Amazon Treasures & Shamans

Hosted byGeorge Knapp

Amazon Treasures & Shamans

About the show

Joining George Knapp, researcher and author Lee Elders discussed his hunt for treasure in the mid-1960s in the Ecuadoran Amazon, and his encounters with local shamans. It has long been reported that there were a lot of Incan treasures buried in caves and other places during the Spanish conquest, he noted. In one of his first expeditions, outside the town of Cuenca, he teamed up with some local Indians and panned for gold on the banks of a remote river named Hell.

The panning was highly successful yielding gold nuggets that filled two coffee cans, but the team got lost trying to find their way back to civilization, and one of the group members tried to sabotage them, he recounted. But a mysterious dog joined Elder's group, and helped guide them back by discovering a tree that had fallen across the river.

On a subsequent journey, he sought out a legendary treasure of emeralds called "Green Fire" which were mentioned in the last will and testament of Raphael Bollanos Mejia, a Colombian who worked for a quinine harvesting company. Meja described where a trove of priceless emeralds were hidden in the jungle, and Elder and his partner compared these details with an old Army map, and set out on an adventure to find the stones. During the expedition, they worked with Shuara shamans from the rainforest who incorporated ayahuasca-induced visions. Though ultimately they did not find the emeralds, their trip was filled with fascinating occurrences. At one site, Elders said they witnessed four balls of light, followed by four shadows moving in unison, which one of the shaman identified as jaguars. He also touched on his work in ufology, and the Billy Meier case.

Fronczak Case Update

In the first hour, Paul Joseph Fronczak provided an update on his puzzling life story --after 50 years, his true identity remains a mystery. He was believed to be a child who was kidnapped shortly after birth at a Chicago hospital, and later recovered in Newark, NJ, but genetic tests as an adult showed he was not related to the Fronczaks. After George Knapp's report on the story, the incident drew national attention, and the FBI re-opened the case. So far, new leads have not panned out, Fronczak noted, though he was able to locate a second cousin via Ancestry.com, but he turned out to be adopted.

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