Missile Range Target: a Cache of Gold : Probe will peek beneath a peak at White Sands to check a 1937 report of a cavern full of treasure.

After a half-century of disappointment and delay, a band of Southern California treasure hunters has launched a high-tech search for a hoard of gold they believe lies deep beneath a fissured limestone ridge on the White Sands Missile Range.

With the help of ground radar, a miniature television camera and a global satellite positioning system, descendants of the late M. E. (Doc) Noss hope to establish once and for all whether he told the truth about stumbling across a cavern full of bullion inside Victorio Peak.

“It’s not the dream of finding billions,” says Noss’ stepgrandson, Terry Delonas, a 43-year-old former advertising executive from Irvine who heads the Ova Noss Family Partnership. “We need to finish what this family was challenged with.”

Victorio Peak poses a formidable challenge.

It rises 400 feet above the Hembrillo Basin in the hot, inhospitable San Andres Mountains about 40 miles north of the missile range headquarters in an area used for fighter-jet gunnery practice.

Last week, a team of 15 workers under the watchful eye of military police graded roads and surveyed the area around the peak with metal detectors, preparing for the arrival of drilling rigs needed to bore six-inch-diameter holes into underground rooms.

The searchers plan to lower a torpedo-shaped probe into the holes to take precise measurements of each cavern’s dimensions and see whether they contain anything unusual. The probe is equipped with a 750-watt lamp, video and still cameras and a system for taking accurate compass readings.

Delonas hopes that the data will reveal the shortest route for tunneling into the rooms.

“We’re hoping we’ll only have to dig 40 feet instead of 400,” he says.

Victorio Peak has tantalized treasure hunters since 1937, when Noss, a foot doctor and prospector with a 10th-grade education, claimed that he stumbled upon a passageway leading into the ridge while taking refuge from the rain during a deer-hunting trip. Deep underground, he said, was a huge chamber filled with gold, jewels and artifacts, along with chained skeletons.

Afterward, Noss displayed gold bars that he claimed he had retrieved from the cave, but he said the narrow entrance had collapsed when he set off dynamite to widen it.

He was shot to death in a 1949 fight with a Texas man he had brought in to finance more digging at the peak. The Texan claimed self-defense and was acquitted.

Ova Noss spent the next 30 years trying to retrieve the treasure she believed her husband had found. That grew more difficult after 1955, when the government expanded the missile range and restricted access to the peak.

Several Air Force officers claimed to have found gold in 1958, leading to an Army-sanctioned search in 1961 that turned up nothing. A 1963 dig and a 10-day surface survey in 1977 also came up empty-handed, although ground radar did reveal a large cavern 400 feet under the peak.

Eight years after Ova Noss died in 1979, her children and grandchildren joined with friends and investors to form the family partnership, dedicated to solving the mystery. With White Sands authorities reluctant to permit further exploration, the family fought for congressional authorization, which was granted in November, 1989.

The partnership will have spent about $1 million by the time the work is finished. The figure does not include the support of volunteers and corporate sponsors.

Many believe the whole thing is a hoax, however.

Among them is Jim Eckles, a missile range spokesman who researched the Victorio Peak legend for a series of stories in the base newspaper.

“My own opinion is pretty well known,” Eckles says. “I don’t believe it much--there are a lot of holes in the whole thing.”

Most lost treasure legends are implausible on their face, he contends. “These people were awful careless with their gold in the old days,” he says. “They stashed it and just forgot about it.”

Delonas is unruffled by sniping from skeptics.

“I’m completely convinced there was treasure and artifacts in Victorio Peak,” he says. “I’m convinced a small portion of it, at least, was removed. If any of it remains, I’m confident we’ll get it out.”

The searchers hope for a definitive answer. Whatever the result, Delonas says, “That would lay the legend to rest, and then the family could rest.”