He was quietly confident that there was more gold to be discovered. Posing in front of the replica gold bars that Roger Roxas discovered The relationship would end badly. At a depth of approximately two hundred and twenty-five feet the Japanese had created the largest and most valuable treasure vaults. Its a heart a symbol placed in the tunnel by the Shinto priests, he replied proudly. McDougald said the fatal accident may slow the treasure hunt. See Photos. Klaus Dona before settling in the Philippines I inspected the impressive collection of museum artefacts that Roger Roxas had discovered and listened as Patrick interviewed Henry. Inspecting the Baguio Hospital artefacts in the Roger Roxas Museum The charges are completely new to me. Dunning, B. He said that Roger only came out of hiding in 1988, shortly after President Marcos had fled to Hawaii while under house arrest. How could I tell if some of my soldiers misbehaved themselves? During the war, the Japanese Imperial Army tortured hundreds of Filipino prisoners in the Spanish colonial-era fort. Years after his disappearance, he was assumed to be dead. This guy is a celebrated rock star in the Philippines, and there were posters of him all over campus. His team went and searched and dug but never found anything. A search team began combing the nearby jungle, hoping to find the bodies of the missing men. By JOHN ROGERS September 24, 2019. I protested and attempted to leave a second time, but was restrained. Andrew Gough, Seashells with cement in them, black stones with gold dust, incense, and a heart, complete with artery Andrew Gough. The Imperial treasure sites were another matter: in addition to gold, they contained ancient artefacts from museums and burial hoards that the Japanese had looted across Asia. Cathcart recounted how he read the GBCs plea for legal assistance with incredulity. But the real treasure was buried much deeper still. In his 1986 book Falsifying China's History about Sterling's earlier work, he wrote: The book is so biased, so unreliable, so riddled with errors, and so utterly lacking in historical perspective that much of it could be classified as fiction rather than as a work of history. They dug through and then, almost a year to the date when they had first plunged a shovel into the ground, they discovered a golden buddha, along with twenty-four small gold bars, each one inch wide, two inches long, and half an inch thick. Despite his altruistic intentions (ie not wanting to risk more of the team getting injured than was necessary), this approach would prove fatal, as he did not do a very good job, and Klaus would have to reshoot the tunnel footage himself, weeks later, and with far inferior equipment. People named Bob Curtis. I sat on the bed trying to make sense of what had just happened, when the healer informed me that I needed to stop on my way to the airport and drink a cobras blood in order to complete my healing process. Symbol markers Klaus discovered in the tunnel backfill In addition to Okubo, Roxas gained valuable insight from Albert Fuchigami, whose father had been a Japanese officer in the Second World War. Marcos had whet his now insatiable appetite for gold and the riches and power that it brought. Supreme Court of Hawaii. They picked the fort, he said, because it was a high-security location, off-limits to all but military torturers and the unfortunate Filipino prisoners destined for death. Random encounter with treasure hunter. Valmores knew where the gold in the region was buried, and although he never violated Prince Takedas trust for his own benefit, he emphatically supported Roxass mission and wanted to help. Sign up! Rights and reuse information. Robert Curtis had paid a very high price for becoming involved in gold recoveries with Ferdinand Marcos, but he was stubborn, and he still had the only copies of the full set of Japanese treasure maps to have surfaced since the war. It has budgeted another $60,000 for the project and has an additional $300,000 to spend if needed. He recounted one incident when he and Peggy were going for a walk down a country lane when a car crept along behind and slowly overtook them. They chose to go on a day when it was 46 degrees Celsius (115 F), but they didnt bring their cell phones with them. They began holding press conferences to try to raise more money in which they claimed to have found tunnels stacked to the ceiling with gold bars (but hadn't thought to take any pictures or bring back any evidence), and these claims sufficiently irked the government to the point that his team was expelled from the country in 1975. or. Despite numerous eyewitnesses and various first-hand accounts, most historians doubted the existence of the Black Eagle Trust, let alone the buried treasure hoards, and so I travelled to the Philippines to investigate the story for myself. I was particularly intrigued with a photo Klaus shared of a cement doorway that he had arrived at in one of his tunnel complexes, and was anxious to inspect it in person. I followed Klaus down the third descending vertical shaft only to find myself standing in nearly a foot of water. With Henry Roxas, Rogers treasure-hunting son That fact doesnt stop thousands of people from trying to beat the odds. Was the healer authentic? Roxass life was not his own. Andrew Gough. That book was followed in 2003 with Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold which told how the Americans got ahold of some or all of it, and added to a similar gold treasure taken from the Nazis, formed a secret fund called The Black Eagle Trust Fund and have been using it ever since as a black fund to fight Communism. As it turns out, Klaus had also been in contact with Sterling Seagrave. The doomed engineers had installed booby traps at each of the one hundred and seventy-five treasure sites either explosives and/or cyanide. The more cameras the better, he chuckled. While in Los Angeles I also met with Dan Cathcart, the lawyer who had famously represented Roxas in the Supreme Court and had heroically won the case over Ferdinand Marcos. I tried not to think about it as I descended the first sixty-foot shaft with a bamboo ladder that afforded my already wet and slippery wellies only about three inches of grip before my toes became jammed against the edge of the tunnel. Website designed by Artifice Design. Although Roxas presented no evidence whatsoever other than personal testimony from many of his associates all of whom had banded together as the "Golden Buddha Corporation" which existed only to pursue this lawsuit they somehow managed to win the case, and were awarded over 40 billion dollars. My dialogue with other Filipino treasure hunters had reached a fever pitch and this, coupled with the fact that I was keen to visit Klaus and inspect his work, prompted me to book a trip to the Philippines. In order to protect himself from further abuse, he formed the Golden Buddha Corporation (GBC) with Felix Dacaney, a childhood friend who was living near Atlanta, and assigned his interest in the case to the GBC. Further disappointment ensued when Bruce was no longer able to travel to the Philippines to direct the episode. And so, while we all love a story of lost gold and would thrill to plunge a shovel into a green hillside that we suspect conceals an endless fortune, the urban legend of Yamashita's Gold is another of those most unlikely to have a happy ending. And yet, the man does not charge for his services. I had forgotten about the legend of Japanese treasure buried in the Philippines, save for the occasional outreach of Filipinos who had seen The Truth About Yamashitas Gold and were looking to secure funding for their own excavations, when I was contacted by a very curious woman from Los Angeles. Fortuitously, Cheatham took a photo of himself with the golden buddha. It is currently on Klauss list, and he is the only one with a permit for the region. Their families believe that the men were all killed by a gang who decided to take the gold mine for themselves. 56 0 obj<>stream She recounted that she ran for cover when she feared she had been spotted. 2023 Skeptoid Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 0 I sat down with Cathcart and his wife in their affluent Beverly Hills home, and was joined by their live-in carer, who sat nearby, listening intently to our every word. I was later told he had decided he did not like me before we ever met. When the cave-in become public Feb. 29, McDougald and his group were forced to go public as well. Read about more bizarre, untimely deaths on 10 Creepily Ironic Historical Deaths and 10 Unusual Ways to Die Through the Ages. And over here we have a marker stone, Klaus added in his patented Austrian deadpan. I knew what it was, but I could not believe my eyes. One such individual was Eusebio Okubo, who as a young man had served as an interpreter for General Yamashita while he was stationed in Baguio. He described the odds as 5% more chance than highly probable, approaching absolute certainty.. They know the Philippines well, but are unreliable on Japan and do not read Japanese. Cite this article: His father was a well-known frontier doctor and surgeon in Burma, himself the son of third-generation missionaries in Burma. Over the next few days Klaus took me around his sites; each was different, but equally spectacular. Real or imagined? Finally, in the spring of 1970 Roxas and his team identified the tunnel area entrance and began an arduous seven-month excavation. I was riveted as Cathcart recalled that tragic day and was leaning forward in anticipation as he spoke, when suddenly his carer abruptly corrected him and blurted out facts about the case that I found startling and incongruous from a healthcare professional who had claimed to know nothing about the affair. They were in their sleeping bags, but their heads were missing. But Japan needed that money badly to pay for its war effort; it would not have converted it to gold bars and sent it away to be buried. He complained at length that none of his journalism colleagues would help him and Peggy with their book. I had to see the Baguio Hospital treasure site for myself. In 1981, an elderly man named Dr. Maurice Dametz went hunting for rocks with his friend David McSherry in Pike National Forest in Douglas County, Colorado, near a famous lookout called Devils Head. Im sorry what was that? I retorted apologetically. Web. Oh, and I meant to ask, how deep had your dad dug when he discovered the golden buddha near Baguio hospital, Patrick asked matter-of-factly. This is how wide you can dig. In particular, I was keen to investigate one mans courageous efforts to unearth Japanese buried treasure, and the tons of gold bullion that accompanied it. Roxas testified, returned to hiding, was discovered by Marcoss men and tortured. Andrew Gough. Jim Hawkins, the protagonist of Robert Louis Stevenson 's 1881 novel, Treasure Island. Robert Curtis had paid a very high price for becoming involved in gold recoveries with Ferdinand Marcos, but he was stubborn, and he still had the only copies of the full set of Japanese treasure maps to have surfaced since the war. Understandably, they had become discouraged and had run out of funds. Curtis to meet privately with a . I wanted to leave, but the caretaker said I mustnt; the healer had sent me, and I needed to complete his process. Roxas was assassinated. The Japanese Massacre of Nanjing, the then capital of China, 1937. However, the legal fees and the cost of the trials ate up so much cash that only $175,000 remained. The Japanese strategy was two-fold: strip the East of their cultural identity, while returning priceless treasures back to Japan to fund their military, political and economic world dominance for the next thousand years. I went for a walk around campus and when I returned the production manager politely asked me to join them, as they were about to begin, and so I did. It does not need to be any wider, Klaus added authoritatively. The first near-death experience (NDE) was in 2013, when she claims to have been dead for nearly twenty minutes. I met her at Soho House and found her to be a gracious and grateful lady, albeit quite fixated on the messages that the alleged spirit of Roxas had been sharing with her. They were buried alive. Intriguingly, Santy introduced Marcos to Imelda, and once dated the former beauty queen back in the day. With the Baguio treasure hoard now lost to Marcos, Roxas went into hiding for the next ten years, awaiting the day when he could fight for his treasure once more. Do you know about Yamashitas gold?. No longer able to travel to the Philippines well, but equally spectacular area entrance and began an seven-month! 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