[THEME MUSIC]
>>Hello, this is
Michael Tellinger.
And our journey of
discovery continues.
This episode, we're
going to be dealing
with gold, our
obsession with gold,
and one of the great untold
stories of the last 120 years
that deals with gold and
its mysterious origins,
the control of gold
on a global scale
and a train filled with
gold that vanished,
mysteriously vanished
out of sight.
But before we start, let's
just recap to the story that
brought us to this point.
We ended off with the
opening phrase of the Bible.
Most of us believe that the
Bible says "in the beginning,
God created the
heavens and the Earth."
Well, we now know that
is no longer the truth,
that the original opening
statement of the Bible
says "the father of the
beginnings created the Elohim,
the heavens, and the Earth."
And that has
profound implications
of who the creator of
everything in existence
is, who the Elohim are, that
the Elohim are not actually god,
or that they are the
gods of the Bible--
the plural of is el is Elohim--
and that somehow, humanity
fits into the equation, and that
the father of the beginnings
is closely related to the sound
and the source of resonance
that brought everything
into creation.
It also takes us to
Chapter 2 of the Bible
and Genesis 2, where we first
encounter the mention of gold.
What I find fascinating
is that gold in the Bible
is mentioned before Eve
even comes into creation.
Yes, that's how important gold
is in all of human history.
Before Eve has
even been fashioned
from Adam's rib, the
narrator of the Bible--
whoever the narrator
may be-- tells us
about the land of Havilah,
where the land is good,
the water is good, and by
the way, there is gold.
So you've got to ask yourself,
why is gold so important?
And as we work through
these episodes,
you realize that gold is at
the center of our appearance
on this planet.
Homo sapiens, human beings,
as we know ourselves today,
are inextricably
connected to the obsession
and the manipulation and the
use of gold on this planet.
This takes us to the southern
tip of Africa in 1898,
when the British
Empire-- the largest
empire that has ever existed
and still controls the world
today-- launched the
most expensive war
in its entire history.
It's when they
send 470,000 troops
to the southern tip
of Africa to find
60,000 farmers on
horseback and about
another 60,000 native Africans
with shields and spears.
It became known as the South
African War from 1899 to 1902,
when two independent of Boer
Republics-- Boer means farmer,
for those who don't know,
B-O-E-R, Boer Republics--
when two independent Boer
Republics resisted the British
occupation and stood up against
the might of the British
Empire.
The question we have
to ask ourselves,
what was so important that the
British Empire would mobilize
such a dramatic onslaught by
sending 470,000 troops so far
away by ship or the horses,
the food, the kitchens,
the hospitals, the support
systems for such a large army
to go by ship all the
way down to South Africa
to occupy a piece of the
world that is so far removed
from Mother England?
It truly boggles the mind.
Clearly, there had to be a very,
very serious reason for this.
This era in our history
and the foundation for this
was laid by this man here, Cecil
John Rhodes, who in his life
was probably, and during
this period of our history,
was probably the most
powerful man in the world.
Many of you will know him
for the Rhodes Scholarship.
And he was at that stage the
wealthiest man most likely
and a very, very
influential human being that
had an ear of the Queen
and the British Royalty,
the royal bloodlines pretty
much at his fingertips,
and was an instrument
of the royal bloodlines
to secure Southern
Africa for the Crown.
And it was, pretty much,
all about the gold.
And it was all about securing
Southern Africa for the Crown.
And when I say the
Crown, I don't mean
the Queen or the royal throne.
I'm talking about
the Crown Temple--
the Crown Temple in
the city of London,
one of the three independent
states that exists on our Earth
today, which are the City
of London, which many of you
will know is a
private corporation,
just like everything
else in our reality--
but we'll get back to that
later-- City of London,
together with the
Vatican, and also
Washington DC-- the
three independent states
that exist in countries that
pretty much around the world
today.
So this war in
Southern Africa was
mobilized to secure Southern
Africa and the future exports
of gold, platinum, diamonds,
and all the mineral
wealth of Southern
Africa for the Crown.
And what became very evident
to me in recent times
is that this South African
War from 1899 to 1902
pretty much laid the
foundation for what
was going to happen in the
20th century between Great
Britain and North America and
the colonization of the world
and taking control of
the world by the royals
and the British might from
Britain right across the world.
And that then brings us
to the phenomenal story
of Paul Kruger.
Most of you will
know Paul Kruger
as the guy that
started the Kruger
Park in South Africa, where
we keep all the animals today.
And the other are the
Krugerrands, the Kruger gold
and coins.
And he was the president of
the Transvaal Boer Republic
together with
President Steyn, who
was the president of
the Orange Free State.
Those two Boer Republics
resisted the might
of the British Empire.
Now, you can imagine
how serious this was.
And we find that the British
were losing this battle.
Even though they
had 470,000 troops
against a bunch of
farmers on horseback,
they were losing this
battle really badly,
until they employed
what they referred to
as the scorched earth policy.
And what this meant is
they burned down the farms.
They killed all the animals.
And they took the
women and the children
of the Boer farmers
and the Boer fighters,
they took them hostage.
And what did they do with them?
They put them into
concentration camps.
Yes, concentration
camps are an invention
of the British Empire
and not of Nazi Germany,
as most may think.
It is estimated that about
35,000 Boer women and children
died in these
concentration camps.
There about 45 of these
concentration camps
scattered throughout
South Africa.
And they were pretty
much starved to death
by the British.
And it was an absolute massacre.
And an unknown number
of black South Africans
died in black
concentration camps
that very little is known about,
because this was obviously
a well-kept secret.
There are some books and some
literature written about it.
But it remains a very dark part
of our most recent history.
What is fascinating
about this particular war
is one particular day
on the 26th of January,
1900, which became known
as the Battle of Spion Kop,
because on this one fateful
day, on this one little mountain
known Spion Kop, three
world leaders were present.
And if any one of these
three world leaders
caught a bullet on that
day in this battle,
it would have changed the
20th century completely
from what it became and
what we know it today.
It became known as the
bloodiest battle since.
And more men apparently
died in one hectare of land
than any other war since then.
Arguably, the most
prominent world leader
present on this mountain and
in this battle on this day
was Winston Churchill.
He was a young war correspondent
for the British media, who was
then captured by the Boer Army.
But the little bugger
escaped, and he became
known as the Brit who got away.
Can you imagine if
he didn't escape
and maybe he was strung
up by the Boer Army,
how the British history would
have changed in the years
to come and how the First World
and Second World Wars would
have changed after this event?
The second critical
world leader that
was present on that same
mountain and that same battle
on that day was a
young Mahatma Gandhi,
who was a stretcher bearer
for the British troops.
You can just imagine
what would have happened
to the history of
the future of India
if Mahatma Gandhi had
caught a bullet on that day.
And then finally,
General Louis Botha,
who was the general
of the Boer Army.
Now, many of you would
not have heard of him.
But it is important to realize
that only 8 years after he
surrendered to
the British Empire
in 1902, 8 years
later in 1910, he then
became the first prime minister
of the union of South Africa.
It was like the United
States of Southern Africa--
the union of South Africa--
and the Boer Army general
that fought against the British
became the prime minister
of the Union of South Africa.
Clearly, something
strange was going on here.
And a foundation was
being laid for what
was to come in manipulating
the future wealth
and the mineral wealth that
came to the British Empire
from this part of the world.
Another important event
during the South African War
happened on the
4th of June, 1900,
when a train filled
with gold left
Pretoria, the capital of
the Transvaal Republic,
headed for Mozambique--
the port of Mozambique.
It went due East and estimated
that this train was filled
with gold averaging
from-- well, the estimates
go between 30 tons
to 3,000 tons.
These all speculations,
because nobody really knows.
The point is that it was
a train filled with gold,
not just one carriage
filled with gold.
And some of the
gold on this train
was some of these
well-known Veld Pond.
Veld means field,
and these gold coins
were minted by the Boer
Republic in the field.
So they were known as Veld Pond.
Well, today, one of these Veld
Ponds is worth about $90,000.
So you can imagine the value
of that golden train today.
I guess, it probably would
be worth the Kruger trillions
and not the Kruger millions.
So this famous golden
train made its way East
through a number of well-known
South African towns.
And they are Belfast,
Machadodorp, Waterval Boven,
which is the town that I
live in today, which is also
famous for its thousands
of stone circles,
and then Waterval Onder.
These are Dutch words for
Waterval Boven means waterfall
above.
And Waterval Onder
means waterfall below.
So there's obviously
a steep downhill
from Waterval Boven
to this little house,
where Paul Kruger lived
for several months,
where he was really
giving the British Empire
a rough go for their money.
What's fascinating is that when
the train got too Machadodorp,
something very
strange and mysterious
happened, because after
Machadodorp, the golden train
mysteriously disappeared,
never to be seen again.
And it remains one
of the great treasure
mysteries of the 20th century.
Every year, thousands
of treasure hunters
come to South Africa and
to this part of the world--
Waterval Boven, Waterval
Onder, Machadodorp--
and that part of what we
call the escarpment, where
they come looking for
the Kruger millions.
Well, I suggest it's the
Kruger trillions today.
And what I find
fascinating is when
I've been doing explorations and
exploring these stone circles
and walk through the
mountains and thinking what
the hell's going on here,
every now and then, I come
across a big hole in the
ground, thinking why would there
be a hole in the middle of
a mountain, when suddenly I
remember, ah-ha, it's
the Kruger millions.
Somebody's been
here digging for it.
I find it amazing that people
would put a map together,
figure out that it was
in this specific place,
that they would find
the Kruger gold.
And they come there in
the middle of the night,
and they dig holes.
I must tell you that some of
these holes are really large.
And people go to
a lot of trouble
to dig these big holes
only to find nothing.
Well, who knows, maybe
they did find something
and they took it away.
But what's left behind is
a big hole in the ground.
So I might be mistaken
actually thinking
that they're finding nothing.
Who knows?
But it remains a big
mystery and remains
one of the great treasures for
treasure hunters in the world
today.
The fascinating thing about
this is, however, that in 1900,
the gold production of South
Africa wasn't that big yet,
because the gold mines on
the reef in Johannesburg--
what's known as the reef,
or the [SPEAKING DUTCH]--
were only discovered in 1896.
So the gold production
from the Johannesburg area
wasn't that big yet in 1900.
And most of the original
mines in South Africa
were in the eastern part.
And there were several
dozen mines there
that weren't producing
that much gold.
The gold rush in South
Africa really started in 1864
in a town called Kaapschehoop,
when a 5.2-kilogram--
that's about 10 and 1/2 pounds--
so 10 and 1/2 pound gold nugget
was found at Kaapschehoop.
This resulted in
the whole gold rush
that we saw in California
and also in Australia
at the same time.
So it's fascinating just to
see how this gold rush started
in three different continents--
the North America's,
Southern Africa, and Australia
at about the same time.
Well, the interesting
thing about Kaapschehoop,
this little town, right on
the edge of the Transvaal
Escarpment-- that's where the
Highveld ends and the Lowveld
begins, it's not as a Transvaal
Escarpment-- Kaapschehoop
is also famous for a very
important ancient site.
And that one is known
as Adam's Calendar.
Here is a view from
Kaapschehoop from the lookout
point in the little town
that became a real frontier
gold-mining town with bars
and saloons and dancing girls
and the typical kind of town
that you see in Western movies.
And it's amazing and remains a
great tourist attraction today.
It's a tiny little
village today.
But at one stage, it
had about 15,000 people
that lived today in this little
gold-mining frontier town.
So this also happens to be
the home of Adam's Calendar.
And this is a critical
bit of information.
This is a view from the
lookout point of Kaapschehoop,
as I mentioned, overlooking
the Barberton Valley, which
is most likely an impact crater
from about 3 billion years ago.
And this Barberton
Valley is also
known for some of the
oldest rock formations
that geologists go crazy
about and come from all
over the world to study.
But the Barberton Valley is
also known for two other things,
which is the town of Barberton,
another gold-mining frontier
town, and what remains arguably
the most wealthiest gold mine
in the world today, known
as Sheba Gold Mine, which
is just outside of Barberton.
So Kaapschehoop overlooks
the Barberton Valley,
which incidentally is filled
with about 50 meters of sea
sand sediment.
And I'll get back
to that later when
we talk about what
really happened
to this ancient civilization.
But I'm giving you a clue
and hint at this stage.
And further down
about four kilometers
along the same escarpment,
we find Adam's Calendar,
looking out at the same
Barberton Valley and Sheba Gold
Mine.
What I can tell you is that
the same Barberton Valley
would have been
filled with hundreds
of gold mines in ancient times.
The question we should
be asking ourselves
is not what happened to
the train and the gold.
And unfortunately,
people get stuck on this,
because they get so obsessed
with the gold and the train
and, where did it disappear,
where is the gold,
where is the train,
and let's go find it.
And this is why so many
people come looking
for the gold and the train.
And we get obsessed about
what happened to the gold.
That's not really important.
The critical question
is, where did Paul Kruger
get all the gold from?
Because in 1900, there wasn't
enough gold in South Africa
to fill a whole train.
Because it wasn't
just one carriage,
it was a train filled with gold
that left Pretoria on its way
to Mozambique.
So once again, this brings
us to gold and the links
to ancient civilizations
and our obsession with gold.
So if Africa is supposed to
be the cradle of humankind,
can we find the origins of
gold mining in Southern Africa?
And the answer is absolutely.
There are never-ending
tales and stories
about ancient gold mines
in Southern Africa,
just like they are
all over the world.
In South Africa, we have
some classic examples
of ancient gold mines
that mysteriously
lie hidden from modern
gold-mining companies.
And yet, there is
so much that has
being exposed over the last few
decades and the last 100 years.
In the town of
Lydenburg, for example,
that is famous for what are
called the Lydenburg Heads,
these strange-looking
ceramics heads,
masks that have been
discovered in the 1930s, just
outside the town of
Lydenburg, that clearly show
some strange humanoid features
that are not of Earthling
origin, that suggests some sort
of alien intervention here--
the Lydenburg Heads.
Just around the
time of Lydenburg,
a survey was conducted,
a geological survey
between the year 2005 and
2010, where they explored
and counted as
many as they could
of these ancient gold mines.
They're known as adit
mines, because they go
into the side of the mountains.
And they started
the count in 2005.
And I believe this was under the
instruction of Anglo American
to try and stop people
from illegally mining gold,
because many of these mines
are just abandoned but still
contain lots of gold.
It's not easy to get it out
and not easy to process it,
but you can if you want to.
So by the time they
finished counting
these ancient adit gold mines--
and I can also tell you,
incidentally, that these
mines were not initiated
in the gold rush of
1864-- these were
rediscovered by the gold miners
that created the gold rush
and reused from ancient times--
I believe these mines have
been there for thousands
and thousands of years--
and just rediscovered and
reused by the gold miners that
started the gold rush in
this part of the world.
Well, by the time they
finished this geological survey
and stopped counting,
they counted around 75,000
of these gold
mines, which made it
a little difficult to close
them all up to prevent gold
mining or illegal gold mining,
even by the mighty Anglo
American.
There are many
mysterious tunnels
that were discovered by miners
and gold miners in the '30s.
What's fascinating about
the story is that--
and I've had at least
two of these stories told
to me by the sons of the gold
miners in the '20s and '30s
in the northern part of
South Africa-- when suddenly
at about 100 feet
deep, they came
across these mysterious tunnels.
What they then did is they
called the authorities,
the mining authorities.
And in those days, it
was the Mariinsky Company
that was the mining
authority in South Africa.
And they had all the rights
to all the gold mining
and controlled everything,
together with Anglo American
and the whole legacy of Cecil
John Rhodes and the De Beers
empire that was emerging in
Southern Africa at that stage
already.
But when the Mariinsky
authorities came,
they found these mysterious
tools and artifacts
in these tunnels that
shouldn't be there.
They confiscated the
tools and artifacts.
They told the miners,
thank you for calling us.
And their words were,
we are aware of this.
Now that, I find,
very mysterious
that they were aware of
the tools and artifact
and aware all of
these ancient tunnels.
And they disappeared.
In the Wolkberg Mountain,
Northern South Africa,
there are accounts
of dozens and dozens
of kilometers of underground
tunnels, ancient gold
mines that show
evidence of gold mining.
And strangely enough, they
left behind the platinum slag.
They were clearly not
interested in the platinum.
They were only
interested in the gold.
And these mines, I've being told
by people that actually walk
through these tunnels
for kilometers upon end,
and they claim that this is
spectacular ancient evidence
of ancient gold mining.
In the 1990s, De Beers
claims to have discovered--
or should I say,
De Beers confessed
to having discovered an
ancient mine shaft that
was 22,000 feet deep.
They said it was cut with
such absolute precision
and technology that
they didn't understand.
And this clearly indicates
an ancient civilization
with advanced tools
and technology
that we are going to
get to in this series.
Anglo American confessed to me
through their chief geologist
over a beer at a pub,
believe it or not,
when he told me
that they often come
across ancient vanished
civilizations and ancient mines
and tunnels and mine shafts.
And their instructions
are very simply,
when you come across
ancient mines,
cover it up and move right on.
When I met this guy, who
was a chief geologist
at a pub at a friend of
mine's birthday party,
he volunteers this
information to me.
And he told me that
just recently-- this
was in 2006-- just recently
they found an ancient mine
shaft near the town
of Bloemfontein, which
is the capital of the Orange
Free State in South Africa.
And that blew my mind.
And I asked him, so did you
find anything, any remains?
And he said, yeah, there
was some skeletal remains
at the bottom of the shaft.
It was about 500 meters
deep, I recall he told me.
And I said, so what did
you do, what did you do?
And he said, well, we just
close it up and moved right on.
And the file sits in a secret
file at Anglo American's head
office, where they must
have thousands of accounts
of ancient gold mines.
But the mystery continues.
In very recent times, in
2014, in a modern mine,
on the West Strand
in South Africa,
where a lot of the gold
mines are found today,
one of the sides are
the mine passage,
the mine tunnel opened up and
exposed an ancient gold mine
and a tunnel that was
cut with precision
that they could not
understand and clearly
was not their doing.
When they called the
mine authorities,
that whole section of
the mine was closed up.
Everyone was evacuated,
never to go back
into that part of
the mine again.
So you can clearly
see an agenda here
that, whenever this kind of
information gets exposed,
they just close it up, cover
it up, and move right along.
There is a great example
of ancient gold mining
in the Northeast
province of Zimbabwe,
in the so-called slave
pits, or the Nyanga pits.
Now, modern historians and
archaeologists call these pits
in the ground made
out of stone, they
call them slave pits,
animal pits, or grain pits.
Now, it's laughable,
if you try and call it
slave pits, because obviously,
if you put slaves in,
there they're going to
climb out and get out.
There's no way you're going
to keep them in there.
So it's nonsensical.
It's nonsensical to think that
you can put grain in there
or animals in there.
How're you going
to get them out?
So a brilliant
Zimbabwe geologist,
by the name of Ann Kritzinger
at Zimbabwe University,
started doing some
research on this.
And she found
something startling.
She found that all of
these so-called slave pits
had inlet valves and
they had outlet valves.
The outlet valves were
normally slightly lower
than the inlet valves.
But what she found was
that in the outlet valves,
there was sedimentation
of up to 2 grams
per ton of gold in
the outlet valves,
leading her to the
conclusion that these must've
been some sort of
gold processing tanks
in ancient times
for the purification
or the extraction
of gold, leading
to the sedimentation of
gold in the outlet valves
to these tanks.
But one of the most
exciting discoveries for me
about ancient gold
mining in South Africa
comes from the town
of Carletonville.
When a team of mine
rescuers or a mine rescue
team around 1975--
because the man
that told me this story who
died a few months after he told
me this story a few
years ago now, told me
he'd never told
the story to anyone
before he told me, because
he thought they would just
think he was crazy.
So in about 1975, they were
testing their equipment.
And they went down a sinkhole.
And these sinkholes around
this part of South Africa
are common occurrence.
They keep appearing every
now and then because
of the draining of
the water by the mines
and creating these
sudden sinkholes that
appear out of nowhere.
And they were testing
their equipment.
They went down the sinkhole.
And at the bottom
of the sinkhole,
about 20 or 30 meters
deep, they found one
of the sides that was caved in.
When they opened it up and moved
into a tunnel that they found,
what did they find?
They found an
ancient tunnel that
was paved all the way around.
The bottom and the
sides was paved.
They will absolutely amazed.
And they walked into the
darkness several meters
to be confronted
by a statue, which
refers to-- that resembles
something like Viracocha,
or the pre-Inca creator, the
pre-Inca deity that is closely
associated with gold
and the mining of gold
and the obsession of gold
in ancient civilizations.
This just highlights
how the mining
of gold across
ancient civilizations
can be connected from
all over the world.
And they seem to be
a connecting point
and evidence of all
ancient cultures
at the southern tip of Africa.
And we're going to be dealing
with this in the next episode.
I'm Michael Tellinger,
and thanks for watching.
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