him and said if you don't tell me where the bars are, you won't leave this room alive."

Doc tried to escape but it was already too late.  He was shot by Charlie Ryan and died instantly.  The date was March 5, 1949.  But the saga of the treasure at Victorio Peak did not die with Doc Noss.  As the legend grew, other treasure hunters tried to cash in on Doc and Babe's claim.



Doc Noss was shot dead

When Doc Noss was killed in 1949, he allegedly left behind a treasure of 15,000 gold bars, buried inside the caverns of Victorio Peak.  For three years, Babe Noss and her children struggled to clear the passageway to the treasure.  In 1952, when they were less than 12 yards from the opening to the central cavern, disaster struck again.  The State of New Mexico was forced to relinquish Victorio Peak and the land surrounding it, so the United States Army could expand the White Sands Missile Range.  Babe and her family were forced off their claim by the Army.  Victorio Peak was now off limits to everyone by order of the military.  But that didn't stop former Airman 1st Class Thomas Berlett and a group of off-duty soldiers from clearing the blocked entrance and exploring the caverns.  According to Berlett, it wasn't long before they found what Babe was after:

"They were bars of something.  And as we scratched it, we knew right away that it was actually gold.  We marked and identified one of the bricks inside with my initials on it and we stood it on end on the large piles."

Eventually, the airmen informed their superiors about the gold they had found at Victorio Peak.  They were denied permission to explore further.  According to Thomas Berlett, they took steps to insure that no one else could salvage the treasure:

"The following weekend, we returned to the entrance and we dynamited it in four different places and blasted the whole thing shut."

Over a year later, the Secretary of the Army created a "Top Secret" classified military operation at Victorio Peak.  In 1961, Babe Noss, along with the State of New Mexico, filed an injunction against the Army to stop excavating at Victorio Peak.  In 1963, the Army petitioned the state of New Mexico for mineral rights.  But their request was denied.  Even so, aerial surveillance photo showed that extensive work had already taken place. 

Finally, the Army succumbed to pressure and allowed some private claimants, including Babe Noss and former military personnel, to undertake a highly publicized, 10 day expedition at Victorio Peak.  The excavation was an extensive, large-scale operation.  But after 10 days, no treasure had been found.  Lambert Dolphin, a scientist from the Stanford Research Institute who worked on the dig, thought the treasure may have actually been there, but just out of reach:

"I noticed on the radar screen, some echoes quite frequently at a very great depth, 300, 400 feet deep.  And that led me to the conclusion that there was indeed a large cavern at the base of the mountain, about where Doc Noss had said."

Deep in the heart of Victorio Peak there may still be jewels, artifacts, and piles of gold worth a billion dollars.  Tony Jolly, the man who helped hide some of the gold, went back years later, and retrieved ten bars.  But Doc's heirs have recovered nothing.  For Terry Delonas and the rest of Doc's family, the fate of the treasure is still, quite literally, a billion-dollar question:


"We have decided that we will finish the work that Doc Noss started, that Babe Noss tried to finish.  We will eventually get Victorio Peak open so that the mystery of what's inside the peak can be solved."

[astr0144]

This was a story that I considered wanting to investigate a few years ago that I really was interested in.

Lost Cave City in the Grand Canyon?





Did an ancient civilization live in caves below the Grand Canyon? This is as vague a statement as wondering why some of the ancient Mesoamerican people depicted their gods as white men or the Olmec gods looked African. Stretching the imagination ... perhaps whatever was found in the Grand Canyon caves discussed below, is linked to Ancient Alien Theory. It is interesting to speculate on ancient Egyptians or Tibetans flying to the Grand Canyon in Vimanas, but, to date, there is no tangible proof to support these claims.










That suggested that there is a hidden cave in the Grand Canyon that contained Egyptian artifacts..and had Alien connections...



It would have been good if it looked had looked like Petra in Jordon !  within the Grand Canyon....

An amazing place...



http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_orionzone_8.htm#inicio

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_orionzone_8.htm#inicio



http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/esp_orionzone_9.htm





http://www.crystalinks.com/gc_egyptconnection.html







I NOW have to question could it be related to this or something along these lines  and part of a Hoax !!!

Egyptian film set found in a USA desert..

There had been a Egyptian type movie that was filmed in the USA and the film set up got left and became lost in the sands of the desert over the years.. and was later rediscovered..

was some of this set taken to the Grand Canyon  and placed within the Cave ?? I wonder !

However the date between the caves discovery in 1909 and the Movie in 1922 do not match... unless when the cave was initially discovered it did not have anything in it 

or maybe similar things as used within the film set were placed within the cave ...somehow !...

I am Not sure that there has been any real photos taken of such finds !...Whats shown on the Internet may just be created images that suggest that is what the finds looked like...

Archaeologists uncover giant sphinx in California dunes
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/16/sphinx-uncovered-california-desert-ten-commandments/17350293/

Archaeologists parted the sands in California to excavate one of the last remnants of old-time Hollywood: a giant plaster sphinx from the set of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. The director buried props from the epic movie (the 1923 silent black-and-white version, not the color 1956 Charlton Heston blockbuster) in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes after the film wrapped. Among the props: 21 plaster sphinxes that were 12 feet tall and weighed 5 tons each. Archaeologists in 2012 managed to unearth the head of a sphinx they uncovered. Short on time, they left the body behind, and hoped to pull it out of the sands this time. What they were able to retrieve came out in pieces, but they also happened upon a nearby and largely intact sphinx before the $120,000 dig ended on Monday, KCET reports; that sphinx will hopefully join the previously discovered head at a nearby cultural center.DeMille went all out in building the "monumental" set, hiring 1,500 workers to toil for six weeks re-creating an ancient Egyptian metropolis, KCET notes. Leading up to the gates of "Pharaoh's City" were four enormous Ramses II statues, as well as the sphinxes. "This was all before the age of computer-generated images—you wanted a big city, you had to build a big city," says Peter Brosnan, a filmmaker working on a documentary about the legendary DeMille set. Archaeologists had to dig out the sphinx slowly enough so its surface would dry, but quickly enough so it wouldn't crumble from air exposure, the Lompoc Record reports. But why did DeMille bury the artifacts? Brosnan speculates the director didn't want the expense of carting everything out of the area, and that he balked at the idea of anyone else using the set after he left the dunes

The Cursed, Buried City That May Never See The Light of Day

It was the biggest set ever built for a Hollywood film in the 1920s, and then it was buried in the sands of the California Coast. The real story begins when a young filmmaker embarks on a decades-long attempt to excavate

The City of the Pharaoh during the filming of Cecil B. DeMille's 'The Ten Commandments'.    Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center

Thirty-three years ago, Peter Brosnan heard a story that seemed too crazy to be true: buried somewhere along California's rugged Central Coast, beneath acres of sand dunes, lay the remains of a lost city. According to his friend at New York University's film school, the remains of a massive Egyptian temple, a dozen plaster sphinxes, eight mammoth lions, and four 40-ton statues of Ramses II were all supposedly entombed in the sands 150 some-odd miles north of Los Angeles.


"It was an absolutely cockamamie story," Brosnan says. "I thought he was nuts." The ruins weren't authentic Egyptian ones, of course. They were the 60-year-old remains of a massive Hollywood set—the biggest, most expensive one ever built at the time. The faux Egyptian scenery had played the role of the City of the Pharaoh in one of Hollywood's first true epics, Cecil B DeMille's 1923 film The Ten Commandments. The set had required more than 1,500 carpenters to build and used over 25,000 pounds of nails. The production nearly ruined DeMille and his studio. When the shoot wrapped, the tempestuous director supposedly strapped dynamite to the structures and razed the whole set, burying it in the sands near Guadalupe, California, to ensure no rival director could benefit from his vision.


Bullpoop, Brosnan thought. But then his buddy pointed him to a line in DeMille's posthumously published autobiography. "If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," the director teased, "I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization...extended all the way to the Pacific Coast."

By 1982, Brosnan had graduated from film school and was earning a living as a freelance journalist, but he couldn't shake his friend's story. The film student in him was enchanted by the idea of uncovering and preserving a forgotten bit of Hollywood's history. That summer, Brosnan and his friend drove across the country, from New York City to a stretch of coast near Santa Barbara, to see the ruins for themselves. The whole affair, he thought, would make for a hell of a documentary.

"We were young, wannabe filmmakers, and I thought this was golden," Brosnan says today. "We'll find some archeologists, we'll find the set, we'll dig it up. The story writes itself."

The City of the Pharaoh was not so much a movie set as it was a monument to the man who built it. DeMille was already a towering star in the early days of Hollywood, but in 1922 he was recovering from a streak of critical flops. He had gained a reputation for his sense of spectacle in films like Joan the Woman and Male and Female, and The Ten Commandments was to be his comeback.

Delivering DeMille's blockbuster meant deploying a barrage of special effects, at least by the standards of the day. In 1923, set design was the only way to visually transport viewers to the Sinai in the time of Moses. The "desert" DeMille chose for his Israelites to wander, while certainly more convenient than filming on location in Egypt, presented a logistical nightmare. There were no nearby cities, no paved roads, and no place for his cast of thousands to stay. The 22,000 acres of sand dunes that separated the small farming town of Guadalupe from the Pacific Ocean was harsh and desolate. The sharp-grained sand that gives the wind there its added sting is devoid of nutrients, and, combined with constant salt sprays from the sea, makes life a rarity in the dunes. For DeMille, it was perfect.


The sphinx on set in 1923.   Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center
"Your skin will be cooked raw," DeMille told his army of 3,500 actors and extras, according to a Los Angeles Times reporter on the scene. "You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history. I expect of you your supreme efforts."

The costs were mounting even before DeMille arrived in Guadalupe to begin shooting. Preproduction expenses were already approaching $700,000—an astronomical sum in the early days of Hollywood. More than a million pounds of statuary, concrete, and plaster were used to construct the 120-foot-tall, 800-foot-long temple and surrounding structures, and whole plaster sphinxes were sculpted and loaded onto trucks bound for the dunes. Every day on location meant feeding and housing the thousands of workers and animals. DeMille drove his construction team to work faster. Paramount Studios, the film's backer, began sending DeMille increasingly desperate letters demanding that he cut costs. One receipt, for $3,000 spent on a "magnificent team of horses" for the pharaoh, pushed the studio over the edge, according to Sumiko Higashi, a professor emeritus at The College at Brockport, SUNY, and author of Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: the Silent Era, a biography of DeMille.

"You have lost your mind," telegraphed Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount Pictures. "Stop filming and return to Los Angeles at once." DeMille refused. He took out a personal loan and waived his guaranteed percentage of the movie's gross to ensure the production continued. "I cannot and will not make pictures with a yardstick," he wired back to the studio. "What do they want me to do?" he was rumored to have said, according to Higashi. "Stop now and release it as The Five Commandments?"

Despite the warnings, DeMille pushed on. Bugles sounded every morning to 4:30 a.m. to wake the 5,000 workers and actors that populated the 24-square-mile tent city he'd built in the dunes. (It earned the nickname the City of DeMille.) His workers raised the 109-foot-tall Great Gate—an archway covered in intricate busts of rearing stallions—and buttressed it with two 35-foot-tall clay-and-plaster statues of the Pharaoh. They erected a "city wall"—built 750 feet long because DeMille refused to work with painted backgrounds or limit his cinematic choices. Five mammoth sphinxes, weighing over five tons each, lined the entrance to the ersatz Egyptian city.

Filming was done at a madcap pace and condensed into a mere three weeks, according to Scott Eyman's biography, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. But even with the Exodus in the can, one more problem loomed. According to a prior agreement with the landowners, DeMille's monumental set had to be dismantled before he left. Production costs had already ballooned to over $1.4 million, more than any other film previously made. DeMille considered reneging on the deal, Brosnan says, but likely worried about another issue: If he left is city standing, rival directors from other studios could easily swoop into Guadalupe and produce an epic on the cheap. DeMille would not have that. Rather than pay workers to take the set down, he settled on a faster method. Dynamite was supposedly strapped to the great temple he had built, and the City of the Pharaoh was brought down. According to legend, he ordered bulldozers to mound sand over the scattered remains and quickly left town.

Sixty years later, in 1983, Brosnan arrived at the dunes like the Children of Israel before him—completely lost. He knew the set was buried somewhere, but the dunes stretched nearly 30 miles, across two counties. Looking for clues, he called the Air Force base that occupied much of the coastline. ("Sir," he says the sergeant on the other end of the line told him, "There is no Egyptian city buried at Vandenberg Air Force Base.") He haunted local libraries. He hounded municipal politicians. No one could provide hints about the set's exact location.

Then he stumbled upon an old ranch hand at a local tavern who had run cattle through the dunes for decades. On a cold and dark morning, after a savage storm had rearranged the topography of the dunes, Brosnan and the rancher hiked the sea of hundred-foot-high peaks, making their way a mile toward the pounding surf of the Pacific. Eventually they spied what locals called "the dune that never moves"—the sandy tomb that covered DeMille's set—and saw a chunk of Plaster of Paris statuary poking through.


The sphinx before excavation.   Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center
The discovery made headlines around the world and Brosnan fielded calls from The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and People magazine. His documentary idea, which had seemed pie-in-the-sky a few months earlier, looked promising. And his pitch—that the lost city is the oldest existing Hollywood set left; that props from more modern shoots have already been preserved for posterity; that early set design was, in a sense, an American art form—struck a chord in the industry. Brosnan tentatively called his documentary project The Lost City.

Charlton Heston, star of DeMille's 1956 remake of the film, publicly wished the project well, and local archaeologists volunteered their time to help in the excavation. A curator at the Smithsonian expressed interest in acquiring some pieces, once the dig wrapped. Promises for funding came in from Paramount Pictures and Bank of America. Brosnan moved to Hollywood with the intention of pursuing a career in the 'biz. But first, he had to start digging.

"This will be a scientific exploration by highly trained personnel," said a Cambridge-educated archaeologist who signed on in 1983. "Not a case of simply digging up stuff like potatoes. And if we're serious about documenting movie history, then let's do it properly."


Excavating the City of the Pharaoh.   Photo: Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center
The excavation and documentary progressed, but Brosnan constantly faced two problems: funding and permitting. When he had the money, the county wouldn't let him touch the environmentally sensitive area. (The western snowy plover, a federally protected species that nests along california's coast, keeps the dunes off limits to people for half the year during breeding season.) By the time he got permission to dig, seven years later, funding had dried up. In 1990, several organizations, including the Smithsonian and the DeMille Family Trust, agreed to partially fund the project, and Brosnan and an archeologist used ground-penetrating radar to show that much of the set remained intact. But he couldn't raise enough money to excavate the actual ruins. He needed $175,000 for an archeological dig to recover 60-year-old fake relics. "We don't see this as a fake Egypt," Brosnan told a reporter at the time. "We see this as real cinema history."

But by the mid-1990s, Brosnan had been scraping by in the movie business for a decade, writing scripts and directing small projects. Lacking the money, he gave up the dig.

That DeMille's ruins have survived intact to this day, albeit buried in the sands, is a quirk of geography. The dunes, which cover some 35 square miles of the coast here, formed about 15,000 years ago, according to Doug Jenzen, executive director of the non-profit Dunes Center in Guadalupe. Jenzen and his team run a small museum out of a craftsman on the town's main (and only) drag and head up conservation efforts for the Dunes preserve. It's a charming little museum that seems out of place among the shuttered movie theater and boarded up buildings of Guadalupe, but the Dunes and DeMille are the only source of tourism dollars in this largely agricultural area, Jenzen says.

Thousands of years ago, rivers swept mineral-dense rocks and boulders from the nearby coastal range down to the sea, eventually pummeling the earth into fine grain sand. "One of the reasons the movie set is preserved so well is because of the minerals in the sand," Jenzen says. "You know how when you order something mail order and it comes with the silica packets? The sand actually acted as a natural desiccant that preserved the plaster for the statues."

For 15 years, the ruins were left undisturbed. Every few years a reporter or a researcher would call and Brosnan would humor him or her with details of his odyssey in the dunes. Each time, he hoped the new round of publicity would inject dollars into the effort, but nothing ever came through.


In October 2014, archeologists preserve decaying remains from wind-blown sand at Guadalupe Dunes.   Photo: AP
In 2010, though, after the Los Angeles Times ran yet another piece on his unfinished dig, a woman—who wishes to remain anonymous—contacted Brosnan and offered to put up the money needed to finish the film. But by then he was married with children and had been away from the project for two decades. "My first response was a moment of panic," Brosnan says. "There's no way I could do this."

But Brosnan hired a producer and an editor, and last fall, with the help of a Santa Barbara County grant, a team of archeologists excavated most of a sphinx. Brosnan was on hand to film it. "We had always wanted to end with a shot of the sphinx being found. And we got it," he says. Using his early footage shot in the 1980s, Brosnan has pulled together a rough cut and has an editor working on a final draft. He says he's looking for distributors and considering the film festival circuit soon.


In the Dune Center, Jenzen and his team display parts of one of the large plaster sphinxes and smaller relics that have been successfully pulled from the sand. "All of the statues were made of plaster," he says. "They were built to last two months—92 years ago. I don't think this could have happened anywhere else on earth."

However, Jenzen says the ruins may not survive another 92 years. Powerful storms in the last few years have shifted the sands of the dunes dramatically—more of the set is now exposed to the elements than ever before. The Dunes Center needs $100,000 to unearth another sphinx to add it to the display, Jenzen says, before it's too late. "It's disappearing so fast," he says, "Archeologists originally thought it'd last until 2090—but every time we go out, more is gone."

http://www.outsideonline.com/2023921/cursed-buried-city-may-never-see-light-day