There is a great book on this topic. My in-laws gave me a sword that supposedly had a map to one the gold locations. But today it is quite a bit of myth. I do believe the explorer did find a gold statue as there were pictures. But the rest of the claims of gold I am skeptical about.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson does a good fictional take on it.
I didn’t know the gold in cryptomomicon was inspired by a real thing!
My mind went to the founder of Bitcoin.
The actual founder of Bitcoin cannot touch their money without causing a lot of panic in the market. I believe Coinbase's 2021 S-1 prospectus explicitly listed "the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto... or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins" as a business risk factor.
I would expect Satoshi to make a lot of money on later wallets that are not identified as theirs.
Not sure why the NSA would pay for a Japanese water system.
To keep up the façade.
Then they should have funded some building preservation programmes instead.