Original subtitles

- 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)

(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.