NARRATOR: Bingo's research has led him to JD Foringer.
Hey, JD?
JD FORINGER: Yes, sir.
Great to finally meet you.
You too, thanks.
Nice to meet you.
Thanks for having me.
NARRATOR: JD Foringer served for over 20 years
as an officer in the United States Navy.
He has spent almost two decades researching
possible connections between his brother, Yamashita's
treasure, and the CIA.
A lot of cool stuff you got here.
These coin holders represent the different ships that I--
that I was on.
The USS Midway, that was my first ship.
Midway was named after the Battle of Midway,
basically our first major battle after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor.
And Midway always went to the Philippines.
And that's how I was overseas when
my brother was in the Philippines,
and I was able to visit him.
So can you tell me about your brother?
Alan was a super patriot.
And he graduated from Duke University
in 1976 summa cum laude--
political science and economics.
He always worked these sales kind
of jobs that didn't anchor him to one location,
that had him on the road a lot.
This picture shows him in the last year of his life.
And this is with some of the family members
that he lived with in the Philippines.
He was there till his death in 1991.
He was my big brother, and it hit me hard.
So I started researching, at that point, his life and death.
My brother was a officer in the company called Nippon Star.
Nippon Star was the company that my brother
and others were involved with to search for treasure
in the Philippines.
NARRATOR: According to JD, Alan Foringer
was an officer in a corporation called Nippon Star.
Throughout the 1980s, Nippon Star's publicly stated purpose
was to search for and recover Japanese treasure
buried in the Philippines.
Among Nippon Star's members--
retired Major General John Singlaub, one of the founding
members of the CIA.
JD FORINGER: It's not hard to make the connection,
to me, that the CIA is involved with Nippon Star.
General Singlaub was a two-star Major General, a Green Beret.
And he was one of the fathers of the special forces
in that covert clandestine warfare that exists today.
But he was also a business partner of my brother's.
I know that they came across booby traps.
There's markers on every site.
The Japanese left markers so that they could figure out
how to get back to the gold.
The Japanese sealed their treasure vaults by filling
them with very hard concrete.
This is getting really trippy.
I have a team in the Philippines right now.
And that's basically what they encountered.
So this is all really compelling stuff.
But do you have any documents or any other proof
of CIA involvement?
Well, come with me.
Let me show you some things.
So I've got, you know, quite a bit of information here
that I've collected through the years.
I have an Office of the President of the Philippines
Presidential Task Force.
"Attention, Mr. Alan R. Foringer."
July 17, 1986.
"Request for permit to search, excavate, and recover
Japanese buried treasure."
So this is Nippon Star basically asking
for a treasure-hunting permit?
JD FORINGER: Correct.
I'm really trying to understand.
Where did the rumor for Nippon Star being apart of the CIA
come about?
JD FORINGER: Through my research,
I found out about a website that was
written by Mark O'Brien, which was a pseudonym for Bob Curtis.
Did you say Bob Curtis?
Yes, Bob Curtis.
Do you-- have you heard of him?
I just had a meeting with one of the attorneys
from the Roxas case, and he had some deposition
tapes on Bob Curtis.
What did they want from Curtis?
JD FORINGER: Bob Curtis claimed to have the maps for 175 sites.
Gotcha.
So these are a box of tapes reported by Bob
Curtis for the meetings-- the three days
of meetings that they had--
all the principals for Nippon Star and Bob Curtis.
NARRATOR: According to JD, members of Nippon Star
wanted to meet with Robert Curtis in 1987.
At Curtis's request, the meeting was held in Hong Kong.
JD FORINGER: At first, he didn't want to get involved with it
all because he was convinced, after hearing Singlaub's name,
that it was a CIA initiative.
And he didn't want to have anything to do with that.
But my brother convinced him to join the group.
[clinking]
Let's give a listen.
[suspenseful music]
That's my brother, Alan, speaking.
OK.
Man, that's pretty muffled.
So your brother's definitely on these tapes, then.
He definitely is.
Wow.
I think the biggest take-away was the US
government may be involved in treasure
hunting in the Philippines.
I mean, really, how far does this go?
Who knows?
[suspenseful music]