Nazi Gold
Here’s another important question: If such an ambitious Nazi program to recover whatever was left of the Ark did go ahead, then how was it funded? Similar to a lot of the Nazis’ unsuccessful efforts to overwhelm the Allies, the funding may have come via controversial means.
As the hordes of Adolf Hitler took on the combined might of Western Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union, as a means to ensure that its war efforts proceeded at an ever-increasing pace, the behemoth-like Nazi regime came up with a bright idea: They plundered, stole, and confiscated as much gold, treasure, and other priceless items as they could from those nations on whose territory they had left their terrifying marks. They then duly (and secretly) transferred the spoils to certain sympathetic banks (including the Swiss National Bank) in return for hard currency. The stark nature of this massive program was detailed in a document generated by the U.S. government on June 2, 1998, titled “U.S. and Allied Wartime and Postwar Relations and Negotiations With Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey on Looted Gold and German External Assets and U.S. Concerns About the Fate of the Wartime Ustasha Treasury.”
Stuart Eizenstat, who served in the Carter administration in the position of Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and under the Clinton administration in the positions of Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Undersecretary of State for Economic Business and Agricultural Affairs, stated on publication of the report that: “The Swiss National Bank must have known that some portion of the gold it was receiving from the Reichsbank was looted from occupied countries, due to the public knowledge about the low level of the Reichsbank’s gold reserves and repeated warnings from the Allies.”[13]
Findings suggested that Switzerland had been the recipient of more than $400 million in gold plundered by Nazi Germany. That figure, however, was later upped to around $440 million, as Eizenstat explained: “New sources recently came to light that provided additional information about the infamous Melmer account at the Reichsbank, named after Bruno Melmer, the SS officer who was responsible for taking materials, possessions from concentration camp victims and others at killing centers and depositing them in an SS account in the Reichsbank.”[14]
Moreover, $300 million — the equivalent of a stunning $2.6 billion in the economy of 1997—in Nazi gold found its secret way to such neutral countries as Portugal, Spain, and Sweden at the height of hostilities, no less than 75 percent of which was clandestinely channeled via the Swiss National Bank. And there was an even more controversial story to come, involving nothing less than the secretive world of the Vatican.
During the Second World War, the Nazis established what was, essentially, a puppet outfit in Croatia called the Ustashi that was as ruthless as it was relentless in stealing gold and other items of great value from the populace. Around $80 million was secured by the Ustashi for Nazi military programs, some of which, in the latter stages of the war, also reached Swiss banks. Eventually a very big problem surfaced: The Ustashi was reliant upon Germany for financial support, as well as for security and military aid. With the irreversible collapse of the Nazi regime midway through 1945, however, the abandonded Ustashi began to spiral downward into splintered factions and unrelenting chaos. Seeing the end as being well and truly near, its high-ranking officials hot-footed it to Italy, and ultimately got a warm welcome from Rome’s San Girolamo pontifical college. It was run by one Father Dragonivic, and almost certainly received significant monetary funding from the Ustashi, possibly even with Vatican assent and knowledge.
On October 21, 1946, one Harold Glasser, the Director of Monetary Research at the U.S. Treasury Building in Washington, D.C., received a Top Secret communication from a certain Emerson Bigelow, an agent of the Treasury. Bigelow wrote that he had learned from a reputable Italian informant that, of the significant funds secured be the Ustashi movement, no less than approximately 200 million Swiss Francs found their way to the Vatican and were held deep within its vaults for safekeeping. According to further intelligence data, Bigelow added, a significant percentage of this amount may have been secretly dispatched to Spain and Argentina via a Vatican pipeline. Bigelow conceded, however, there was a possibility this was merely a carefully arranged cover story, and that the vast sum may never have left its secret storage area — the heart of the Vatican, in other words.
Notably, additional reports generated during the same timeframe by elements of the U.S. Intelligence community suggested that Bigelow’s information was right on the money, so to speak, and that a massive 200 million Swiss francs was secretly delivered to the Institute for Works of Religion — the Vatican Bank, as it is generally known. To this day, not surprisingly, both the bank and Vatican officials deny any knowledge of such a controversial transfer of funds essentially done on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Seven decades after Hitler and his cronies were defeated much of this saga is still engulfed in a muddy haze of secrecy. Yet, the allegation that somewhere, deep inside the secret vaults and tunnels of the Vatican, there exists a repository for Nazi-purloined treasures just will not go away.
Hungary’s Crown
The Holy Crown of Hungary, also known as the Crown of Saint Stephen, has a similarly remarkable history, to say the least. Believed to have been fashioned in the 1100s, it has been stolen and recovered on countless occasions, such as when Lajos Kossuth, the Regent-President of Hungary, fled the country with it after the collapse of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 and then buried it in a forested area in Transylvania. By 1853, the crown had been successfully recovered and was returned to Buda Castle, Budapest, from where Kossuth had originally pilfered it. But the adventures of the crown were far from over: it was eventually destined to travel overseas.
As the Second World War came to a crashing end for Hitler and Co., and as the Russians were publicly demonstrating their strength all across Hungary, the crown was secretly handed over to the U.S. Army’s 86th Infantry Division to ensure that it stayed out of the hands of the Kremlin. A secure, heavily guarded location was chosen to house the priceless, legendary item: none other than the United States Bullion Depository in Kentucky, commonly known as Fort Knox, which holds approximately 2.5 percent of all the gold known to have been refined throughout human history. The crown remained there until January 6, 1978, when it was returned to the people of Hungary, with much fanfare and gratitude given to the United States and President Jimmy Carter for ensuring that the Soviets never succeeded in getting their hands on the legendary crown.
This would be just another story of political intrigue, were it not for one very strange, and previously secret fact: According to a collection of State Department memoranda of 1956 and 1957, at one point in the 1950s, as a means to ensure that the true nature of what they were guarding remained a murky secret, the soldiers at Fort Knox were first told that the crate containing the crown held the wings and engine of a flying saucer! They were later advised that its contents were actually recovered German artwork, gold, and other items of priceless historical value.
C-5
The Little Men of Hangar 18
On March 28, 1975, the late Barry Goldwater — who served as a major-general in the Air Force, a senator for Arizona, the Republican party’s nominee for president in the 1964 election, and the chairman of the U.S. government’s Senate Intelligence Committee — wrote the following words to a UFO researcher named Shlomo Arnon: “The subject of UFOs is one that has interested me for some long time. About 10 or 12 years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.”[15]