Gold, Lies & Videotape

The story in a nutshell, part one. A lifelong con artist named "Doc" Noss (not a real doctor) claims to have discovered piles of gold, a whole room full of Conquistador treasure. It is claimed that he showed solid gold bricks to many people and buried others. But the only evidence shown on camera is some old coins, costume jewelry and, inexplicably, a suit of armor (were the Conquistadors riding around New Mexico wearing plate armor?). Sadly, the gold room is lost in an explosion. Doc Noss gets all his friends to donate thousands of dollars for his excavation. He finds nothing and disappears one day abandoning his wife, who continues to believe in the treasure until her death.

Part two. An Army dentist claims that he met someone with some of Doc Noss's treasure. It was a literal treasure map, a yellow parchment showing the entrance of the cave and location of the gold room, which Doc Noss did not draw himself but found in the cave (figure that one out). It's claimed that the dentist wandered around the mountain after it became an Army base, walked straight into the gold room somehow and got his Army buddies to dig it up for him. The dentist is shown bankrupt and living in a trailer, but the descendants of Doc Noss insist that he was a rich man, because he donated money to his university.

This story is a massive hallucination, and this show tells it with a bit too straight a face. But it's also a fascinating story with many twists and turns. The production value is amazing, a great compilation of old interviews, new interviews, B-roll, and crappy footage of the 1993 excavation of the site seemingly filmed in Hi8.