Here’s today’s Sleuthtastic article, which begins with a quote from a recent teaser ad:

“A new Aussie mining boom is being born, 8,560km from the Pilbara…

“The Luckier Country

“Why there is a $20bn ‘covert exodus’ of Australia’s mining elite to a country that promises even GREATER riches…

“And how a ‘George Soros tip-off’ led me to the $1.26 Aussie stock leading the charge…”

Sounds pretty exciting, right? It gets even better — like so many other mining-focused newsletter dudes have done in recent years, Alex Cowie also has to throw in his “Indiana Jones” story to make it even sexier, so he tells us about the tiny plane he flew in as he feared for his life — just like the plane that crashed recently with a bunch of mining folks aboard, and about the dead bodies he saw on his journey to find you a fabulous mining stock.

Which, of course, subtly reminds us that he’s taking terrible risks just to make you wealthy, so you oughtta spit out that $150 for a subscription quick! It’s the least you can do!

The newsletter they’d like you to sign up for, incidentally, is Diggers & Drillers, which is the natural resources-focused letter from Port Phillip Publishing in Australia — yes, yet another international affiliate of the octopus that is the Agora-plex.

Well, the pitch is all about mining in Africa — and specifically, about the fact that Australian miners are reaching out to Africa to find more potential drill targets … and, more specifically still, that there’s one company with a big discovery in Botswana that you ought to be climbing all over.

So what is it? Well, thankfully, we get some clues even beyond the George Soros bit and the A$1.26 share price:

“In 2003 there were 54 ASX-listed firms with exploration interests in Africa. Today there are over 160.

“I was in Botswana to investigate just ONE of them.

“It was on the back of a tip-off I’d received back in April last year.

“It had come via one of the richest men on the planet…

“And it could present YOU with a 180% return within 24 months.”

That “tip off” was that George Soros, still most famous for his massive billion dollar profit from “breaking” the Bank of England in 1992, bought shares of this miner in April of 2010 — on April 7, we’re told.

Cowie doesn’t mention that George Soros’ funds often own 500 or more stocks, or that they’re so massive that a particular position needn’t be a particular personal interest of Mr. Soros himself … but we’ll let that slide.

So … some more details about this stock that Cowie thinks could be “the equivalent of a winning lottery ticket?”

“Concentrate production is soon to start from what could be the most significant new mine on the African continent in decades.

“The price of the resource in question is cresting at all-time highs – up 30% in the last year alone.

“And one as-yet unnoticed Australian company – stock trading right now at around $1.26 – is in charge of the whole project.”

Then we get into some of the specifics of this particular mine, for our clue-sifting pleasure:

“high ore grades that are double the industry average….

“going to start producing in the second quarter of 2012….

“The drilled part so far alone is over 300km long… with the whole tenement 1200km² … all potentially containing:

“100 million potential tonnes of something that will soon be in VERY short supply”

Cowie even goes so far as to state the obvious (not that we don’t appreciate it — sometimes we’re all too oblivious to the obvious) — that all resource companies like to claim that their mine will be the next “global game-changer”; and that “strike-it-rich stories are a dime a dozen in Australia.”

Which is why, he says, you need him — because he get his “boots on the ground” and talks to trustworthy geologists to help get at the truth.

And yes, he says that he’s convinced this is a case where the company is “telling the truth.”

So what’s the “secret” stock that Cowie will tell you about if you subscribe? We went so far as to check a few of the other clues as well — like these:

“Macquarie has just bought a 10.3% stake in the SAME Aussie company I’m going to tell you about….

“… market cap of $577 million.”

This, sez the Thinkolator, is a little company called Discovery Metals (DML in Australia, DME in London, and DVYLF on the pink sheets, where trading is very thin)

I don’t know whether George Soros or his fund still own any shares of Discovery Metals — he’s no longer listed under his familiar names and entities on their top 20 shareholders page, though Macquarie is with their (now) 10.6% stake. For what it’s worth, Soros apparently doesn’t have to tell us which foreign stocks he owns — the SEC requirements mean that it’s pretty much just exchange-traded US stocks that investment managers have to report on their 13F filings. (Which is why, apropos of nothing, Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t report its shares of Tesco or Posco each quarter).

Discovery Metals does indeed have two projects in Botswana, and it’s their Boseto copper project that has Cowie excited here — it’s in NW Botswana, with their tenements now extending to the Namibian border. The full extent of their tenements does total 300km, though I don’t know if they’ve “drilled” all of that as Cowie indicates. The other number he used, 1200 square kilometers, doesn’t match up as the total size of their tenements, the number they claim is actually 10,100 km2, but everything else in the tease matches up, including some direct quotes from analysts… and the share price and market cap.

Discovery Metals did get quite a bit of attention starting about a year ago, with good drilling results from Boseto that helped to drive the shares higher … and with that Soros purchase. They released some more results just last month that sounded pretty promising as well, and confirmed that they’re still working on a bankable feasibility study for an underground mine (so far they’re moving forward with the open pit mine construction, but they think there’s more to be found in a deeper mine). The latest announcement is that the new feasibility study will come out in the third quarter, and that they will start mining (the open pit, presumably) sometime in the first half of 2012.

They say that “Planned production is 36,000 tonnes of copper and 1 million ounces of silver per annum over a minimum 15 year mine life,” and that their goal is to ramp that copper number up to 50,000 tonnes. You can see their latest announcement with these details here.

Well, it’s always nice to hear about a miner that’s actually going to dig something up in the near future — will copper remain at these historically high prices? Will Discovery Metals be able to move forward with Boseto mine construction in order to be shipping concentrate a year from now? Those are a couple of the questions you can ask yourself as you consider the shares — all I can tell you is that Alex Cowie seems to like ’em, and I think he’s also touted them in the past (though memory fails as to when that was — I think I’ve mentioned these guys before, but don’t know when).