In the book chapter: "Old Gold", Bourke Lee describes a conversation which he had several years ago with a small group of Death Valley residents.
At one point two of the men, Jack and Bill, described their experience with an 'underground city which they claimed to have discovered in 1931 after one of them had fallen through the bottom of an old mine shaft near Wingate Pass.
Besides they claimed to have discovered preserved mummies of "a race of men eight to nine feet tall” in several caverns which they have followed about 20 miles north into the heart of the Panamint Mountains.
Evidence of a lost civilization in Death Valley came in a bizarre report of caves and mummies in the Hot Citizen, a Nevada paper, on August 5, 1947.
Some highlights from the article:
The caves contain mummies of men and animals and implements of a culture 80,000 years old but more advanced than ours.
One cavern contained their ritual hall with devices and markings similar to the Masonic order.
A long tunnel from this ritual temple hall took the party into a room where, well-preserved remains of dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, imperial elephants and other extinct beasts were paired off in niches as if on display.
The 32 caves covered a 180-square-mile area in California's Death Valley and southern Nevada.
According to Howard E. Hill some catastrophe apparently drove the people into the caves.