- Tonight, a fortune worth hundreds of billions
of dollars plundered by Japan during World War II.
- Artwork, priceless treasures,
a hundred billion or more in gold and silver alone.
- It’s whereabouts are still unknown
and shrouded in mystery.
- The Philippines is 7,000 plus islands.
You can’t think of a better place to hide things.
- Now we explore the top theories
about this infamous, missing treasure.
- The United States government would be very interested
in finding out where this gold was.
- [Stephanie] These aren’t just treasure hunters,
these are CIA agents.
- The Marcoses aren’t really doing a great job
of trying to hide the fact
that they suddenly have a bunch of money.
- In retrospect, how did they get so rich?
Nobody was asking that question.
- What really happened to the lost gold of World War II?
(suspenseful music)
It’s the spring of 1942,
just a few months after Pearl Harbor.
War is raging in the Pacific.
Japan’s vast empire stretches from Manchuria
through Southeast Asia
all the way to the Solomon Islands,
and in every territory it conquers,
Japanese forces seize a fortune.
- The Japanese are actually meticulous in their ability
to extract wealth and they do so at every level.
So not only will they go after things like national banks
and depositories of gold bullion and silver bars,
but they will also raid individual houses
to amass enormous stockpiles of jewelry
and other symbols of wealth and value.
- Think about the entire national treasure
of 13 countries.
This is a lot of value, a lot of money.
The value of what’s estimated that the Japanese looted
is between 60 and a 100 billion dollars
in 1945 dollars.
You know what that translates to?
Between three and $5 trillion today.
- [Laurence] In March of 1942, Japan has another conquest
in its sites, the US territory of the Philippines.
- The Japanese going to very quickly sweep south
toward the capital of Manila.
There they’re going to run into elements
of the United States army that’s been in placed
under Douglas MacArthur to try to halt their advance.
But before that happens,
MacArthur and his headquarters team are ordered
by President Roosevelt to withdraw from the Philippines.
- So the Philippines will fall in 1942
and MacArthur will have to evacuate.
So he will leave the Philippines.
He makes his sort of famous promise.
I will return, I will be back,
back to help you against the Japanese.
- In some ways, the Philippines is the perfect place
for the Japanese to amass a lot of the loot
that they’re pulling off of the mainland of Asia.
And that’s because the Philippines
is an island location.
It’s a very easy transshipment point.
There’s a lot of great ports and harbors
and there’s no possibility of an enemy overrunning
any of those storage depots.
And so what they’re gonna do is they’re going to consolidate
the material that they’re stealing
in a few specific locations
and then they’re going to transship it
directly back to Japan.
- [Laurence] But by early 1943, a US submarine blockade
has cut off the sea routes back to Japan’s home islands.
The Japanese hold onto the Philippines, for now.
- There’s still this hope among the Japanese
that the Philippines will be one of the last things
that will kind of fall.
That they will continue to be able to control that at least.
- [Laurence] By late 1944, the tides of war are turning.
MacArthur makes good on his promise to return
to the Philippines, arriving with 200,000 troops.
His opponent, the notorious Japanese General,
Tomoyuki Yamashita.
- Yamashita is one of the great troubleshooters
of the Japanese army.
He’s widely perceived
as one of its greatest field commanders.
His job is to both enhance the defenses
and make it as costly as possible
for any potential American invasion.
- They called him the Tiger of Malaya.
What a great name, from his victory in Malaya.
And what better a man to lead the defense
of the Philippines than him.
- [Laurence] According to some, fighting off the allies,
wasn’t Yamashita’s only mission?
- Some historians do suggest
that it wasn’t just winning the war or staying
and keeping hold the Philippines,
it was also what to do with all of this wealth
that he had accumulated.
- If they’re gonna lose the Philippines,
they have to hide this treasure somewhere
where they can come back in the future for it.
- [Laurence] The following summer,
after the US drops two atomic bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Emperor Hirohito finally surrenders
on August 15th, 1945.
But Yamashita and his army take another 17 days
to surrender, holding out in the mountains of Northern Luzon
leading some to ask what were they doing during that time?
- According to Sterling Seagrave,
an author who’s an expert in this field,
a General Yamashita, was working in cahoots
with an organization called the Golden Lily.
Who was in the Golden Lily?
Military strategists, economic experts,
members of the Japanese royal family,
they had the job to find, take and use,
and ultimately hide all of this treasure.
So 1943, tons of gold and treasure piling up in Manila
and Emperor Hirohito hires his brother Prince Chichibu,
to head the Golden Lily and to spearhead the operation
of securing the treasure.
- The Philippines is 7,000 plus islands.
You can’t think of a better place to hide things.
Prince Chichibu arranged this group to create locations
to place these hundreds of tunnels.
- And you can’t do this alone.
You need thousands of laborers
and the Japanese had plenty of them.
- They would build these tunnels with allied forces.
They would use American and Allied POWs
and they would use enslaved Filipinos
to construct these tunnels.
- They were really complex so they weren’t just a tunnel
underground, they were just massive.
There were all kinds of little kind of secret ways
and a lot of things designed to throw off anyone
who might go underground who might discover the tunnels.
- The defensive aspects of Japanese tunnels
included booby traps and these could take the form
of physical traps.
So pits with spikes at the bottom of them.
Chemical weapon attacks, fragile containers full of cyanide.
- They even used the water table
so that when people would come in,
the water tables could rise
and the people in the caves would drown.
Likely the last 17 days they would seal these entrances
with concrete and then they’d let the jungle take over.
- [Laurence] The story of buried treasure
sounds like the stuff of myth,
but there’s at least one witness who says
he survived the destruction of one treasure tunnel.
- Decades later, a Filipino civilian Ben Valmores
came forward, claimed he had information.
- As a kid, at 14 he was hired to be the valet
for Prince Takeda.
So Valmores claims he was there when this massive tunnel
was built that was 225 feet below the ground.
And Yamashita says they want to have a party
to celebrate the construction of this massive tunnel
and he tells all the engineers to go inside the tunnel.
At that time, Prince Takeda calls Valmores out.
He says, "No, you’re my valet come out.
You don’t get to go to the party."
They blow this thing up.
Everyone dies inside.
So Prince Takeda saves Valmores,
who is the witness to watching the Japanese kill
their own engineers again to keep everything silent.
- The Japanese were really interested in secrecy.
They wanted to preserve what they had done,
making it off limits knowledge-wise to the allies.
Anybody who knew about this gold was gone.
- [Laurence] According to Seagrave,
the loot is so cleverly hidden,
Golden Lily members will need maps to find it again.
- Maps were produced in blue for the engineers
who actually designed the various vaults
throughout the Philippines.
And then maps were designed in red
to tell people how to find the treasure.
And these maps would have flags
that pointed in one direction if they were to be read
in a mirror and in the other direction
if they were to be read normally.
- So even if you can read this map
and you can find where the vault is,
you could have the map upside down.
You could have the map backwards
and realize that you go the wrong place, you can die.
- [Laurence] The cartographers supposedly draw up
several copies of the maps
which go only to the highest ranking members
of the Golden Lily.
- The Golden Lily was really counting on
keeping the Philippines for the peace talks,
to allow ’em to go back and get the treasure
to refund the imperialist army.
They didn’t get that.
So Japan has to keep not only the treasure
in the Philippines now because they can’t transport it,
they’ve gotta keep it secret.
- [Laurence] But did Yamashita and his soldiers
really hide billions in gold?
- There are lots of maps to this gold in the Philippines
that start cropping up, why?
’Cause everybody wants to go hunting for treasure.
The question is, are these maps real?
- Ben Valmores claims that as Prince Takeda
prepared to leave Japan,
he approached him and gave him a satchel that included maps
to 175 different treasure sites throughout the Philippines.
- Takeda was on a submarine fleeing,
and in case the submarine sunk,
he wanted someone to know where the gold was.
- So Prince Takeda goes back,
he instructs Valmores to bury these maps, these 40 maps,
and he does, he buries them in his backyard.
Keep in mind that Prince Takeda saved his life
when that tunnel was exploded, he called him out of there.
And so maybe there’s a sense of duty on Valmores’ part.
- It’s sort of weird,
you think if he got these maps from Takeda
that maybe he would’ve gone and dug one up
and gone and gotten some gold
and lived an immensely luxurious life, no.
- [Laurence] Despite allegedly being in possession
of so many of the Golden Lily’s maps,
Valmores never seems to profit from them.
- Publicly, Valmores never found anything,
never became a rich man.
- But think about it for a second.
If you have a map and you find treasure,
are you gonna tell anyone?
I wouldn’t.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] It’s the fall of 1945.
The Pacific War is over,
but the US maintains a strong military presence
in the Philippines.
America’s prime mission is to rebuild the country
and provide relief for its suffering people.
But there are also whispers of hidden gold.
- Think about this.
Estimates are that the value of just the gold between 60
and a billion dollars in 1945 money
that’s between three and $5 trillion today.
- It’s a pretty history altering amount of wealth,
if it does exist.
And it wouldn’t just be Japan that would want it,
it might be other nations who might be interested
in getting it as well.
- [Laurence] According to some, President Truman is briefed
on the Golden Lily hoards and orders the fortune
to be found and seized.
- There starts to be rumors that again soldiers,
American soldiers know of perhaps former Japanese soldiers
or people who knew Japanese soldiers
who had heard about Yamashita’s wealth
and they know someone who knows where to look for it.
- [Laurence] According to this theory,
Japanese officers looking for leniency
begin sharing information
about the Golden Lily’s top secret operation.
That doesn’t mean they know exactly
where the treasure filled tunnels are,
but apparently there’s one prisoner who might.
- The person that has the information,
most information is Yamashita, who they have in custody.
He is in prison in Manila.
How do you get that information from him?
You can’t torture him, it’d be a war crime.
So US is trying to think what they can do
to get this information.
Yamashita will never give it up because in his eyes,
this is the future of imperial Japan.
- [Laurence] But Yamashita’s driver, Major Kojima Kashii
is a much easier target.
- Yamashita’s driver finds himself in a small dark cell
being interviewed by a couple of OSS operatives,
the precursor to the CIA.
It wasn’t a good day for him.
- According to Seagrave’s notorious American spook
Edward Lansdale and a
Filipino National by the name of
Santa Romana, who is referred to
generally as Santy,
were the people who were involved
in the torture of Yamashita’s driver.
- So the driver cracks, big surprise.
What’s he do?
He leads Santy and Lansdale to a dozen or so
of the more easily accessible treasure troves.
What do they find?
Gold bars, platinum bars, diamonds, gold Buddhas.
They not literally, but figuratively find Fort Knox.
- [Laurence] While Santy and his team are supposedly
breaking open more vaults,
Lansdale flies to Washington to brief President Truman
about the find.
- Truman consults with his cabinet
and makes a really pivotal decision.
He says like, we are gonna keep this.
We are gonna keep all of this,
but we’ve got to keep it under wraps.
- You’re looking ahead to a cold war
that the US is gonna be engaged in.
And the fear of communist domination was at a fever pitch.
Pragmatic approach is to say we have access to these funds,
we can keep off the books to advance US democratic interests
around the world.
And why would we give that up?
- To use this wealth, you have to keep it a secret.
And what does that mean?
It means silencing Yamashita.
- [Laurence] On October 29th, 1945,
an American military tribunal in Manila
begins presenting its case against General Yamashita
for war crimes relating to his campaign in the Philippines.
It’s a controversial move.
- So you think about how long these tribunals usually take.
You think about like the Nazis that were brought up
on trial.
It takes a long time.
Sometimes it takes decades.
Yamashita’s trial is run through very, very fast.
- [Laurence] Yamashita, once Japan’s outstanding general
takes the stand.
Before him witnesses have presented harrowing evidence
of atrocities committed under his command.
- The big question is what’s Yamashita’s guilty of?
Yes, he was a Japanese general,
but he is not on record ordering the death of,
for example, American POWs.
- Yamashita himself says he was not aware of
half the stuff he was charged with.
In his position and with the number of troops he oversaw,
he couldn’t have been.
- [Laurence] On December 7th, 1945,
the four year anniversary of Pearl Harbor,
they deliver their verdict.
- The commission finds you guilty as charged
and sentences you to death by hanging.
- Yamashita is really the first commander
to be held responsible for things
that his men commit without him knowing it.
And that feeds into this idea of why the execution?
Well, if the government does want the money,
you wanna keep him quiet
and that’s how and why he is executed.
- [Laurence] The notorious general is hanged
on February 23rd, 1946.
Whatever secrets he’s hiding about buried gold,
go to his grave with him.
- What happens to the wealth that supposedly
as historians claim was collected
by the United States government?
Well it has to go somewhere.
And that’s this secret banking society,
this secret wealth container system, the Black Eagle Trust.
- And according to the Seagraves,
this is a trust which now houses all the funds
of the loot seized from Yamashita,
but also all the loots seized from the Nazis.
And it wasn’t until decades later
that a former deputy director of the CIA Ray Cline
admits to Seagraves that this money
was put into 176 different banks spanning 42 countries.
Now a lot of historians will sort of question that idea.
Was there really a Black Eagle Trust?
Is this a conspiracy theory?
But the reality is that when Santy, Santa Romana died,
he left hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Some historians say it was because he had access
to the looted Yamashita Gold
for his role that he was able to play in uncovering it.
If you wanna question this theory
or think about how truthful this is,
one question would be, well,
why does the United States care about keeping this secret?
One explanation could be all of the logistic trouble
that we would have to go through in admitting
that this stuff came from victims of war.
- This is the fruit of the poison tree.
I didn’t steal the money, but it’s stolen money.
You’re responsible and you’re accountable.
So that’s why the US government would probably want to keep
the existence of these billions and billions
and billions of dollars, a state secret.
It begs a very tantalizing question.
If the US government got their hand on billions of dollars
from 12 sites, what happened to the other 163?
So what does that mean?
Billions of dollars today,
trillions of dollars could be sitting hidden in caves
throughout the Philippines waiting to be discovered.
(suspenseful music)
- [Laurence] If in fact hundreds of millions of dollars
in treasure was buried in tunnels in the Philippines
during the end of World War II,
then where did it go?
Was it handed to a secret government slush fund
as some believe or did it end up somewhere else.
- Decades after the war,
one of the most infamous dictators in world history
in the 20th century, he becomes part of the story.
- [Laurence] It’s 1986 and the eyes of the world
are on the Philippines.
As notorious dictator Ferdinand Marcos is overthrown
in a popular uprising.
- There’s a lot of complaints living under a dictator,
but living under the Marcoses has a very specific complaint.
While the Filipinos are living in abject poverty,
Ferdinand Marcos and his wife,
they’re living in the lap of luxury.
- I vividly remember being a kid in the 1980s
and reading about these million dollar shoe shopping sprees
that Imelda Marcos went on.
- The Marcos aren’t just rich,
they’re significantly wealthier than most of the country.
And the way they spend money is in complete contrast
to the way that most Filipinos are living
after World War II in the Philippines.
- There’s the one story that they went to Rome on vacation
and on the way back they had to turn the plane around
because Imelda Marcos had forgotten
that she wanted to buy a particular kind of cheese.
- The Marcoses aren’t really doing a great job
of trying to hide the fact
that they suddenly have a bunch of money.
The good only question comes,
where’s that money coming from?
It’s obviously not from his government salary.
- [Laurence] There are accusations that Marcos
and his cronies embezzled upwards of $10 billion
from the Philippines treasury.
But is there more to this story?
Could their wealth in fact come from another source?
- So if the Marcos are in charge of the Philippines,
then they have such vast power in the Philippines.
One explanation could be, were the Marcos are drawing
from Yamashita’s gold.
- [Laurence] If that’s the case, it all begs the question,
how did the Marcoses get their hands on Yamashita’s gold?
The Marcos chapter of the lost gold saga
really begins in 1961,
with the 17 year old boy named Rogelio Roger Roxas.
- Enter Rogelio Roxas,
who is born towards the end of the war in the Philippines.
And keep in mind the Philippines is an impoverished country.
Roxas is born into poverty,
but he’s also born into the legend of this gold.
- And he meets this Japanese man who claims to know
from a Japanese soldier where Yamashita’s gold is located.
So he claims to know of a site of one of these tunnels.
He has a map and he knows where it is.
- If he’s interpreting this map correctly,
it says that one of the Golden Lily vaults
is actually very close to his hometown of Baguio.
In fact, right by the hospital.
Roxas thinks he’s actually onto something.
- [Laurence] In early 1970,
Roxas gets a permit from a local judge to begin excavation.
That judge’s name is P.O. Marcos.
- Roxas didn’t really make the connection,
but the judge that grants the excavating permit to Roxas
is actually connected to the Marcos family.
So he is part of, you know, this vast network of Marcos.
It connects Roxas to Marcos and to Yamashita’s gold.
So now Yamashita’s Gold is part of the Marcos story.
- [Laurence] In May of 1970,
Roxas and his team start hacking away
through dense vegetation near the hospital.
- So after two months they find a cave.
While the bad news is about a hundred yards inside the cave,
it’s caved in and it appears to have been dynamited shut.
What does that mean?
They’re gonna have to tunnel around it.
- [Laurence] Weeks go by, the men are running out of money.
- Treasure hunting, it’s like gambling.
You’re sitting at a roulette wheel
and you just can’t get up.
It’s that last spade of dirt.
It’s that last pass with the metal detector
and that’s like Roxas.
They’re about to quit and Roxas decides to give it
one last look with his metal detector.
And (makes buzzing sound),
the metal detector senses something.
- Full of adrenaline, they start digging and digging.
They break through, they find,
you know a whole chamber underneath them.
- And they look down and what do they see inside?
28 inch tall, golden Buddha, Burmese style.
They’ve hit the jackpot.
- The thing weighs a ton.
It’s only this big.
They get it up and they bring it back
and he stores it in his closet
because they want to get back to excavating
and digging more.
- [Laurence] That’s when Roxas claims
to have bound another chamber,
crammed with wooden boxes from floor to ceiling.
- He opens one of the boxes, inside gold bars.
And if Roxas is telling the truth,
this is a massive quantity of treasure.
It’s a mind blowing experience.
It’s like something out of an Indiana Jones movie.
This is too much gold to move in a day.
They’re gonna go home, sell the Buddha
and use the money to hire more workers
and get more personnel.
Go back up in the cave and get the rest of the gold.
And Roxas of course wants to celebrate.
He has his brother take a picture of him
next to the Buddha.
- We’ve got this picture of the one thing of Roxas
with this golden Buddha and a prospective buyer comes
and looks at it, test the gold
and finds it is actually 22 karat.
- [Laurence] The mysterious buyer offers Roxas a $160,000
for the Buddha.
Roxas says, he’ll think about it.
- And as he’s thinking about it,
he’s looking at this Buddha and he notices
what just imperceptively looks like a fine liner
on the neck of the Buddha.
So he takes this and he looks at it and he starts to strike.
It takes a fricking wooden stick
and he starts hitting this thing until it comes loose,
removes the head and inside are handfuls of diamonds,
cut and uncut.
- Is all that glitters in the Philippines really gold?
More than 20 years after the Japanese Imperial Army
surrenders the islands,
Rogelio Roxas digs up what appears to be part
of Yamashita’s legendary treasure.
But just as Roxas is celebrating his find,
the tale of the lost gold takes another dramatic twist.
- April 5th, 1971, 2:30 am and there’s a knock at the door.
Bad thing in the Philippines, opens the door,
it’s the police.
They come in, they arrest Roxas, they seize the statue,
they later put him in jail.
But guess who is there?
The buyer and Roxas knows what’s going on, why?
Because on the rifles there are these little red ribbons
and that means palace guard, Ferdinand Marcos,
who knows who’s behind this.
(dramatic music)
- And if you go back and realize that the permit originally
came from P.O. Marcos who was related to Ferdinand Marcos,
connect the dots and you realize
that’s where their information came,
then Marcos probably sent that buyer
to make sure it was legit.
Then the palace guards come and confiscate and arrest him.
- [Laurence] Outraged, Roxas goes to the police
and the media with his story.
It’s not long before the word spreads
of his treatment by Marcos.
- When the Buddha is stolen from him,
this is really heartbreaking.
Again, it’s not just about the money,
but what it meant to him and what it meant for being able
to continue to search for the truth.
- Everyone knows about Roxas and this Buddha.
And so there’s this enormous public outcry
when this happens ’cause he’s sort of a folk hero
and Marcos decides to return the Buddha.
But the Buddha that’s returned isn’t the same Buddha.
Buddha that returned isn’t made of gold,
it’s made of bronze.
The head is stuck on.
It’s just not the same Buddha that gives this like
copycat Buddha to try to appease the public.
- [Laurence] When Roxas speaks out,
he’s arrested and spends the next two years in jail.
- The guards then torture Roxas and all of his teammates.
Roxas supposedly never breaks, which makes sense,
being that driven as a treasure hunter.
You’re not gonna break, that’s your life’s goal.
But apparently one of his team breaks
and gives up the location.
- [Laurence] After Roxas is released from prison
on November 19th, 1974, he finds soldiers
standing outside tents near the Baguio General Hospital.
- And the hospital staff later actually remembers seeing
and they’ve reported seeing soldiers come out of the cave
behind the hospital, carrying wooden crates
and putting them in military trucks.
They didn’t have to guess what was inside,
’cause some of these boxes they were rotten
and they broke up and now they’re being carried.
And what falls out, gold bars the size of cigarette boxes.
- To give you an extent of how much gold
we’re talking about, it’s 10 boxes a day going up every day
for a year.
- [Laurence] Roxas is certain Marcos’s soldiers
have found his tunnel and stolen his treasure,
but there’s nothing he can do, at least not for now.
Meanwhile, Ferdinand Marcos is on the hunt
for even more Golden Lily vaults.
- Fast forward not long after this,
Marcos allegedly gets his hand on something else.
Not more treasure, but a full set of Golden Lily maps.
So, remember those maps that Valmores had 10, 15 years ago?
Maybe the same maps.
- [Laurence] Allegedly Marcos uses these maps
to successfully excavate five more tunnel complexes
piled high with dizzying amounts of gold and jewels.
- Ferdinand and Imelda constantly spend money
and they do it with wild a abandon
if it is connected to this hoard.
Well that goes back to this idea
of whose money are they actually spending.
They’re not spending just Japanese captured goods,
they’re spending goods that belong to all different people
across the Pacific.
- So if Marcos is gonna make this work,
he’s gotta make this gold appear like it didn’t come
from the Japanese, stolen from other countries.
So Marcos hires a mining expert
and a metallurgist named Robert Curtis.
- The theory is that one of the things
that Robert Curtis was able to do for Marcos
is to doctor the gold or make it seem
through playing around with the properties
that it did actually come from the Philippines
and didn’t come from someplace else
and wasn’t captured and brought to the Philippines.
- [Laurence] But in 1986, Marcos’s plans change
when over a million Filipinos take to the streets
to protest his corrupt regime.
On February 26th, 1986,
the Marcos family flees the Philippines undercover
of darkness and having been granted asylum
by President Reagan take up a life of exile
in Honolulu, Hawaii.
- But when the Marcos flee,
they leave behind a lot of mystery.
There’s a lot of questions about what happened to
you know the rest of Yamashita’s hoard.
Is it still there?
And that’s something that fuels Roxas.
- Roxas is trying to figure out what he can do.
He’s not gonna get the gold back.
He decides to turn to the law and he files a civil suit
in Hawaii against the Marcoses
and the suit goes through the courts for years
and years and years.
It takes forever.
- [Laurence] Meanwhile, Roxas’s lawsuit against the Marcoses
takes another turn.
- The suit’s still going on.
Roxas dies in a fairly suspicious manner.
- Official cause of death is tuberculosis.
But there are questions about how is it that he died.
- According to his family,
he never had any signs of symptoms of tuberculosis.
- [Laurence] But despite his death,
Roxas has one trump card still left to play.
In 1993, the court hears Bob Curtis’s sworn testimony.
- [Speaker] Can you raise your right hand to be sworn.
Do you solemnly swear the testimony you’re about to give
is constantly the truth, so help you God.
- I do.
- [Speaker 2] Your name again on the record please.
- Robert H. Curtis.
- [Laurence] Bob Curtis claims he was hired by Marcos
to launder Yamashita’s gold.
He testifies to seeing another item in Marcos’s possession,
a solid gold Buddha with a removable head.
The very same golden Buddha Roxas is photographed with.
Curtis’s testimony helps the court
to come to a final decision.
In 1996, the court awards the Roxas estate damages
of $22 billion.
The largest civil settlement in history.
- 20 billion is a lot of money.
This was what the treasure was worth from that one vault
that he found.
There were 175 vaults.
But even more important from like a history perspective,
it’s not about the money,
it’s the that a court of law actually validated
that the existence of these vaults,
that these things were real, that Yamashita did bury these,
and that this legend is actually based in fact.
- [Laurence] It was a hard fought victory
for the Roxas family, but a largely symbolic one.
Despite Bob Curtis’s testimony,
the Marcos fortune is still caught up in legal wrangling.
The Roxas family has yet to see a penny
and the mystery of Japan’s lost gold still lingers.
- Now this just gives even more sort of proof
if you subscribe to this theory of Yamashita’s hoard
that there’s more to be discovered.
- [Laurence] Some people are convinced whatever gold
the Japanese may have hidden in the Philippines
was cleaned out by Ferdinand Marcos.
- There’s another theory,
the Marcos regime just pretended to find gold
so they could cover their tracks for embezzlement.
- [Laurence] But others think there’s reason to believe
that some Japanese gold remained hidden
in the Philippine jungle through the late 1980s.
It’s the promise of this gold that brings retired US Army
General Jack Sinlaub to the Philippines.
- So Jack is a retiree and an amateur fortune hunter.
That’s what he says.
And the US Embassy, they back up his claim,
they paint him to the local media, just a hobbyist.
But no one believes this
because in addition to being a rabid anti-communist,
he also happens to be one of the founders of the CIA.
- Jack Sinlaub forms his own treasure hunting organization
that he calls Nippon Star.
And his objective is to go to the Philippines
and potentially take advantage of information
he already knew about these possible treasure troves.
- One of his associates, Alan Foringer,
he’s the acting CIA head at the embassy in Manila.
- And so there’s this idea
that these aren’t just treasure hunters,
these are CIA agents operating as part of a deeper,
darker, or more secret mission.
(dramatic music)
- [Laurence] According to this theory,
Jack Sinlaub decides Nippon Star needs to recruit someone
with proven insider information.
- All they need to know is where to dig
and who has that information.
They know one guy who’s got it, Bob Curtis.
- Bob Curtis is the metallurgist
that worked with Ferdinand Marcos,
essentially to not only decode Japanese maps
that were in Marcos’s possession,
but also then to effectively money launder
any loot that was discovered.
Bob Curtis saw himself as an American patriot.
And according to one version of the story,
President Reagan himself had endorsed Sinlaub’s efforts
to recover stolen loot that the Japanese had hidden
in the Philippines.
- [Laurence] With all their expertise
and alleged deep pockets, Jack Sinlaub’s team
should be well placed to find Yamashita’s gold.
But their search for the treasure doesn’t go to plan.
- Publicly, Nippon Star is a, is an abject failure
throughout the 1980s.
There are a whole host of media stories about their efforts
to uncover buried treasure and their failures
to be successful in those endeavors.
Is it possible that they actually recovered treasure
and put out a cover story
that suggested that they’d been a failure?
Of course, Curtis claims he was inspired
to give his all towards these treasure hunting efforts
because any treasure recovered might be used
as a private funding source for defense
and intelligence initiatives on behalf of the United States.
- [Laurence] As Foringer wrote in a letter to Curtis,
those initiatives included the private funding
of defense projects like the B-1 Bomber,
MX Missile and Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program.
- He appears to have been convinced
that these private funding sources might create
so-called black budget programs
that would protect the United States from Soviet aggression.
- This money, if they find the Golden Lily treasure
is going to be used to establish a new arch conservative,
military industrial complex controlled by the United States.
- [Laurence] But by 1990, the pressure is growing
on Nippon Star.
And there are rumors of Soviet agents
listening in on their communications.
- While Foringer’s vacationing in Hawaii,
he’s at the beach and a passerby walks by
and something nicks his leg.
Within a day, he’s in the hospital
suffering from mysterious ailments.
And although he pulls through,
after returning to his apartment in the Philippines,
the usually healthy 37 year old begins having seizures
and his heart gives out and he dies
under mysterious circumstances.
- You gotta ask, was Foringer’s worked with Nippon Star?
Is there a connection to his death?
You gotta ask the question.
Maybe that put a target on his back.
- [Laurence] Despite Foringer’s death,
no gold is ever officially found by Nippon Star.
- Conspiracy theories love unexplained deaths,
particularly to individuals that are getting close
to the answers.
And we’ll often link those deaths together
to suggest they’re part of a bigger pattern.
Oftentimes humans die for unknown causes.
Sometimes it really is just an accident.
- [Laurence] Since the end of World War II,
the legend of Japan’s lost gold has captured the imagination
of treasure hunters worldwide.
But as the decades have passed without new discoveries,
some question if the treasure ever existed,
and if yes will more ever be found?
- We do know, we’ve got one great photo of Roxas
with that Buddha,
and after 80 plus years of searching for that treasure,
that is the only real proof that we have.
- Like a lot of theories,
there are certain key points that you can see
or that you know are real.
And so with Yamashita’s hoard,
we certainly know that the Japanese plundered.
- They stole tens of billions of dollars.
The Japanese conquered the Pacific,
they plungered like there was no tomorrow.
They brought the wealth back to the Philippines.
- There certainly was looting in the Philippines
just like there was looting by the Japanese
in really anywhere that they went.
That is a fact.
- But there’s no photos of vaults,
there’s no records of how much gold was brought into Manila.
- Probably the diamond filled Buddha
is a spoil of the Japanese looting,
but maybe it’s more of a one-off
than the tip of the iceberg.
Maybe this was just one tunnel that was filled
and we found it
and maybe there isn’t this vast network
that was part of the Golden Lily.
- [Laurence] Some also point to logistical concerns
around Yamashita’s last days during World War II
to question the extent of the legendary treasure
he supposedly buried.
- If you think about just how much gold was purported
to have existed, how heavy and how much it was,
the logistical requirements to move that kind of wealth
would’ve been not only one of their main tasks,
it would’ve been the only thing that they could do.
(suspenseful music)
I think one of the real treasures in the Philippines
is that millions of dollars spent on the local economy,
fortune hunting and treasure hunting.
- Treasure hunters are drawn to the Philippines
and the Philippines, from my experience,
seemed quite easy to embrace them,
comfortable embracing them and trying to send them
to these sites.
And again, I think it’s, from what I’ve seen,
it’s people who really believe that
you can find these things buried on the island.
- A lot of these legends that sort of become folklore
that stay because they become part of our history
and part of our culture and the Filipino people like
are immensely proud people.
And in many ways they’re very, very attached to this idea
that this could exist and it could be here.
So it in many ways lives because of the people themselves.
- Treasure in the Philippine jungle,
it’s a story that never dies.
Just when you think it’s over, it comes right back to life.
- [Laurence] Over the course of one weekend in 2017,
a video is uploaded to YouTube.
It quickly gains hundreds of thousands of views.
In a submerged cave in the Philippines,
what appears to be gold bars.
- They were really dirty and muddy,
but became this internet sensation
where people found them and all of a sudden
the Yamashita’s gold legend comes back.
Maybe this is really happening.
That stokes the fire again and makes that legend continue.
- Is there a connection to Yamashita’s gold?
Maybe and a lot of viewers like me, they remain skeptical.
Maybe they just want views.
It definitely warrants further investigation.
- Now you have a lot of amateur treasure hunters
who can upload videos.
They can upload what they claim is proof of what they found.
And going back to Roxas and his Buddha’s statue,
that’s something that people can see.
And when you can see something,
it makes it a little bit more real.
The fact that it does still spark interest,
I think is something that it’s still creating
the conversation.
And as long as there’s a conversation around it,
it’ll never die.
- I have no doubt that treasure went into the ground.
What I believe today is that whatever is left there
is going to be incredibly hard to find.
And based upon the stories that we know about the way
that these places are booby trapped
and trying to seek this treasure
would be incredibly dangerous.
And you know, I mean a billion dollars worth of gold
would be really nifty to have,
but it’s also nice to be alive.
- We never run out of treasure hunters
and people never stop dreaming for being the one person
that’s gonna find this thing, to be the next Roxas.
To find that next Buddha and to pop open the head
and find diamonds.
Every treasure hunter wants that.
And so that legend’s never gonna diminish.
- For 80 years the lure of Japan’s lost gold
has mesmerized world leaders and commoners alike.
We won’t know the full truth about this legendary treasure
until someone finally strikes gold.
But with such a dazzling fortune still on the line,
there is one certainty.
No one’s laying down their treasure maps anytime soon.
I’m Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching, History’s Greatest Mysteries.