by Josh Gates
The effects pass quickly, and we’re warmly embraced by the entire tribe. They serve us a challenging lunch of stewed bananas and taro root, which we diplomatically consume as best we can. I teach the kids how to use an iPod (it turns out that a click-wheel really is pretty intuitive); they squeal with laughter, tickled by the strange sounds of a little-known band called “the Beatles.”
A tour of the village is revelatory. There’s a vibrant community here that is totally divorced from the modern world. The discovery that the locals are still using seashells for currency is downright mind-blowing. I spend the better part of an hour trying to work out the dollars-to-shells conversion rate, but in the end I just give up. I’m offered a few thirteen-year-old brides, which I politely decline, as we weave our way between the simple huts and throngs of onlookers.
We get down to business and interview eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the iguanodon creature. They nearly universally describe the animal as having a dog-like head, a long body, and a spiked tail. Villagers seem to think it’s a dinosaur of some sort. Several people claim that the creature has eaten local dogs. We also buy a live chicken to use for bait that the mayor strangles to death, a process at which he doesn’t appear overly adept. The zombie chicken keeps coming back to life again and again, and I gnash my teeth waiting for it to be over.
Finally, with our (hopefully) dead chicken and a fan club comprising everyone in town, we head out to begin our investigation. One eyewitness is actually too scared to descend the slope where she spied the creature. This is a little nerve-racking, since it’s clear some kind of animal really did frighten this woman, iguanodon or not. A few of the locals assist in erecting a base camp, using machetes to create bamboo supports for our rain tarp. In the span of about three minutes, they turn the site into the Professor’s hut from Gilligan’s Island, fashioning a table, two chairs, and a roof out of bamboo, putting my own camp-building efforts to utter shame. I half expect them to install a coconut phone.
Just before dark, we string out a series of infrared cameras to survey the area for any movement. Thermal imagers aid our efforts as well, piercing the darkness and illuminating anything that emits heat. While part of the team begins a preliminary sweep, the rest of the group continues to activate the equipment at base camp.
The ensuing investigation is notable in that it marks the first of two instances when I nearly get my head blown off while making Destination Truth. It happens as we trudge through a swampy section of wilderness beyond our camp. I hack at a huge banana leaf that suddenly drops away to reveal a heavily cleared expanse and about twenty Papuans servicing construction equipment. The men immediately stop what they’re doing and accost our group, hysterically yelling and waving us away. Two of the men are holding pistols, which they wave about haphazardly in the general direction of my face; the rest step forward with machetes. I watch our Papuan security guard take the safety off of his machine gun and I motion the muzzle down while Steve politely apologizes for the intrusion. An argument ensues but is settled when we all back off from the site and agree to go around.
As we retreat, I glance back at the equipment, which appears to be dredging part of the swamp. Steve tells me that they’re looking for the wreckage of an American bomber from World War II, which they believe was carrying a shipment of gold. Clearly, they’re protective of the bounty.
We double back to base to begin our overnight investigation, more than a little wary of our newly discovered neighbors. I’m less than surprised to find that Lucas has fallen asleep on a log.
The rest of the night is monopolized by an extensive search of the jungles surrounding the village. Just after midnight, we encounter something that shakes the trees so hard I’m convinced it’s the Smoke Monster from Lost. Whatever it is, we never get a good look, and it quickly flees into the darkness. We trek on and eventually loop back to our camp. The video monitors back at our bamboo base show flickering scenes of static jungle and a dead chicken swaying in the breeze.
At dawn there’s little to report by way of findings, and the chicken is cooked and consumed by the villagers. Though our culprit is described as an iguanodon, the consistent elements from the interviews sound to me like this monster might be a large crocodile (of which Papua New Guinea has many).
We speed away from the village, waving back at a mob of cheering locals. Though we didn’t find their dinosaur, this was certainly a journey of discovery for my group. Palm fronds smack the front bumper of our car, clawing at the doors before releasing us and cloaking the road behind. I wonder if I’ll ever see this place again.
At the airstrip we board a flight to Lae, a city nestled in the Huon Gulf on the west side of the main Papuan island. We’re flying in an old de Havilland Dash 7, a plane better suited for a museum than the friendly skies. A rattling old piece of junk, the plane lurches up off the tarmac and lets out a cacophony of ill-fated mechanical sounds. As we level out, I watch as the copilot props his knee against the stick and opens a local newspaper across his lap. The headline reads, “GIANT CROC KILLS LOCAL WOMAN.” It seems the Iguanodon has struck again.
We’re now on the hunt for Papua New Guinea’s flying dinosaur. Known as the Ropen, this pterodactyl-like cryptid has been spotted in the skies over PNG for decades. The creature is said to be uniquely bioluminescent, glowing brightly as it flies. As the rusted wings of our plane shudder in the cloud line, we drop down toward the tarmac to begin the search.
The main airport here is in disrepair and closed, so we head for a World War II strip, which hasn’t seen much service in the last fifty years. We somehow touch down in one piece and make our way to a primitive yet serviceable hotel. It’s the first running water that we’ve seen in nearly a week. I shower quickly, and while the rest of the group cleans up, I grab the car keys and jump in the jeep. There’s a place nearby that I’ve always wanted to go.
I step out at the old Lae airfield, which now sits in abject disrepair. I walk along the silent runway and crouch down, skimming my hand across the rough stones at my feet. It was here, in 1937, on the very pebbles that now slip between my fingers, that a heavily loaded Lockheed Electra plane gained momentum and took off into the blue. The pilot, a wiry, thirty-nine-year-old woman, was bound for tiny Howland Island, more than 2,500 miles away. But Amelia Earhart would never arrive. I rise to my feet and slowly walk the length of the narrow field, looking up at the clouds and picturing her waving to the locals before arcing out over the ocean. I’m fascinated by her, of course. What adventurer isn’t? Her many exploits were brazen but undertaken with such surety of purpose that they appeared effortless. Earhart was seemingly unconstrained by gravity, an aviatrix Astaire who could glide across the globe with ease. During her trans-world flight, she wrote, “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards . . . I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”
The magnificent thing about her is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart’s legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don’t think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon.
I head back to town and to our comparatively modest adventure. The most recent sightings of the Ropen are concentrated along a small peninsula that we can only access by boat. I pilot one of two vessels, hugging the coast and riding the swells toward our target. We bank in toward a simple village, noticeable only by small fires set along the beach. We tie up at a primitive dock and begin to interview the witnesses. All of them describe a large, bat-like monster and then point up to the sky, recalling the Ropen’s strange glow. They gesture toward the jungles along the coast. The entire peninsula they’re referring to is now a nearly impenetrable mess of vegetation, snakes, and spiders. We look over wartime maps to see that, like in Rabaul,
the Japanese did a thorough job of turning this particular sliver of land into a military powerhouse. Dozens of gun turrets are marked on the documents, as well as a vast network of defensive tunnels that underlie the entire area. Allied forces bombed the region so heavily that the Japanese spent much of their occupation underground. The locals believe that the Ropen now inhabits these tunnels.
Our first attempt at exploring the forest is by way of direct assault. We leave the beach, passing a perfectly preserved Japanese Zero plane that’s literally hanging out of a tree. The path degrades quickly, and we eventually reach a dead end. We revisit the maps, and the locals point out a nearby feature that we’ve missed: the entrance to a tunnel. They cut back vines to reveal a badly collapsed opening that’s now completely sealed. We translate back and forth between pidgin and English and are told that an earthquake destroyed the opening more than fifty years ago.
“How many people can you get together from the village?” Neil asks Lucas.
“Neil?” I interject. Even though I know exactly what he’s thinking.
“What? You’ll love it in there,” he offers smugly.
While Neil oversees the work of uncovering the tunnel entrance, I lead the rest of our group on a trail up the peninsula, searching for an alternate entrance. The heat is absolutely sweltering as we trek uphill, and by the time we reach the first Japanese gun turret, my clothes are soaked through. I sit behind the rusted barrel of the gun and look out through the natural camouflage of the canopy, imagining Allied ships in the distance. We press on as far as we can, but hordes of prickly vines and spiderwebs prevent much progress.
Back near the beach, we come across a forgotten graveyard. Here the final resting places of gold miners, soldiers, and wayward travelers are being reclaimed by nature. Some of the plots are dug up and empty. The locals say that they believe this to be the work of the flesh-feasting Ropen, though to me simple grave robbery seems a much more likely cause. Names are still legible on a number of the broken headstones, and I walk down the line reciting them aloud. “Jack Davies. Charles Collins. Keith Suttor.” I falter when I see a postscript under one soldier’s name that reads, “KILLED BY NATIVE ARROW.”
We hike back to the tunnel, where a hardworking team of locals has breached a small opening. With daylight fading, Carter and I wedge ourselves into the lightless cavity. We get to our feet, stooping forward under the low ceiling. The air is stale but breathable, and our headlamps illuminate crumbling walls and endless passages. To my dismay, we also find bats. Lots of bats. They whip through the chambers at high speeds and rush past our faces. We walk slowly and deliberately so that their echolocation can guide them around us (the best way to take a bat in the face is to panic and move quickly). Entire branches of the tunnel are collapsed, and we do our best not to think about how stupid an idea this is. Just keep moving. The sides of the tunnel are wet and flake to the touch. “Stay off the walls, Carter. They’re falling apart,” I whisper.
“Shit. Spiders,” he answers.
I look back at Carter’s headlamp beam, which illuminates the stocky legs of a tarantula drawing back into a hole. I scan the floor in front of me and see hundreds of glinting eyes retracting in the darkness.
The tunnel opens up a bit, and we come across railroad tracks originally used to deliver munitions to the guns on the hillside. I’m now adding unexploded ordnance to the list of things in here that could potentially kill us. We discover a few pieces of bone that look human but no signs of anything the size of a flying dinosaur. Once we’ve explored everything we can, we carefully pull back to the entrance. Neil and Eric pull Carter and me out of the hole and into the jungle darkness. The fresh air is a relief, and we sit on the ground for a few moments to catch our breath.
Our investigation continues throughout the night, and a few hours before dawn we, like so many others before us, do see strange lights. A small glowing ball appears low in the sky and streams slowly and steadily above the water. Since planes don’t fly here after dark, it’s not an aircraft, but I’m certainly not willing to concede that it’s a flying dinosaur, either. The event is captured on our infrared cameras and we continue to scan the skies until sunrise, but the light never reappears. While the footage is ultimately inconclusive, it does align with eyewitness testimony, leaving the case open for future investigation.
At dawn, we return to Port Moresby and board a flight bound for home. In the end, it’s hard to define PNG, and perhaps that’s what makes it so special. It is at once a sprawling scrap yard from the Second World War, a treasure trove of unknown biodiversity, and home to tribal cultures that have staved off the modern age. It is dirty and yet pristine, both criminally corrupt and blissfully pure, and brimming with ways to kill you.
On the margins of antique maritime maps, cartographers would often write, “Here be monsters.” It was a way of both warning and luring sailors to places unknown and uncharted. Papua New Guinea is such a destination, even today. Its highlands are barely explored and its jungles are among the wildest on earth. Its monsters come in many forms, from mermaids, iguanodons, and Ropens to crocodiles, spiders, and machete-carrying mercenaries. Some are folkloric and some all too real. Either way, though, the Papuans don’t much care. To them, these are all indelible inhabitants of this mysterious lost world.
Here be monsters. Find them if you dare.
CASE FILE: LIVING DINOSAURS
NAMES: Mokèlé-Mbembe, Emela-ntouka, Ninki-Nanka, Ngoubou, Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu, Nguma-monene, Arica Monster, Papuan iguanodon, Burrunjor.
DESCRIPTION: They are described as large (some in excess of thirty feet), dangerous, and decidedly prehistoric. They make up a category of cryptid that also includes T. rex, velociraptors, and an assortment of other dinosaur-like predators that somehow survived when the universe hit the control-alt-delete buttons on their existence.
LOCATIONS: These oversized creatures are primarily reported in the swamps of Central Africa. Additional sightings occur in locations as varied as the Australian Outback, the jungles of Papua New Guinea, and Chile’s Atacama Desert.
STATUS: The nineteenth century prickled with a new awareness of and fascination with the unknown. Some of the most famous explorers of all time wandered the globe during these years. In Latin America: Alexander von Humboldt. U.S.: Lewis and Clark. Africa: Livingstone, I presume. And countless polar expeditions to boot. As a result, public interest in undiscovered lands and tales of faraway monsters was piqued, and the imagination of authors was sparked, creating an entirely new breed of adventure fiction. H. Rider Haggard made a five-shilling bet with his brother that he could write a book half as good as Treasure Island and published King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 (ah, sibling rivalry). It quickly became a sensation. Once Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs penned The Lost World and The Land That Time Forgot, respectively, man and dinosaur were forever destined to coexist on the pages of popular fiction.
What this interest truly amounted to, however, was an undeniable fixation with exoticism that further propelled explorers to pursue these creatures. Africa is ground zero in cryptozoologists’ obsessive search for living dinosaurs. In the last one hundred years alone, nearly thirty expeditions have been dispatched to document the giant sauropod Mokele-Mbembe. These investigations, in some of the wildest parts of Africa, have resulted in amazing stories but little in the way of compelling proof. Nothing tops the story from a zoologist claiming he observed the creature for twenty minutes but was so excited he forgot to remove the lens cap from his camera. Cough, cough. Bullshit.
VERDICT: In the case of another African monster known as the Emela-ntouka, when local tribesmen were shown photos of rhinos, many identified them as . . . Emela-ntouka. It’s not uncommon. Many of these cryptozoological creatures are simply normal animals that have been magnified by native folklore over generations. The stories have been retold so many times that what we may have here is a simple failure to communicate.
There are places on earth where isolation has resul
ted in evolutionary diversions; the Galapagos Islands, Madagascar, and Papua New Guinea come to mind. However, a blue-footed booby is one thing; Grumpy from Land of the Lost is quite another. We’re not talking about a little poison dart frog, or an ivory-billed woodpecker here, but colossal, glass-of-water-vibrating, jeep-flipping, lawyer-eating dinosaurs. It would be impossible for these beasts to escape detection. So that’s kind of a problem.
Let’s face it. Everyone loves dinosaurs, and from Barney to Dino, our kids are downright obsessed with them. Their size, their majesty, and their incredible power . . . the only thing about dinosaurs that isn’t awesome is the part where they all went extinct. To me, the case for living dinosaurs is merely mankind desperately wishing it were so. Our planet had previous tenants, and we’d love to meet them. So if you really want to run into a dinosaur, may I recommend the dusty fiction of Doyle, Burroughs, or even Crichton. You’re guaranteed to find exactly what you’re looking for.
8: Under New Management
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Hollywood, 2007
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Our exploits in Malaysia and Papua New Guinea gave way to a voyage that unfurled across the globe. We traveled on to Thailand, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina, searching for evidence of strange creatures and paranormal phenomena along the way. We tackled twelve individual stories, which were then distilled into six hour-long episodes. The collective experience was a nonstop thrill ride to film and a hard-knock education on how to hunt monsters and make a television show at the same time. This first season has since been released on DVD. Even though it’s a little rough around the edges, as I look back on the journey now, I’m amazed at what we were able to accomplish and how far we’ve come since then.
Though my journals from this inaugural season are brimming with colorful tales of misadventure, it was our travels through Malaysia and Papua New Guinea that stand out for me as the best embodiment of the unscripted and unpredictable nature of Destination Truth. After all, we traipsed through some of the planet’s most harrowing environments and let the ensuing adventures dictate our story. It’s supremely difficult to make television this way, to stake a narrative on the idea that interesting things will happen simply because the world is an interesting place. I’m just glad that it worked out and nobody lost a limb.