Ben - Philippine rice farmer; as a boy he was valet to Prince Takeda, visiting all 175 treasure vaults; was given a copy of Takeda’s maps.
We interviewed pilot Eric Shilling, one of the original Flying Tigers in the American blunteer Group (AVG) in 1941, who went on to fly for CAT and the CIA after the war. Shilling told us he made numerous flights from Guam and Clark, ferrying FRNs and Nationalist secret agents as far into China as Chengtu in Sinkiang Province, and flying boxes of gold out to Taiwan. The B-29 had a range suited to long roundtrips, and Shilling was skilled at flying the aircraft at 30 or 40 feet above the ocean to enter and leave Chinese airspace without being picked up by radar. He told us Generalissimo and Mme. Chiang Kai-shek were fully informed of the flights, and on his return to Taipei once, Shilling was invited to the presidential palace where Mme. Chiang praised him, and told him: “I did not go to bed until I knew that you had landed safely.”