Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Dec. 2, 2006 - Art Bell

02:39:07

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Peter von Puttkamer - The Real Lost World

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	From the Southeast Asian capital city of the Philippine Islands, Manila, typhoon-ravaged Philippines that would be, I welcome you to Coast to Coast AM, everybody.
	Good evening, good morning, good afternoon, whatever it may be, wherever you are, every single one of the time zones across the world covered one way or the other by this program, largest of its type in the world, Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Mark Bell.
	Well, as you know, Typhoon Durian, which is a... Typhoon... Actually, Durian.
	The name Durian is a nasty little fruit that grows here.
	Actually, it's quite good.
	They make candy out of it and so forth and so on, but... Durian is a fruit which grows a... It's kind of like a... How can I say this?
	It's got long...
	Protruding things coming from it that if it actually fell from a tree and hit you on the head it would kill you.
	So it's a nasty fruit in a way.
	And it's probably a good name for a nasty typhoon.
	I saw durian coming long ahead of time and I thought surely here in Manila we were doomed.
	They had the eye of Durian coming right over Manila, and so we were all preparing this time for the worst.
	Truly the worst.
	We thought that was it.
	And I thought, you know, if these kind of wins hit the capital city here, it's going to just be, there's not going to be anything left.
	And for several days, the track remained showing it going right over downtown Manila.
	You know, right over Makati.
	It just would have been horrible.
	Then at the very last moment, the eye took a slight jog to the south.
	And when I say the last moment, I really mean the last moment.
	It took a slight jog to the south.
	And of course, the results are now known of that.
	We still got hit hard here, but to the south of us, it was awful.
	The ash and the boulders that had been building up since an eruption in July, high on the slopes of the Mayan volcano, let go.
	Typhoon Durian's blasts of wind and drenching rain raked it all down in deadly black walls of debris.
	For nearly three hours, the typhoon on Thursday afternoon Mudslides ripped through the Mayan gullies, uprooting trees, flattening homes, engulfing people, entire hamlets simply swamped, gone in Mayan on northern Luzon Island.
	About 300 people are now known to be dead, most of them in the mudslides on Mayan.
	300 are missing.
	So 300 dead, 300 missing, that is obviously not a final death toll.
	What I do have there comes from the National Office of Civil Defense.
	With power and phone lines down, it took until Friday morning when the very first flights managed to survey the area, looking for the scope of the devastation to emerge, and it did.
	The disaster covered almost every corner of the province, rampaging floods, falling trees, damaged homes.
	It all happened in Albay, the governor of Albay Province.
	Uh, accounted for all but a few of the deaths.
	Pope Benedict, saddened by the tragic loss of life, was praying for the victims' rescue workers and others providing assistance, the Vatican said.
	Our rescue teams are overstretched rescuing people on rooftops.
	That sounds familiar, doesn't it?
	According to the civil defense head, after officials briefed President Arroyo on the disaster and the difficulty of getting two survivors stranded by seas of black mud, they call it a black desert.
	Bodies wrapped in blankets, slung on bamboo poles to be carried to trucks, then covered with coconut leaves and transferred to makeshift morgues.
	It's just terrible.
	We now call this place a black desert.
	The mayor of Albay said that.
	He said that three of the five communities comprising the village of 1,400 people have been, quote, wiped out with only the roofs of several houses jutting out of the debris, if you can imagine that.
	He said people claimed some of the boulders were as big as cars and red-hot, suggesting fresh lava, perhaps from the 8,077-foot Mayan.
	His own residence, that of the mayor's, actually had water that rose higher than a person's head in a flash flood.
	He said, I thought I was a goner.
	That's the mayor of the town.
	So a real disaster here in the Philippines.
	There's a lot going on here in the Philippines.
	I'll fill you in on some more of it in just a moment.
	Let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll look at more news and some national news.
	stay right where you are i saw as a quite a bit of the uh... the coverage of the u.s.
	coverage on fox and cnn of the uh... events are in the philippines so i know
	that a lot of you are aware of what happened
	I'm hearing from a lot of families in the U.S., families who have families in the Albay area, and two items.
	I'm unable, and I'm really sorry, but I'm unable to act as the Red Cross and get you any information at all on your families.
	I don't have any communication to that area.
	As you all know, I had an antenna up, had, past tense.
	The building consulted with its attorneys and in a hurry with the typhoon bearing down
	on us, the antenna was taken down.
	So I don't have an antenna up anymore.
	If I want to get one, I am going to have to find a house, something that I'm giving considerable
	thought to right now.
	up But my antenna's not up, so I'm very, very sorry.
	I cannot report on anybody's relatives or loved ones in the Albay area.
	Just know it's bad and two of the three villages are simply wiped out.
	That's all there is to it.
	And that was a result of the southern little tiny turn.
	If you look at the track of Duran, you can see at the very, just I mean, at the last moment, when it was headed, the eye was headed straight for us, at the very last moment, it took a tiny little jog.
	Now maybe that was some of you with With mass concentration, I have no idea.
	If it was, thank you.
	But look what happened to the South of us.
	I did not request that anybody do that.
	I know there were some who went ahead and did it anyway.
	I still feel that toying with Mother Nature is not a good idea.
	And I don't know that that really occurred, but I do know there were some people doing that.
	So, thank you, but it may have had unintended consequences.
	Again, I certainly did not request it, even on my own behalf or that of my family.
	Now, the webcam photograph tonight is going to take a little bit of explanation.
	Ladies and gentlemen, meet Dolly.
	Now, there's a fair story that goes along with this.
	As you know, I brought Yeti and Abby all the way from the U.S.
	to here in the Philippines with me.
	And here in the little area in which we live, we have a number of restaurants that we visit regularly, every day, you know, for lunch or dinner or whatever.
	And every time we walk, we go to the restaurants, we walk, and every time we'd go here would be this bouncing little kitten.
	This beautiful, poor little kitten.
	I guess I need to back up a little bit.
	Most Philippine cats, particularly, you know, the ones here in the cities, Are very leery, weary of people that don't treat them nicely, and so they tend to scratch and bite, and you stay away from them.
	In fact, pretty much all Filipino people who come here are afraid to even touch my cats.
	I tell them, no, they won't bother you.
	But they don't believe that, and for a good reason, because most of the ones out there in a self-protective mode scratch and bite.
	So, naturally, they're very leery to get anywhere near.
	Now, this little tyke doesn't scratch, doesn't bite.
	And about two weeks ago, I finally, Erin couldn't take it anymore either.
	We both, we picked her up and we brought her here to the, this was two weeks ago, brought her to the condo.
	Gave her a bath, fed her, sat down and said, you know, we just can't do this.
	We can't have three cats in a condo.
	And so we ended up, uh, after feeding her and bathing her, we took her back.
	And then every day she would be there to greet us, rub up against our ankles, do little turns and twists, you know, like she was so happy to see us, little girl.
	And so, Day before yesterday, she did the normal.
	It was just too much.
	There was just no way.
	Aaron said, no, we've got to take her.
	So, once again, I carried her in.
	The guards outside our building got a good chuckle out of it.
	Just big chuckle.
	They thought it was the funniest thing they ever saw, me carrying this little tiny thing.
	She's really quite small.
	I don't know if you can tell from the picture or not, but she's quite small.
	And the little marks she's got on her nose are not lesions or anything.
	She's been in some fights with other cats and so she's got some little cuts on her nose.
	You know, it's a rough life out there for a Philippine cat.
	It's got to fight for daily survival.
	Well, so the bottom line here is we have another cat.
	Number three here in the condo.
	Too many, obviously, for a condo.
	What are you going to do?
	So yesterday, we took her to the vet.
	She got her shots.
	We will proceed.
	We'll be back to the vet in another couple of weeks and gave her another bath.
	And now she is firmly convinced that I, not Aaron, but I am her mother.
	And she sleeps with me in my armpit, covering my neck, around my head, tacking my feet.
	And needless to say, at first, Abby and Yeti hated her guts.
	Then Abby decided she was alright, and well, they play like crazy now.
	Yeti has not yet forgiven me, nor anybody else having anything to do with this, for bringing this cat, this little, little tiny thing into the house, and Yeti is really ticked off.
	I mean, he is ticked off.
	Now, it's become somewhat better in the last 12 hours or so, and we'll see how he does, but Dolly is now here to stay.
	So, there you go folks.
	Once a sucker for cats, always a sucker.
	I guess there's no way out of it.
	There's just no way out of it.
	That's all there is.
	I'm just a sucker for cats.
	I just couldn't stand it.
	Aaron couldn't stand it.
	We'd walk by and she'd say, where's your cat?
	And boy, this little thing would come bounding every day right up to us and we just caved in finally.
	All right, enough.
	Let's look at the world news.
	President Bush said Saturday that he wants to hear all advice before making any decisions about any changes at all in Iraq.
	The strategy there.
	Even as it was disclosed that apparently Donald Rumsfeld called for major changes in tactics just two days before he resigned as Defense Secretary.
	I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
	He said, quote, in my view, it is time for a major adjustment.
	That's a November 6th memo to the White House and maybe the adjustment was that he was out.
	Anyway, clearly what the U.S.
	forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.
	That's a continued quote from Rumsfeld.
	Pfizer Inc.
	said Saturday that it has cut off all clinical trials and development for a new cholesterol drug that was supposed to be the star of its pipeline Because of an unexpected number of deaths and cardiovascular problems in patients who used it.
	The world's largest drug maker said that it was told Saturday that an independent board monitoring a study for the drug that raises levels of HDL, what's commonly known as good cholesterol, recommended that the work end because of, quote, an imbalance of mortality and cardiovascular events, end quote, good reason.
	A triple car bombing struck a food market in a predominantly Shiite area in central Baghdad Saturday, killing at least 51 people just a day after a U.S.-Iraqi raid against Sunni insurgents in a nearby neighborhood.
	Three parked cars blew up just about exactly the same time in a very busy district where people were shopping for vegetables and so forth.
	Remember the man gunned down in a spray of 50 police bullets on his wedding day?
	He was buried Saturday as hundreds of angry demonstrators honored him with a moment of silence before going jaw to jaw with police in a bitter confrontation outside a Queens precinct house.
	The demonstrators taunted police standing just inches away from a row of officers and daring the police to lay a hand on them.
	Some in the crowd held signs reading, Death to the Pigs and Shoot Back.
	Castro did not show up at his 80th birthday celebration.
	They had actually put that off so that he might be part of it, and he's not.
	So it's beginning to look as though he's sort of permanently missing.
	Utility crews worked overtime Saturday, bad weather I guess, to restore electrical service to thousands of customers, still blacked out by the Midwest's first big snowstorm of the season.
	As temperatures plummeted below freezing in the storm's aftermath, officials said some people could be without power for days.
	Missouri National Guard teams are going door-to-door in the St.
	Louis area to make sure residents were surviving the cold.
	Hard to imagine that from here in the tropics.
	The widow of a soldier killed in Afghanistan saw a Wiccan symbol placed on a memorial plaque for her husband Saturday after fighting the federal government for more than a year over the emblem.
	Roberta Stewart, widow of Sergeant Patrick Stewart and Wiccan leader, said it was the first government-issued memorial plaque with a Wiccan pedicle That's amazing.
	A five-pointed star enclosed in a circle more than 50 friends and family dedicated the plaque at Northern Nevada Veterans Cemetery about 30 miles east of Reno.
	Also, as if there's not enough going on here in the Philippines, just to the south of us, south of Manila, just a little bit, Taal Volcano, that's T-A-A-L, I've been to the Taal Volcano now a couple of times.
	Known as the world's smallest active volcano, has recently formed a new geyser emitting from the volcano's vent on Crater Island.
	The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology says a full-scale eruption, not expected, But place the volcano on an alert level 1 or low level unrest, urging visitors to keep a safe distance from the danger zone.
	Additional seismographs were installed to monitor water levels, temperature, water chemistry in the volcano.
	Several unique features have made Picture Postcard Tall Volcano a premier tourist attraction.
	It really is.
	Most notably, a tall volcano is an island On a lake which exists within a larger island which is in itself surrounded by a lake about 30 miles south of Manila in Luzon, an island itself.
	Which makes this volcano even more novel is the fact the volcano contains a lake of its own within its crater known as, of course, Crater Lake.
	Now I have been to this volcano now twice.
	There is an area above it that I'm very much in love with.
	There's a ridge looking down on the volcano.
	And it's about 2,500 feet in elevation, which makes Tagutay a home to a lot of very fine resorts, hotels, vacation homes.
	It's a beautiful area.
	As I mentioned, I've been there actually three times now.
	I looked at some homes there.
	I'm also looking in the Baguio area.
	Baguio's up at about 7,000 feet.
	Average temperature about 68 degrees.
	So I'm looking there too.
	So now we have a volcano on alert just to the south of Manila.
	It's obvious to me that the typhoons that we have experienced one after another after another this year in the Pacific are what has prevented essentially a repeat of the hurricane year that the U.S.
	Eastern Seaboard had the previous year.
	I'm concerned that next year may be a reverse of the whole situation.
	Our weather is worsening.
	There's no question about it.
	Storms are getting worse.
	Now, the fact that the U.S.
	Eastern Seaboard escaped for one year doesn't mean a damn thing.
	I know that the people there are very glad that they didn't have a whole series of very bad hurricanes this year, but we did.
	On the other side of the world, we did.
	Well, weather patterns will shift and then of course the large storms will return to the U.S.
	East Coast and it's going to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, just like that.
	So don't rest easily because it was a good year.
	It's going to be a bad year and we're going to get increasingly bad years, ladies and gentlemen.
	That's all there is to it.
	The apocalypse has a new date, Cheery Little News, 2048.
	I sort of read this to you a while ago, but it's an update on that story.
	2048 is a date when the world's oceans will be completely, I say again, completely empty of fish.
	This is all being predicted by an international team of ecologists and economists.
	The cause, the disappearance of species due to overfishing, pollution, habitat loss, climate change.
	The study is by Boris Warm, PhD, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, with colleagues in the UK, US, Sweden, and Panama.
	It was an effort to understand what this loss of ocean species might mean to the world.
	It's a long story.
	I'm not going to have time to go into it all right now.
	But this is a story we're going to begin to track very closely.
	Because I can assure you, if all the world's oceans are devoid, completely devoid of any life, any fish, how far behind can we be?
	I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed so.
	I will read to you more about this threat to the world's oceans.
	We'll get into more of that tomorrow night.
	But can you imagine?
	I mean, in 50 years, all the fish gone.
	That's not tenable.
	I don't think we can survive on a planet where that occurs to the world's oceans.
	I just don't think we can.
	And I've got a number of other stories that are very apocalyptic, and I don't particularly enjoy reading those stories to you, but there's more and more of them.
	They cannot be denied.
	Especially something like this.
	No more fish.
	At any rate, we're going to go to open lines, so anything you want to talk about is absolutely fair game.
	Those were the portholes to come and visit with us over the next 30 minutes or so.
	Then at the top of the hour, we're going to talk to a sort of Indiana Jones of the animal world, a man who went searching for dinosaurs, and we'll find out What he found, you know, kind of the lost world scenario only for real with this man.
	Peter von Puttkemmer is his name and he really, he's putting together a documentary actually of I guess what we will call the real lost world.
	At any rate, all of you and whatever you want to talk about coming right up.
	By the way, one more thing about Dolly.
	An amazing thing as far as I'm concerned.
	Dolly would appear to be probably about five months old, four to five months old.
	And that's the vet's guess.
	And when we brought her back, we had installed, we have sort of a maid's quarters out there.
	Not that we have a maid, but we have a maid's quarters, you know, with a CR.
	That's comfort room.
	Americans say bathroom, we say comfort room over here.
	And we had a little swinging door installed and put the cat box out there in the maid's quarters.
	Minus the maid, of course, she's not here.
	And, of course, Abby and Yeti, who are very used to using it, immediately determined how to use the door and went in and have never made any mistake.
	But Dolly, I thought, oh, we're going to have a problem here.
	Because she'd been an outside cat, used to doing it anywhere.
	Well, we brought her in the house and so, concerned about that, I taught her about the door.
	I kind of pushed her through the little door, you know.
	Amazingly, she loved it.
	She liked the door idea, I guess.
	Because she went back and forth, in and out, had to have gone ten times in and out of that door, teaching herself how to push the little door until she went through.
	So she actually taught herself to use the little door.
	Now she has not made one mistake.
	Every single one of the little Caterdews has gone exactly where it belongs, in the box.
	So she's obviously a pretty bright little cat to have learned the door and learned the box all in one fell swoop, without one mistake yet.
	And if there hasn't been, there probably will not be.
	So that is the story to date of Dolly the Cat, who absolutely thinks that I am her mother.
	And she treats me that way.
	I woke up in the middle of the night tonight as she was licking and chewing on my eyelashes.
	That's an experience.
	And then I had a dream that sharks were eating my feet.
	And I'm convinced she had something to do with that as well.
	All right, here we go.
	Let's go to the first time color line.
	How about that?
	Spencer in Fairfield, California.
	All right, baby, what's going on?
	Well, a lot.
	I bet.
	How are you enjoying that island weather out there?
	Well, the normal weather here is hot and humid.
	It's a lot like Florida, actually.
	I bet.
	I bet.
	Hey, longtime listener, first time caller, I wanted to relate a story That, uh, I, uh, about an experience I had cruising back on the 580 corridor heading into San Francisco.
	I live out in the East Bay of California and, uh, you know, we have the Concord's, uh, weapon station out here.
	We have Lawrence Livermore Labs.
	Sure.
	Well, about two years ago, I was heading out 580 and I decided to cut across some, uh, farm roads through the, uh, Diablo Uh, mountain range out by Vasco Road and whatnot.
	And it must have been just my luck and, you know, one of those, you know, divine intervention things.
	But as I was cruising along, you know, and this is like 1030 at night, I'm looking up at the stars and all of a sudden the stars blackout.
	And honest to God, Art, I saw one of those, uh, black triangles that people have been talking about.
	Yes.
	I guess there was some recent guest on Coaster something described the black triangle as a blimp or something akin to some high-tech blimp.
	I don't think so.
	I really don't think so.
	Rolling over a million times as I have, what I observed with Ramona back when we saw it, that was no blimp.
	There's no way that was a blimp.
	Oh, this thing was not a blimp either, Art.
	Where I was, along the road, there were some eucalyptus trees, some fairly tall eucalyptus trees, and this thing was just above them.
	And, I mean, it had to have been no bigger than a really, really good-sized RV in length, but there were no bright lights on it.
	The only light that I saw were maybe these small little red pinhole running lights.
	Was it completely silent?
	Completely silent.
	Would you describe it as floating and or defying gravity but not flying?
	Not having speed to aerodynamically navigate the sky?
	No.
	Well, this thing seemed pretty intent on where it was going.
	No, what I mean is, was it going so slowly that it wasn't flying?
	I mean, traditionally, planes have to go fast enough to have lift.
	Oh, yes, yes.
	No, this thing was cruising rather slow.
	Rather slow.
	And it wasn't a blimp either.
	It was just so low.
	And the moonlight at that night, it was in October, was really well.
	And again, this is off from the highway in the hills, going into, like, the San Ramon area of California.
	And, you know, there's a lot of canyons out there, but this thing was flying real low.
	It crosses over from my right to my left over these trees, and after it crosses over this road, there's just some, you know, some cattle farms right out there.
	Just a bunch of grazing land and some small foothills.
	But this thing comes over, and it's just Just kissing over these these foothills, Art, and it looks like it's doing like a like a platter effect.
	It doesn't like it's not rising vertically at once, but like almost like kind of fishtailing over these little hills.
	And I tried to keep up with it, but it was going a little faster than, say, 70 miles an hour.
	Ah, okay.
	Well, that's still entirely too slow for it to have been aerodynamically navigating the sky.
	It wasn't doing that.
	The one I saw was going considerably slower than that, and to this very day I will laugh, and I'll forever laugh, at what the Air Force said about it all.
	You know, I wasn't the only one, Ramona and myself, we're not the only ones who saw this thing.
	It was reported widely, and you know, so Nellis Air Force Base had to say something, I've said this before on the air, their response in the next week's paper was, yes, Yes, we admit there was a secret mission that may have overflown the Pahrump Valley, they said.
	It was a C-130, they said.
	Ha, ha, ha.
	What an insult.
	Anybody who's ever been around aircraft knows aircraft at all.
	A C-130 at 150 feet above your head would rattle your teeth.
	As it flew over, this was no C-130 or any even far distant relative of a C-130.
	So I thought they had real guts to say something like that.
	I mean, that's embarrassing as far as I'm concerned.
	A silent triangle goes over your head, floating, defying gravity.
	Giant triangle.
	You watch it head out over toward Area 51, and the Air Force says it was a C-130.
	Oh, please.
	First time caller, make that wildcard line.
	Paul in Wisconsin.
	You're on the air.
	Yeah, hi Art.
	It's Paul from Greendale.
	Yes, sir.
	I was in the Air Force in the C-130.
	I mean, just from that last caller.
	That's a propeller plane that's... Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It's hard to compare that to a silent triangle.
	That's an insult.
	Totally.
	Totally.
	Anyway, question was, back probably like three or four years ago, you had some folks on that were describing a black, like, pyramid, not pyramid, but like, well, it was, they had an alien in the ice chest.
	Remember those guys?
	Oh, yes, of course.
	And I think that the want to take a ride actually came from that.
	Jonathan Reed.
	Yeah, whatever happened.
	I mean, I never heard.
	I apologize if this, you know, had been debunked or whatever, but...
	Whatever happened to those guys?
	Well, look, a lot of debunking went on.
	People claim to have seen people working in jobs and all kinds of things.
	But as far as I'm concerned, it's still, as they say in my gray box, there's not one thing that has not been debunked.
	I mean, look at Roswell.
	Look at anything, really, that you want to talk about.
	If the debunkers want to go to work on something like that, they can absolutely ruin it.
	That was an outstanding story though.
	I mean, you know, the dog that imploded into another dimension.
	Yeah, it was either a great story or it was real.
	It was either a great story or real.
	Either way, it was fun.
	Yep.
	Alright.
	Okay, thank you very much.
	I approached it absolutely honestly.
	And so, if it was fake, if it was somebody's made-up story, it was a damn good one.
	But I can assure you that I approached it honestly at the time.
	And yes, the debunkers went to work on that.
	The debunkers went to work on Mel's hole.
	The debunkers have gone to work on... In fact, on every major story that we have reported, the debunkers take it as their personal job to find holes, make holes, or otherwise just say, it cannot be.
	Let's go to Steve on West of the Rockies line in California.
	Hi Art.
	Hi.
	I want to commend you and thank you so much for taking little Dolly into your life.
	She won the lottery.
	Well she did.
	If only all little creatures could be so lucky.
	I take care of 20 to 30 cats.
	Possums, skunks, you name it.
	He must have a lot of space.
	Well, I live in the country and it's on my front porch.
	They have food, they have water.
	I do what I can for them.
	Good for you.
	And my heart breaks.
	I've seen so many tragedies, as you might imagine.
	But I do the best I can do.
	So, I really want to thank you so much.
	You're truly a wonderful and magnificent individual.
	I have a question for you.
	Sure.
	That has nothing to do with that.
	Sure.
	Um, the rocket guy, the guy who was going to launch himself, the guy who made his money, I think, inventing Legos, and then he got married.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I have not heard back from him.
	I don't know.
	You're right.
	He was going to launch himself.
	Well, then she was a wise woman.
	I had some negative vibes about that.
	I just never heard anything more about it.
	You know, he was quite interesting.
	Oh he absolutely was and again I'm sorry I've heard nothing further which obviously means that that he did not launch himself because had he done so even in partial success or spectacular failure either way we would have heard about it so probably somebody talked him out of it.
	Well I you know as far as cats are concerned I'm It's just I'm hopeless.
	And Aaron is also hopeless.
	We're just both hopeless.
	And Ramona was hopeless in that category too.
	And that just, it's one of those things.
	So here I began with two cats here in the Philippines.
	By the way, their passage, for them to come from America to the Philippines, cost more than my ticket.
	A lot more.
	In fact, almost double.
	Ridiculous.
	At any rate, now there are three, and you'll be able to see Dolly.
	I'll leave Dolly up over the weekend, but she's a total sweetheart.
	We've just got to do more for animals in this world.
	I've said this before and I'll say it again.
	I don't see a great difference between animals and humans, except we can talk.
	Otherwise, though, they have all the emotions we have.
	Oh, Lord, they have every single emotion.
	Jealousy, anger, joy, happiness.
	Just everything that a human expresses, and we do it vocally, they also have.
	If you look at them, you cannot not know that.
	So, the way we treat animals in this world has got to be rethought.
	Substantially rethought, in my opinion.
	We've got to rethink it.
	That's all there is to it.
	Let's go to the second wildcard line.
	JC, calling himself JC in Florida, not THE JC.
	Oh, okay.
	Hey Art, how are you?
	Quite well.
	Wonderful.
	Congratulations on the dog.
	That's very compassionate of you.
	It's amazing how an animal can come to your life, a creature, a living creature, and expand me.
	I mean, there are limits.
	I mean, you walk every night, and every night this little thing runs up to you like, oh, my savior, oh, mommy, oh, daddy, take me, take me, take me.
	You can't take that night after night.
	You just can't.
	Well, I'm glad you survived the hurricane.
	I don't get to listen as often as I'd like to, but I'm traveling right now.
	I was listening in the beginning of your show, and there's a little news brief you were discussing about something about in New York, the fellow that was shot, I guess murdered, essentially, on his wedding day, and then this angry mob, or not angry mob... No, it wasn't an angry mob.
	That's a fair comment.
	I hate to say that, because it seems that it's becoming more of a police state, and Yes.
	New Yorkers are great examples of when we the people are really fed up, starting in Maybe you can help me out with something.
	I am not clear.
	The original incident where the 50 bullets were fired, I know there was a collision, maybe a couple of collisions with police vehicles, but I'm still not clear on why they opened fire.
	Are you?
	No, this was the first I've heard of it and I know that stories like this do not get mentioned in cities like Dallas where I live.
	It's very Viacom or Clear Channel and pretty much has monopoly on all the news in Dallas.
	So we don't normally hear this.
	Well, it's not Clear Channel keeping the news from you.
	I haven't heard it either.
	I mean, I read every news service there is.
	I'm looking for information.
	Did they suspect it was an attempted vehicular homicide?
	Is that why they opened fire?
	I haven't heard anything like that.
	So, I just don't understand why.
	Well, the aggressive nature of the police these days, it's just out of control.
	And I don't know either what happened.
	I'm not really sure of the details.
	I am a first-time caller, and normally I don't like to get into subjects like this, but I was just kind of wondering what was going on with the situation, because, you know, as far as New Yorkers all standing together... Yeah, well, people are actually quite angry.
	Listen, thank you very much.
	People are angry, and they have a right to be angry about this, I guess.
	But again, I don't know what prompted them to open fire.
	Now normally, a couple of collisions would not be enough to do that, unless the police thought that he was attempting vehicular homicide, trying to kill police officers, you know, with a collision.
	If they thought that, then that would of course cause them to open fire.
	They would be responding in self-defense.
	But I really haven't heard What the police say prompted them to open fire, and if anybody out there has heard, I would appreciate that information.
	I guess all of this is still yet to unwind.
	Strange stuff.
	Very strange stuff.
	We now hear about the fact that it occurred, we hear about the burial, we hear about the confrontation with the police, but we still don't really know what caused them to open fire.
	Well, from Typhoon Ravaged, the Typhoon Ravaged Philippines, I'm Art Bell, alive and we shall just keep on truckin'.
	Stay right where you are.
	You certainly are.
	Good morning, afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be.
	This is Coast to Coast AM, the largest program of its type in the entire world.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Have you ever imagined As in the movie.
	A sort of mist-enshrouded island looming in front of the boat you're in.
	Wondered what might be on that island.
	Could it be that there is a land that time forgot?
	Could it be there's a lost land where creatures that we almost think of as myth right now still exist?
	Where creatures that we have not categorized yet exist.
	Well, if you lived where I live, you could imagine that.
	There's, here in the Philippines alone, and believe me, there's a lot more to Southeast Asia than the Philippines.
	7,107 islands.
	So many islands, you can buy an island.
	Islands that people have not been to before.
	So could it be?
	You bet it could be.
	Coming up next, Peter Von Puttkammer has been writing, directing, and producing international award-winning films in the United States and Canada for the past 25 years.
	His company, I think it's Griffin or Griffin?
	Griffin, I would guess.
	Griffin Productions Limited has created documentaries for the Learning Channel, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, and other specialty channels.
	Von Puttkammer's fascination with indigenous peoples Anthropology, archaeology, mythology, music and wildlife has led to work around the world.
	Peter has climbed through ancient caves used for human sacrifice in Mexico, filmed then eaten giant 12 In tarantulas with Venezuelan blowgun hunters, filmed sacred mask rituals and dances of North American natives, chased caribou herds on the Arctic Circle, and joined a hunt for Bigfoot.
	So this is a very unusual man coming up next.
	His name?
	Peter Von Puttkammer.
	Stay right where you are.
	Hi, it's good to be here.
	Good to have you.
	Where are you actually?
	I'm actually in Los Angeles right now.
	L.A.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	Well, this is a subject that I just don't know a lot about, frankly, and I guess you've been chasing this kind of thing all your life.
	Is this new for you or what?
	Well, I've been making films, as you know, for over 20 years, and I've worked a lot with indigenous peoples all over the world, and I've done a particular lot of stuff with the Pacific Northwest.
	There's a lot of great mythology and legends and strange creatures there that are part of Native American lore, and those creatures have Um, surfaced in their masks and in their dances, you actually see representations of those creatures.
	And when I was doing those films, I started to, you know, see some pretty familiar figures like Bigfoot, for example, uh, you know, the wild man of the forest or the wild woman of the forest.
	And their actual characters are hair covered creatures that appear in the mask dances of the Pacific Northwest.
	And I thought, well, Gosh, if they're depicting them so clearly, I mean, there must be some basis for this.
	And you can go to Europe, and you can see the same exact Wild Man of the Forest characters show up as large, hairy creatures, man-like creatures, and they come down to, you know, as part of this carnival and festival, and they do some of the same things they do in the Pacific Northwest.
	They steal children, and they return to the forest, and they take the kids, And so I started thinking about global wild man stories, and that led me to make, I guess, the first cryptozoology film, Sasquatch Odyssey, The Hunt for Bigfoot, which I think, you know, a few of your listeners might know about.
	Yes.
	And it was really my love of Native American mythology and my belief in their, you know, They often get dismissed, you know, Indigenous people as, oh, it's superstition and they're not scientists and, you know, but they're, they're so wise, you know, and so many levels that I don't dismiss the accounts of Native peoples as just mythology.
	Well, some of it may be.
	It's separating the wheat and the chaff.
	Usually, really strong myths that survive generation after generation after generation have some basis in fact.
	They didn't just start from nothing.
	There's a reason for them.
	So, I guess you operate on that principle, right?
	Well, it's what got me into this, and then as I got into it, like with the Bigfoot research that we did, and we actually got to work with the greats, you know, Peter Byrne and John Green and Rene DeHanden and Dr. Grover Crent.
	We feature the four, you know, the horses.
	Those are the greats.
	Yeah, they're the greats, all right.
	And so in working with them and in going out and meeting some very credible witnesses, such as, you know, state troopers, people who are professional, you know, wildlife officers and know what big game looks like, and when they tell you they saw a creature, That is man-like, it's hair-covered, it smelled bad, it was, you know, standing on the road in front of their patrol car, and they could clearly see the eyes and the intelligence in the eyes, but they knew it wasn't a bear, and they knew it wasn't human, that I tend to believe a guy who's been a state trooper for 20 years telling me this, he's got nothing to gain by it, you know what I mean?
	I, too, tend to absolutely believe them.
	They're trained observers.
	However, Peter, there is another part of me that is concerned that we don't have any hard evidence yet.
	There might be some hair that somebody's analyzed.
	There might be this or that.
	But, you know, by now it seems to me, in the hunt for Bigfoot, we ought to have a dead Bigfoot.
	Right.
	Well, of course, unless unless, Peter, they're not fully in.
	How would I put it?
	Fully in this dimension?
	Yes.
	Yes, there is.
	There is a I would say a following, a group of the Bigfoot believers that, you know, would put him into, you know, another dimension.
	I tend to certainly all the old time hunters I was with believed in Very much Bigfoot on the ground and a flesh and blood creature.
	And people like Peter Byrne, you know, who, you know, began hunting the Yeti with Tom Slick in 1956 in Nepal.
	And this guy is a professional game hunter and he's hunted tigers and elephants in India.
	And, you know, he, he has an explanation, you know, and he talks about big animals.
	Of course, particularly in the tropics.
	After four or five days, they're basically gone.
	Even the bones are broken down within a year and eaten by rodents and everything else.
	You don't find skeletons of black bears in the forest.
	You don't find skeletons of big predators very often.
	I did a show on wolverines once.
	You know, there's people that have been out in the woods all their lives and never seen a wolverine.
	They're very hard to find.
	So picture a Bigfoot that would be ten times as rare and probably more intelligent and elusive.
	No, it's a good point.
	There's a whole range of these creatures, not just Bigfoot, but along with Bigfoot, Chupacabra.
	It comes and goes.
	The Jersey Devil.
	I have books about the Jersey Devil.
	I've investigated all of them, by the way.
	I've been tracking the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens with a team, with a group of hunters, and even had a lead on A direct descendant of the Jersey Devil.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	How do you organize and then decide where you're going to go to hunt these creatures?
	I mean, do you operate on tips?
	What do you do?
	Well, in this case, I mean, in this day and age, of course, the Internet has made things much more accessible and we tried to find, in the case of Monster Hunters, which was a series I created in You know, I'm a filmmaker, so I go out there, and my wife and I, we both go out there and produce these shows and direct them, and I'm often shooting myself, so I get first-hand experience, and I want to find people that are, you know, credible, you know, hunters.
	They're not just, you know, fanatically interested in something, but they actually, you know, have a basis for their For their hunts, and so that we can go out and see what they, you know, what they are up to.
	And in the case of the Jersey Devil, I mean, it's a fascinating phenomenon, because here's a bona fide American legend.
	Not that much is known about it by the general public.
	It has a fantasy, if you will, supernatural component that is, it's born of the 13th child of Mother Leeds.
	The 13th child.
	Mother Leeds, late one stormy night, is going to give birth.
	She's had 12 children.
	She doesn't want the 13th one.
	She said, let this one be a devil.
	And out pops the baby.
	The baby transforms into a demon.
	In some stories, kills the parents and bites their neck and then crashes through the glass and out into the Pine Barrens to haunt it forever.
	That's the legend.
	No kidding.
	Now, actually, I've got some books.
	I have never read that.
	I've always read about contemporary sightings or whatever of the Jersey Devil, but I had no idea how it was, the myth behind it.
	It's a wonderful legend because the Jersey Devil pops up at time when America is under stress, when America is about to go to war.
	It's a portent of war.
	It appeared just before Pearl Harbor.
	It appeared during the American Revolution.
	It was shot at by Admiral Decatur, Commodore Decatur, with a cannon shot through its wing, apparently.
	An American revolutionary hero.
	Napoleon Bonaparte's brother lived in New Jersey for a while, and he sighted it in a hunting party.
	There have been many sightings.
	In 1911, that's when thousands of people across three states claimed they saw it, and there were armed shotgun riders riding on the trolley cars in Pennsylvania.
	Wow.
	And it was even, at one point, a fire department had the Jersey Devil trapped on the roof of a house and was using a fire hose to try and get it down.
	And they ran, this is 1911, so they ran out of water, it jumps down, they're throwing sticks and rocks at it, and two policemen that same year said they shot at the Jersey Devil.
	What is it that, you know, we're in the 20th century now, we're not back in Salem Witch Trial era, you know, what did these so-called, you know, modern 20th century humans What did they see?
	What were they fighting?
	Well, okay, I'm going to ask you to describe the Jersey Devil.
	I've heard Bigfoot, of course, described many times, Chupacabra is described many times, but I've never heard a description of the Jersey Devil.
	Well, this is where it, you know, potentially crosses over into, you know, your kind of devil Christian iconography.
	I mean, he's described as having, you know, this horse-like head and then winged bat wings.
	A cloven hooves, a forked tail, but the head is always less devil-like, I would say, than even a camel or a horse-like head.
	What's fascinating is we went into the backwoods.
	There's people there called the Pines, who are descendants of Hessian mercenaries from the American Revolutionary Wars.
	That still live in the Pine Barrens.
	Wow.
	And we were actually fortunate.
	They invited us to a guitar jamboree that they had there.
	I mean, this is two hours south of New York City, right?
	Sure.
	Or less.
	And the Jersey Devil is theirs.
	It's their story.
	It's their creature, if you will.
	These modern people talk about going out in the woods.
	Cutting lumber, cutting timber and hearing a wailing, screaming sound that is louder than their power saws, their chainsaws.
	And they talk about being woken in the middle of the night repeatedly over the course of a year with screams coming from a swamp that sounded like a woman being torn apart is how they described it.
	Yes.
	So, you know, what is this?
	I mean, no one's getting famous over this.
	They're not, again, there's people not, you know, they're not making money.
	I don't think the Enquirer has been there lately.
	So, why are they describing these things?
	What did they hear?
	And there is something biological going on in the Pine Parents in New Jersey.
	Maybe it's a big crane, you know?
	Maybe, you know, it's been speculated by some people that there's a A crack in the earth there and some kind of pterodactyl has gotten on the loose?
	Okay, well isn't that another way, Peter, of explaining that these could be, for example, dimensional creatures.
	I mean, they have this way of coming and then apparently just almost instantly disappearing.
	So a crack in the earth into which they could suddenly go and just disappear.
	Well, I think that's another way you could look at it.
	I mean, I'll tell you something.
	I've been all over the world.
	I've been in the Amazon many times.
	they have a power that we don't have that in some way protects them and allows them
	to disappear virtually without a trace.
	Well, I think that's another way you could look at it.
	I mean, I'll tell you something.
	I've been all over the world.
	I've been in the Amazon many times.
	I've been in jungle environments.
	This year I did some films in haunted homes with families being plagued by supernatural
	entities and the Pine Barrens in New Jersey was the creepiest place that I've ever been.
	My hair on the back of my neck was standing up all the time when I was in there, because for one thing, it gets very dark in there.
	As soon as the sun sets, I don't know if you've been in the eastern woods, but it's like the Amazon.
	These cicadas or something, they start up, so you've got on a level of, you know, out of ten, a seven out of ten on the audio level, you're just, you've got this piercing, buzzing sound just like eating your brain, you know, as you're trying to focus and trying to look for something.
	I know the sound.
	And then, as you're going through this dark, dark woods where it's very easy to get lost, there are There are forgotten towns.
	There are Victorian era entire towns lost in the woods in New Jersey where you come across old buildings and just dilapidated homes.
	There are graves everywhere.
	There are family plots.
	You stumble over tombstones when you're walking in the forest there.
	It just, for a lot of the audience, it doesn't sound reasonable for this to be so in New Jersey, but I can assure the audience it is in fact the case.
	There's a lot of wild New Jersey.
	It sounds crazy because you think of Jersey, you think of, I don't know, Newark, Patterson, you know, the cities, but there is an area of New Jersey, just as Peter is describing, and if you want to prove it to yourself, be my guest.
	Don't like to go out at night.
	In Leeds Point, which is Jersey Devil Central, we talked to several people.
	They don't like to wander the streets, the roads, the rural roads at night.
	Peter, the other thing is, this is, it's not just New Jersey, it's not just the American Northwest, it's, for example, I'm here in the Philippine Islands right now, and there are many creatures, for example, we have something called the Aswang, half human, Half animal.
	Winged animal.
	And I can assure you this is no joke here, Peter.
	These people not only believe in it, they absolutely know it's true.
	It's an article of faith.
	They simply know it's true.
	And you might tend to chuckle at this belief every now and then, but I'm starting to think that it's worldwide.
	That there's absolutely nowhere, Peter, without this kind of lore, of this kind of creature.
	Well, certainly in the wing creatures, I mean, you know, the Texas Big Bird, those things have been tied in.
	The Thunderbird, of course, and there was that sighting, I'm sure you covered back in 2004, I believe, that was, you know, incredible sighting up in Alaska of some creature with a 15-foot wingspan sighted by a pilot and the passengers, and two independent sighters on the ground.
	And they described it as looking like something out of Jurassic Park.
	No, you know, how could I have missed that?
	The answer is no.
	I guess you're going to have to tell me about that one.
	Something out of Jurassic Park.
	All right.
	Peter Puttgammer is my guest.
	He's an adventurer and a guy who heads off into the wild and tries to put a face, a fact, on these otherwise mythological creatures.
	From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	It is.
	My guest is Peter von Puttkenner.
	Now, Peter puts together expeditions, camera crews, groups, going out and looking for things like the Jersey Devil, a Bigfoot, and various other monsters.
	He was getting all set to tell us about one, which he will indeed do in just one moment.
	Don't move.
	Once again, Peter von Puttkammer.
	Peter, welcome back, and we were about to talk about something seen in Alaska, and somehow that one got past me.
	Tell me.
	Well, I believe it was actually, I said 2004, I think it was a little earlier in 2002, but basically, I believe the first person to see it was a A heavy equipment operator saw something from the ground that he thought it was an otter plane, which they use up there for transport a lot.
	And as it got closer, he could see that it wasn't a plane at all, but a bird.
	He actually got on the radio and told the people in the nearby village to get the children off the street because this thing might pick them up and take them away.
	A pilot who actually, because that was reported locally, he'd heard about it and thought he had a good laugh over it, and then he himself was flying passengers to another village up in Alaska, and he saw it, along with all the passengers, and he measured it, estimating the size at a 14-foot wingspan, and looking like something out of Jurassic Park, and the Local scientists, biologists said, well, there isn't really anything that big that hasn't been around here for about 100,000 years.
	There was some suggestion that there's a stellar sea eagle that flies in from Siberia that's got at least a 10 or 11 foot wingspan, much bigger than an American bald eagle.
	If people hadn't seen it before, you know, it would be quite shocking to see it.
	But this is mysterious, and with my work with Native people in the Pacific Northwest, of course, the Thunderbird, you know, it's integral to all of their cultural activities there, and it's certainly something that appears, you know, I mean Thunderbirds in their mythology picked up whales out of the ocean.
	Picked up whales out of the ocean.
	Yeah.
	All right, well, so this was seen.
	It is true in Alaska.
	Anywhere you go in Alaska, any travel at all in the state, pretty much has to be by air.
	So there's an awful lot of small plane traffic in Alaska.
	You simply have to go by air.
	It's too big, it's too cold, it's too remote.
	You have to go by air, period.
	Yes.
	But would that be, a creature like that, would it normally be that far north in the world?
	Or would most of these type of creatures tend to be in southern latitudes?
	Well, you would think so.
	It really, you know, you can't imagine other than, you know, some huge winged eagle-like creature what would actually be up there.
	But for that matter, I don't really understand what the sightings of big Big Bird would be in Wisconsin or Texas either, right?
	I mean, it's pretty difficult as well.
	What was less or more easy to believe in was the idea of mythical creatures, massive creatures in the Amazon, and that's what brought me down to Venezuela.
	I would say on my grandest film expedition yet, a film we produced for Animal Planet It's called The Real Lost World, and it's coming up on TV on December 10th on Animal Planet.
	Oh, no kidding!
	We've got Animal Planet here, so I'm sure that I will see it.
	It's coming up on December 10th.
	Give us a little preview.
	You went to Venezuela.
	Yes.
	Why?
	I was down in Venezuela doing, a few years ago, a show on these big spiders, as you alluded to earlier.
	We were going into caves looking for blind cave tarantulas, and that was in Mexico, and then we went on to Venezuela, and we were with these blowgun hunters, and they introduced us to their little friends, little furry friends, who were 10 to 12 inches across.
	The dinner plate sized spiders that they revere as keepers of the underworld.
	They are part of their ceremonies.
	They actually communicate to their dead through the spider, through the body of the spider in their ceremonies.
	And when times get tough and they have no monkeys or birds to shoot with their blowguns, they'll eat the spiders.
	So they took us to a place, a cave, where they bury their dead.
	It was very, I would say, reverent.
	It wasn't like, oh, let's eat the spiders.
	It was like, no, we're going to eat them in the presence of the bones of our dead ancestors.
	Yes.
	We're going to build this fire.
	We're going to say a little prayer of thanks that these Spiders are available to us and then they cook them up and you know, it's like a crab roast in Maine or Pacific Northwest and once the hair is singed off, you could almost believe they're land crabs.
	Oh yummy, land crabs.
	So you actually filmed all this?
	Yes, that was in 2002 and when I was down there I met Some people and one of the arachnologists on our trip told me about this plateau, Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World.
	I mean, this is the granddaddy of all dinosaur and creature books and movies.
	It's where King Kong sprang from and where, you know, Godzilla, Jurassic Park, they all Came from Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World.
	You found this place?
	So, we went there.
	It's known.
	It's on the borders of Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela.
	It's one of the oldest places on Earth.
	It's three and a half billion years old.
	This is where Africa and South America were ripped apart.
	And how do you even, I mean, where is it recorded?
	What did you use for a reference to even know where to go?
	Well, it's been speculated for some time, you know, what is the Plateau?
	Because people, you know, they read about this land forgotten by time and they wondered, well, where did Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, where did he come up with this place?
	People have speculated about Brazil because, and I can tell you a bit about that, Colonel Fawcett, a legendary Amazonian explorer who was looking for Atlantis, lost cities of gold.
	He had run-ins with dinosaurs and giant anacondas.
	He was a friend of Doyle's and certainly influential in this story, but when you look into it, all the facts seem to point to There's a clue in the book, The Lost World, where one of the characters, Lord Roxton, he points to a map and he says, down here in the Amazon, where the three countries meet, this is a place where anything could exist, anything is possible.
	And, well, the place where the three countries meet is Mount Roraima.
	If you look at it, it's a 9,200 foot plateau and it rises over a mile above the surrounding jungle.
	What is it geologically or otherwise about this plateau that makes it so much more likely to host the kind of environment you're talking about here than anywhere else in South America?
	Because it's so darn old.
	Because, as I said, this rose out of the ocean when the continents split apart.
	It was suspected for a long time that animals, plants, creatures, what have you, were isolated.
	And there are quotes directly from Scientists, Victorian scientists, that were speculating as to what could be there.
	But even before the, you know, Victorians got in on the act in the 1800s, Sir Walter Raleigh was the first to report on the plateau.
	He was looking for El Dorado, the lost city of gold.
	And he believed, he described Roraima as the place of gold and diamonds.
	And so, for three centuries, People tried to get to the top of this mountain.
	Let me just interrupt you for one second.
	It does sound geologically isolated.
	Is there any chance, Peter, that they felt that this was an isolated environment that would have sort of, I don't know, I guess, where time sort of stopped?
	And the environment there has virtually remained the same thousands of years ago or even more till now.
	Absolutely.
	That's what people believed and as I tell you this story I will tell you that they were right.
	There's a fascinating story here.
	I mean the Victorian explorers You know, as people began to the great, you know, colonial expansion, you know, of the early 1800s, explorers went all over the world looking for new places and ultimately it was, you know, part of, you know, colonialism, territorial expansionism, what have you.
	But really what was driving it initially was orchids.
	Orchids?
	Orchids drove the colonial explorers from Britain.
	People wanted rare orchids for their collections in England.
	And the Kew Gardens was the Grand Botanical Conservatory in London, and they sent people out.
	There was also the World Geographic Society.
	Now, what was great about, you know, the background to The Real Lost World, to, well, our movie's The Real Lost World, but the lost world of Roraima, the plateau, is that this was a time when people were just starting to find dinosaurs.
	In the 1830s, the first bones were being discovered in England.
	Now, this was before Darwin, so these certainly weren't reported in the Bible.
	These were things that cropped up, basically dragons in our backyards.
	What are these?
	At the same time, you've got explorers coming back from places all over the world with, pretty well, a new creature every couple of months.
	Pygmy hippos.
	you know, and by 1911 the Komodo Dragon, but the Okapi and, you know, all kinds of fantastic new animals.
	Gorillas were only discovered late in the 1800s.
	Amazing finds from all over the world.
	And so people believed anything was possible.
	On top of that, you have dinosaurs being discovered, and they built the first dinosaur theme park in London in
	1853.
	They did.
	And we went there and we filmed for our film, The Real Lost World,
	we filmed in this park, which is untouched.
	these These are life-sized dinosaurs standing outdoors in a very, you know, exotic environment with trees and grasses and bushes.
	And they're amazing.
	And so people demanded, and there were There have been newspaper editorials from the time saying, why have we not gone to the top of Roraima?
	What secrets lie up there?
	And they virtually demanded the Royal Geographic Society send explorers to discover what awaits at the top.
	And they believed dinosaurs might be there.
	And the RGS, Royal Geographic Society, sent two explorers, Everett M. Thurn and Harry Perkins in 1884.
	In our film, we take a modern team of scientists and they follow in the footsteps of these two explorers to get across the swamps, down the rivers, across the savannah, and up the 9,200 foot mountain, and then into a new cave system, which has only just been discovered two or three years ago.
	And we take a biologist along to see, a cave biologist, to see what lies inside the caves.
	Brave man.
	So, across swamps, rivers, savannah, mountains, then finally caves that nobody's probably ever set foot in or hasn't for a very long time.
	Boy, oh boy, oh boy.
	And you filmed in there.
	We did.
	Now, if you add to that that the Native people, the Mthern, Edward Mthern and Harry Perkins, reported in their journals, which I've read, creatures.
	Described to them by the Indians.
	The Indians feared Mount Roraima.
	They feared the sister mountain, Ayantipui, was considered the devil's mountain.
	There were spirits at the top.
	Roraima was spoken of in hushed tones.
	It was where the water, the mother of all waters, is what Roraima means.
	And they didn't venture to the top.
	That's why so little was known about it.
	The Indians never went there because they feared What lay at the top.
	And so the explorers heard tales of water dragons, flying reptiles, bizarre turtle like creatures, huge, 20 feet across.
	Some kind of dinosaurs.
	Yeah.
	And so what I wanted to do on this trip, and I would say my grandest adventure yet, is take a team that ended up being 20 cast and crew, Fifty porters to get us to the top, three cameras, helicopters at some point to shoot some of this, and a big crane, and we made
	You know, we filmed this entire trip on high-definition video.
	It's going to be on Discovery HD on the 14th.
	Good for you.
	I love high-definition.
	Something I'm missing terribly over here.
	High-definition is an absolute new world into whatever is being shot.
	It's just wonderful.
	Oh, it's phenomenal.
	I mean, we're going to be premiering the show on a big screen here in Los Angeles tomorrow night, actually.
	It's just fabulous, even like 40, 30, 40 feet across, it still looks amazing.
	Peter, I've got to ask, you don't have to answer because you're very close to the debut, but I've got to try.
	Did you catch anything on film that you've been describing?
	This is what I'm going to tell you.
	I think if we caught a dinosaur, you might have heard about it by now.
	But what we were doing, we were on a mystery hunt.
	We were on an investigation.
	And that meant that we were speaking to villagers, to shamans.
	We were going with local guides to places where These creatures had been sighted, for example, this beautiful Konaima Lagoon, seven cascading waterfalls.
	It's the runoff from Angel Falls, 3,200 foot highest waterfall in the world, where this water dragon, Rato, is said to live.
	And as recent as just a few, you know, three, four years ago, there were people dragged off the beach there by this creature.
	The tales of the Didi, the ape man, now people forget with The Lost World that it's not just dinosaurs.
	Conan Doyle has a whole tribe of Sasquatches, of Bigfoot, in his book.
	And they're the wild man, again, the same, you know, you see them in European, even the European coats of arms has, royal families have this Bigfoot-like creature in their coats of arms.
	So here's this wild man now in South America, and they're called the Didi by some people, and every tribe, and we went to several tribes there, and they all have an account, and when they tell you about it, it's not like, oh yeah, we used to have this story about that or something.
	It's like, no, this thing, people are very afraid of that.
	We've been lucky.
	It hasn't been here for a while, but this is what it does, and it hunts and eats humans.
	And when they tell you about it, it's not just like some story, but it's part of their forest life, like any of the other animals.
	It hunts and eats humans.
	Again, we have a creature here, the Philippines, that does the same thing.
	It hunts and eats humans.
	And it's not a laughable matter.
	Of course, people from the West would tend to chuckle about this kind of thing.
	If you've lived in a city all your life, you definitely would chuckle about this kind of thing.
	But there's no chuckling going on here, I can assure you, Peter.
	This is a deep, ingrained Strong belief, and I'm sure what you ran into is exactly the same thing.
	Hold tight, Peter.
	We're at break point from Manila in the Philippines, where the typhoons come this year.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Land of dragons, actually, here, Japan.
	This would be the land of dragons.
	Peter von Puttkemmer is my guest.
	He's a monster hunter.
	He just did a A high-def video trip down to South America looking for monsters.
	There's more from Peter in a moment.
	Well, all right.
	Here's Peter Vaughn, put the camera once again.
	Peter, how big was this group that went on the expedition?
	Well, we handpicked a team, we put together a dream team, if you will, of spider experts, arachnologists, snake experts, cavers.
	One of the top cave biologists in the world, Dr. Hazel Barton, was in the IMAX Journey into Amazing Caves And also Dean Harrison, who's a cryptozoologist in Australia, and he has a large group there, Australian Hominid Research.
	Tell in total about how many people.
	Well, all told, with our five team members and then our film crew and support team, we were about 20.
	Wow.
	And then we needed about Close to 50 porters to get us up the mountain with our gear.
	And so it was a real expedition.
	It was a full, I would say, two weeks of hiking, camping, trekking and caving as part of this.
	And now all the while, I mean, yes, we're there to explore legends.
	of dinosaurs and ape men, and there is the cryptozoology component.
	There's also the animal component, which kind of intersects, because, for example, the anaconda, we actually went into a swamp and pulled an 18 to 20 foot anaconda out of a pool of water as a part of our Really?
	And you will see us do all of these amazing things.
	Yeah, let's hit that again.
	You said December 10th?
	Yes, and December 10th on Animal Planet, and December 17th, it's a repeat, and also December 14th on Discovery HD Theater, High Def Theater.
	That's great.
	Now, again, I don't want you to give things away here, but did you find...
	Did you find any hands-on evidence?
	Now obviously you did interviews with indigenous folks, and I'm sure heard all kinds of stories, but did you see anything that you can talk about?
	Well, I just want to, yes we did, but it was unexpected.
	And it may lead us to clues about life on other planets.
	What?
	So I'm going to get to that in a second.
	What we did really look at, because you have to understand that Colonel Fawcett, who was a friend of Conan Doyle's, described in his journal shooting a 62-foot anaconda very close to that area.
	So we wanted to pursue that and find out, and we have Dean is actually setting up Uh, camera traps and so on to see what he can capture.
	There's also the 23 foot Orinoco crocodile that weighs as much as a Honda Civic.
	Um, and so our question was, could some of these tales be related to existing animals, to giant versions of these huge reptiles that we know exist there?
	And, you know, that was very intriguing because Colonel Fawcett, describes a Diplodocus, a huge brontosaurus-like creature that he spotted in the swamps there.
	There was a sighting by a European in the 1950s in the lagoon of a plesiosaur-like creature.
	We also had descriptions from, like, not villagers, but actual guides and game people On one of, in one of the wildlife refuge areas we were in, who were telling, you know, as a child seeing anaconda coming up to a man's hip in thickness.
	So a school bus had to stop to let it cross.
	So this thing was at least 60 feet long.
	It's like a thicker than a telephone pole around.
	So if you start to think about dinosaurs and these, you know, what these could be, then, you know, maybe they relate You know, two anaconda tails, and that's part of what we were investigating.
	Here's a question just off the hip before we get to this big thing you want to talk about.
	Peter, suppose you had actually found dinosaurs.
	Suppose you had actually found something that eats people.
	I mean, were you prepared to deal with something Of that kind.
	I mean, did you take along a lot of guns, a lot of something to protect yourself?
	Well, I don't know.
	I don't think that would have gone across too well with the Venezuelan paramilitary forces that are ever-present when you're down there.
	Yeah, I spent some time in Caracas and I found it to be...
	Caracas is pretty edgy.
	It is edgy.
	There you go.
	That's the right word.
	Edgy.
	A little scary.
	Yeah, the doorman at our hotel had a sawed-off shotgun.
	Well, that's not unusual.
	Everybody was sort of shocked down here.
	No, it was more than that.
	I mean, I saw automatic weapons.
	I saw people were... Well, I had... I was shooting photographs in Caracas, and I shot something that I guess I shouldn't have shot, and one guy looked at me and drew his finger across his throat like, do that again and you're a dead man.
	That's a deep memory of Caracas.
	Yes, of course.
	Once you get outside of that big city, which I think has a higher crime rate than even Bogota, Colombia now.
	Caracas is actually... We have people tell us, oh, Colombia is no problem.
	You should go.
	Colombia is great, you know.
	Anyway, but if you go outside, you know, it's like people anywhere.
	I mean, you don't want to go to...
	You don't want to go too close to the Colombian border because people are being kidnapped.
	I mean, that's always your biggest fear.
	Your biggest fear when I'm in these situations, generally, is not the animals.
	It's the humans you've got to watch for.
	The two-legged ones.
	Yeah.
	But, you know, we were in the midst of many strange poisonous creatures there.
	I mean, day to day, the stuff we've got to watch for is the fer-de-lence.
	One of the most deadly snakes in the world.
	It hides in the tall grass.
	It's invisible, even on our high-def cameras.
	I mean, you know, I had to go in and sort of highlight things in post so we could see the darn thing because it's so perfectly camouflaged.
	And our snake expert, Seth Heal, is, you know, very, very close to this thing.
	And if these bite you, And I know you have lots of these critters in Manila as well, in the Philippines, but the ferulence attacks the red blood cells, so if you get bitten by one of these, if you don't die outright, then your limb may turn black and fall off.
	I mean, it's pretty well certain you're going to lose a limb if this thing bites you.
	Of course, we have rainforest here, and there are just, you know, there are giant areas where there's just nobody, and if you go in there, you are truly taking your life in your hands.
	You know, an amateur, of course, would be just suicidal.
	Absolutely, and even handling, you know, Rick West, our arachnologist, I mean, he was finding new species of tarantulas there, some of which were You know, again, 10-12 inches across, and if you don't know what you're doing with those, you know, you're going to get bitten, too.
	And these are actually bird-eating tarantulas.
	Bird, and also a giant foot-long centipede that we caught.
	Of course, dinosaur-era descendants were 8 feet long.
	We had a mere foot-long centipede that eats mice and frogs.
	But it's extremely, you know, painful bite and can make you very ill.
	Look, you just said something we have to follow up right away.
	You said you found something that might indicate extraterrestrial what?
	Well, we, of course, You know, as I said, we're looking for very, very huge creatures, as were the original explorers.
	I mean, they went there, yes, they went there to gather plants, they went there to mark the boundaries, but they also were looking and expecting dinosaur-like creatures when they got to the top.
	When we got to the top, what we found was one of the most amazing landscapes on the planet.
	It was described by the explorers as a fantasy land.
	It's like a set from Star Trek.
	There's windswept geological formations that look like predatory dinosaurs, among other things.
	Incredible creatures and shapes.
	And even as you scale, and all the time as you're climbing up, the Indians are telling you, You know, if you're talking, I'm a director and I'm yelling at my crew or something, and they're going, you know, the native people are getting upset because you're upsetting the spirits on this mountain, and they don't want to... And again, so the audience understands, when you say the top, you're talking about an elevation of 9,000 plus feet, is that correct?
	That must be an entirely, oh my God, at 9,000 feet, you have a complete new climate from down below.
	I mean, completely new.
	You're climbing to the top through a forest that's got, you know, vipers in it and bullet ants, these ants that have venom that's like a snake that can actually kill you or put you in the hospital.
	You've got a whole variety of things that can get you on the way up and then there's a 45 degree slope.
	Now this mountain was considered unclimbable for decades and people went around and around and around it looking for a way to the top and it was Everett M. Thurn that we can see his journey in our show and we follow up the same 45 degree ramp that he took and it's part of it is clinging to the cliff What you see is a narrow pathway with foliage around it.
	So when you're in it, you aren't as aware of sort of a 3,000 foot drop to your left, but if you were to go off the path a couple of feet, you'd soon find out that it's a long way down.
	Oh my God.
	I can't even imagine bringing a camera crew, 20 and then what, 50 people, and did you lose anybody in this process?
	No.
	We had a medic along.
	We were very mindful of that.
	We were lucky in that it didn't rain.
	It rains.
	It's incredible.
	You know, it's called the Mother of All Waters for a reason.
	And if you were to hit that mountain on a deluge day, I mean, part of it's just a clay face.
	So if you're scrambling up a steep slope, You'd be dealing with slippery red clay and you'd be all over that mountain.
	How long did it take you to go from the forest canopy cover to the top?
	It took us a week.
	A week, wow!
	And once you reached the top, how much geography was there?
	And describe, if you can, what you saw.
	Yeah, well, this is what I'm saying, is that we got up there, I mean, as you come to the top, again, it wasn't quite the same feeling as the Jersey Devil and being in the Pine Barrens, but the first thing are these large, you know, they remind you of the figures from Easter Island?
	But they're not man-made.
	It's like the hand of God touched this place and you're looking at three sort of guardians of the gate as you get to the top.
	They hover, they're black and they're very unusual shape.
	You'll see them in the film.
	And everywhere you look are little gardens.
	So you'll have these huge black shapes that look like animals and dinosaurs and tortoises and creatures and then these little delicate gardens.
	With flowers.
	And what the first explorers found were that, you know, they were right.
	This was a lost world.
	And it is a lost world.
	And there are thousands of plants that exist nowhere else on Earth except on these tepuis, the plateaus.
	Some of them, hundreds, are endemic, unique to Roraima, this plateau alone.
	There are dozens of animal species So, insects, frogs, mice, a whole variety of birds.
	In other words, it had its own ecology.
	It does, and they're all black.
	So the butterflies are black.
	They're all black?
	They're all black.
	The lizards are black.
	Why?
	Well, as our cave biologist explained to us, all the rocks, the black color of the rocks, if you crack the rock open, they're white inside.
	What's on the rocks is a layer of black microbes.
	And life adapted for two reasons.
	One, to blend in with the rocks or camouflage, but also to dissipate heat.
	It's very hot there.
	It's right on the equator.
	Even at that altitude?
	Yes.
	It cools down.
	I mean, at night, it went close to freezing.
	And at daytime, it would soar up to 90 degrees.
	Of course, down below, it's 120 degrees.
	Um, but it does cool down at the top.
	And no one knew until very recently that there were caves.
	Massive caves.
	In fact, the oldest caves on the planet, on the top of these mountains.
	Wow.
	They're 125 to 150 million years old.
	Peter, if there's anywhere on the globe where I would think that a species could exist and ignore the changes of time, it would be a cave like that.
	Now caves, when you go into the earth, the temperature tends to stabilize.
	I don't care what part of the earth you're in.
	If you're below the earth or in a cave, the temperature tends to stabilize, I think in the mid-50s somewhere.
	Isn't that true?
	Yes, yes, it is definitely.
	The caves of the world are, I'd say, along with the deep oceans, the last frontier, and we know probably less about, you know, caves and the deep earth than we do about the deep ocean, because we've done quite a bit of exploring in the deep ocean, but not so much in caves, especially not very deep.
	And, of course, Our cave biologists are some of the best on the planet.
	You know, Dr. Hazel Barton and Peter Sprouse is one of the most fabulous cave guys you'd ever want as your backup man on a trip.
	I mean, he's uncanny.
	He's Spider-Man in the cave and these are people that can go down for weeks at a time, miles underground, jumping off of ravines, miles underground, rappelling deep under the ground.
	Um, so these caves on Morima are the fourth largest quartzite caves in the world.
	Now another magical part of this mountain is that there's crystal rocks, crystals, quartz crystals lying everywhere.
	So it's like, it's like the Wizard of Oz or something.
	You've got these shapes all over.
	You've got these pristine, beautiful little gardens.
	And then you've got quartz crystals sort of magically scattered on the paths and scattered in the pools.
	And when you go into these caves, and the caves that they found, the Czech cavers found it, but they weren't scientists, and they didn't investigate it with a scientific team.
	We were the first to do that.
	So, what we found inside, it was named Crystallized Caves, and as you come into the caves, you'll find, embedded on the floor, these two Holes that have been dug out like two giant eyes and inside they're filled with quartz crystals.
	So you have the red color of the cave and then these bright white like eyes, like white eyes staring at you.
	Yeah, this is like going into a different world.
	Yes.
	I really want to see this.
	Do you know what time it's due to air on Animal Planet?
	Yes, I believe it's eight o'clock.
	It's in primetime Sunday Showcase on Animal Planet.
	How long is it?
	Is it one hour, two hours?
	No, it's a two-hour special.
	Good, good, good, good.
	Now, I can tell you about what you were asking.
	Well, we've got a break coming up, so I'm going to have you hold it.
	But find something that perhaps indicated extraterrestrial life.
	What would you call it?
	The surprise of the expedition?
	It was a surprise, and I will say that NASA is funding our cave biologists on a return trip.
	Oh my god, are they?
	Yes.
	The funding for the trip that you did do, did that come entirely from Animal Planet?
	Well, we have to be clever as filmmakers, and we get some money from the broadcasters like Animal Planet, and we got some funding from Canada Outdoor Life Network, where, by the way for the Canadian listeners, on October the 17th it's going to air on Outdoor Life Network.
	There you go.
	All right.
	Peter, stay right where you are.
	And when we come back, we'll talk about whatever it is that Peter found that might indicate extraterrestrial life.
	And that might be just the place that you'd find something like that.
	From Manila, the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	A two-hour high-definition trip to a lost world at the top of a plateau 9,000 plus feet in Venezuela.
	Not something I'd do, but something I certainly am going to want to see.
	It's coming up on Animal Planet at about 8 p.m.
	Peter von Puttkemmer is my guest, and he tells us while he was there, he found something of such interest that there's going to be a return expedition funded at least in part by NASA.
	That's coming right up.
	Peter, NASA has a pretty tight budget these days, to put it mildly.
	So whatever it was you found had to be awfully interesting for them to pony up any money at all.
	Tell us about it.
	Yes.
	Well, first of all, we had to get into these caves, okay?
	So there's various entrances, and we experimented with several entrances, including repelling a team of people to get You know, inside we really didn't know what to expect.
	We'd heard some reports.
	I mean, the Czech cavers had reported giant lobsters inside the cave.
	I mean, that was the description.
	So we were kind of anxious.
	And, you know, part of a trip like this is, you know, well, what is, you know, we know what we're going to explore.
	We know we're going to be able to tie together You know, The Lost World, Dinosaur Legends, with the native stories told to explorers, which were then told to Conan Doyle.
	So, we were pretty sure that we could, you know, we could find that connection, and we did.
	And then, what were we going to find?
	Well, as far as, you know, physical, like, biology, that's unusual.
	Well, as it turns out, you know, this place has been You know, separated from the rest of the jungle for thousands and thousands of years.
	It's life on top of this mountain got separated from the jungle by 3,000 foot sheer cliffs.
	There's no relationship between the species on the mountaintop and the jungle.
	So this area gets 30 feet of rain a year.
	There's no soil.
	There are floating islands of plants.
	It's a totally bizarre landscape.
	There's a frog there that's only related to a frog that's in Africa.
	And it only lives on that one tepui.
	It only lives on Roraima and nowhere else in the world.
	So, going into the caves, we were very anxious to see what might be in there.
	Anxious?
	I imagine anxious is the word.
	There's other words I could think about before I do it, but anyway.
	So, as we went in there, we made three separate forays into the caves, and as I say, these turned out to be the fourth largest caves of their kind, namely quartzite caves, but they're very, very ancient at over 125 million years.
	That's significantly older than most caves in this country.
	What we started noticing, one of the first things you notice is that there's massive spider webs everywhere.
	Three, four, five feet across.
	We're looking for different life forms at this point.
	And one of the first things we found was a brand new aquatic species of cricket, a ladder about 3-4 inches long that had never been seen before, and extremely unusual to see something like that in there.
	And then, Dr. Hazel Barton is specifically there, and this is a lady who's gone down 700 feet feet through moving ice crevasses to find microbial life that's been left over from the Ice Age, okay?
	So she's a hardcore lady and she's looking for things that are unusual because she's advised NASA on life on other planets and how life might evolve because we're always looking for The obvious.
	We're looking for the way life typically evolves on Earth, but what if creatures are living or growing on a very small scale, and what if they're eating things that aren't the norm?
	And what we started finding were these unusual formations, and they look like stalactites.
	But there's no water in this cave.
	The stalactites are formed from dripping limestone, typically, right?
	Yes, indeed.
	Yes, of course.
	And what we figured out, and Hazel figured out, is that what we're seeing are the remnants of spiderwebs that are coated with something that have been growing and getting longer for maybe 150,000 years.
	150,000 years. Now that's weird. So in other words, these appear to be or seem to be solid
	in the sense of, I don't know, like something that was, I don't even know what you're talking
	In other words, I can imagine what you're talking about, but I can't imagine how a spider web turns into that and then gets... What you're seeing are giant, elongated, what look like sugar-coated formations hanging from the walls.
	And they get referred to as carrots, too, because they can kind of resemble that, but they're organic.
	So the question was, are these microbes eating the spiderwebs?
	Is that what we're seeing?
	Are we seeing microbiology at work here?
	And as the spiderwebs are abandoned over time, that these colonies of Macro life, as it were, microbiology starts growing down the spiderweb.
	So, Hazel basically studied it and was actually quite blown away because what she's figured out, and this is what she's going back to find out more about, is that these are basically microbes that are eating the glass walls, that is, silica walls of the caves.
	And what we're seeing... Silica?
	No, wait a minute.
	They're eating silica?
	They're eating silica.
	And that's never been observed before in a cave, ever.
	Eating silica?
	Yeah.
	That's life... that's not the life we understand.
	No, no, exactly.
	And so what we're seeing is the sediment that's deposited from the microbes eating the silica in the walls, and they're landing.
	It's like, you know, the canary in the coal mine, so to speak.
	The spider webs are just the outer sign of life at work.
	Life that develops very slowly over hundreds of thousands of years, but the signs are What it leaves behind, and what it leaves behind are the fine dust particles that it's chewing away on in the walls of this ancient cave, 125, 150 million year old cave.
	Well, we have to understand how silicon can be used as a nutritional source for anything.
	Oh, that's weird.
	And literally, I mean, Hazel goes all over the world.
	You know, she studied, you know, as I said, up in Greenland.
	She's been underwater in limestone caves in Mexico.
	She's been in all kinds of environments, and she's never seen anything like this.
	Was she pretty sure that that was what was happening?
	She was so sure that as soon as she got home, she wrote I can see why.
	the Kentucky Space Grant Consortium, which receives its money from NASA, and they have
	granted her the money for a return trip.
	I can see why.
	Now if you're in the guessing mode here, do you think that this is life that adapted in
	this weird environment to begin to eat silica, or do you think that this life is life that
	originated elsewhere and is able to survive on silica?
	Well, I guess we'll find out more when Hazel goes back with her, you know, it takes a while to get, you know, you mount an expedition, even like ours, like to get collection permits is a huge deal in foreign countries, right?
	I know.
	So Hazel has to work with universities, she has to work with government agencies, you can imagine the bureaucracy in Venezuela to get through.
	I can do better than imagine.
	So it's, you know, the next step is to be granted the collection permits to now go back and prove her findings And, but this, you know, this is a lady who's working on the highest level in the world on these kinds of discoveries, so she's quite certain that this is what she's seeing.
	Well, if she's really got it, if she can prove that there's a life form existing, eating as nutritional value silica, then that opens up Even the probability that life, perhaps as we don't understand it, but could understand it through this, would exist on other planets?
	Absolutely.
	I mean, as I said, you know, we're always looking for water-based life forms, looking for carbon-based life forms.
	Of course.
	We're looking for things that are like planet Earth.
	But the fascinating thing is, and this is the great lesson of our search and it's the great lesson of the Explorer's Search is that you go looking for dinosaurs and you find a lost world alright but it's completely unexpected.
	No, no, no, this is really a big discovery.
	So, when will the next expedition possibly occur?
	Well, she's I'm hoping that it's going to be within the next six months.
	Do we get a good look during this two-hour special at what you're talking about right now?
	Absolutely, yes.
	We got a lot of great shots of it.
	First of all, I want to say that inside these caves, some of these rooms we're in are the size of cathedrals.
	I mean, they're massively huge.
	And, you know, we had to haul our lights in there and light this up so you could see it.
	I'm sure it was a logistical nightmare, all of that, wasn't it?
	Yes, absolutely.
	And we made another discovery, which was quite fascinating, is that we sent one of our cameramen, who was an ex-Czech Army guy, who I had no And so they're crawling on their hands and knees through miles of tunnels.
	And in this cave, the ceiling, if you so much as tap it with your head, pieces of the ceiling flake off and fall down all around you.
	Not my kind of place, Peter.
	So they're crawling on their hands and their belly, and we filmed all of this.
	They find a long lost animal down there.
	A skeleton of a mammal that likely wandered in there.
	It could have been 10,000 years ago.
	I mean, we don't know, but it was another interesting discovery because no one has ever found the remains of a larger mammal on top of the mountain before. Peter, because you did not have, I
	presume you did not have collection permits, you were not allowed to collect any
	samples?
	That's right. You know, one of the things that's neat about this place is that
	they've placed, I mean you hear about Chagas and all that sort of
	thing, but you know, their parks and their areas, like this entire area was declared a World Heritage Site, right?
	Back in the 90s.
	And it's looked after by the local Pomona Indians.
	And they let the native people, whose sacred mountains these are, basically be the caretakers.
	And you don't go to this area, and you don't go to the top.
	Without their say-so.
	And we had to clear this with, you meet the chiefs, you meet the shamans, and you negotiate, and you help them out a bit, and they work as sherpas for you and bring stuff to the top.
	But they are very watchful.
	They don't want people picking up crystals and taking them off the mountain.
	They don't want someone pocketing a rare black frog of Roraima and take it down with them.
	So they're watching, and they make sure that people don't take things.
	And you can negotiate for collection permits, and it does take, it can take a year or more to get them.
	Still the temptation to grab a crystal, to grab something that, it just must have been overwhelming.
	Sure, I mean, people love to take, you know, souvenirs.
	And if you or somebody in the expedition had, in fact, Taking a sample, you certainly couldn't tell me about it, could you?
	Uh, no.
	And what'll happen to you there is the Pomona, who are amazingly resourceful and clever people, and they're just, like, watching all the time.
	They're watching to help you out.
	I mean, it's not like they're sort of, like, nasty.
	They're very nice, and they're very helpful, and they're usually watchful in a good way.
	They don't want you to get hurt and things like that.
	If someone took something from the mountain, they turn you into the National Guard and you end up in a South American prison for a little while.
	I see.
	Which isn't so good.
	Right, and I'm sure that of course you're going in and out of customs and that sort of thing as well, so I guess you'd be discouraged from it.
	Some of the other types of adventures, I mean we just talk about the animals and the perils of the trip, but you know some of the other Things you encounter you don't expect.
	You know, we come into this jungle camp, and here's this, you know, you've always got to be careful in South America, you know, and here's this bar, you know, outdoor bar, and there's a beautiful woman behind the counter, and there's like six soldiers with Uzis sitting at the counter, and I'm already telling my crew, okay guys, Hands off the bar, girl, because we could get into serious trouble here.
	And then we find out that she's married to this guy who's worked for the Foreign Legion.
	He's a professional mercenary, been all over the world, killed at least two or three hundred people in the course of his career as a soldier.
	Several of whom no doubt opposed his girlfriend.
	And he's this Swiss guy, and he's very affable, and he goes down to the Amazon tributary and plays his 20-foot alpenhorn for us.
	He says, oh yes, you must hear my horn, you know?
	We go, oh, very nice, of course we'll listen to you, Mr. Killer Murderer.
	And then people are telling us stories, you know, when...
	uh... federico over there he was called in to help resolve a prison uprising he
	he's he personally they they there was an uprising in a local prison and he
	went in with some of the venezuelan and kill over a hundred people in a prison
	operating so
	we gotta be careful not just with the animals but here very careful about
	when you meet people down there Well, Peter, look, I've been telling Americans now for many years, before I left America on my latest adventure here, that Americans have just got to, somehow or another, get out and see some of the rest of the world.
	It gives you such a different perspective on where you live and what you have to see some of the rest of the world.
	Don't you agree with that?
	Yes, absolutely.
	And you know, Venezuela is a fabulous country.
	It really is.
	And as you know, Caracas has got its problems.
	But when you get outside, you're going to see some of the most incredible scenery and beautiful places on the planet that you'll ever see.
	And of course, it helps to have a good person taking you there.
	We had I previously worked with a guy named Juan Carlos Ramirez, this Akanan Tourism.
	They helped keep things organized and they helped us find animals when we needed to film animals and they were safety people and they took care of us when we were rappelling down into caves and so on.
	So you've got to have good local people.
	But even with good local people, even with the best of everything, there's still a lot of danger in what you did.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, we risked our lives every other day there, you know.
	I mean, just even being on the Grand Savannah, the walk to the Lost World, I mean, one of the big, probably one of the most dangerous things about the trip was lightning strikes.
	And they were very cognizant of that.
	And whenever there was rain or anything coming in, we were hunkered down under the next shelter as quickly as we could, because you do not want to be out On a massive open savannah in a lightning storm.
	And similarly, you do not want to be on top of this mountain.
	And I'll just say that this mountain is not for the faint of heart when you get to the top.
	Now picture they get 30 feet of rain a year.
	So typically, you know, you go up there and there's first of all, there's crevasses when you get to the top.
	30 feet of rain a year.
	So, the rock formations form mazes, so even on a day when there's no fog, you can get lost.
	You can easily lose your way and then fall down a three or four hundred foot crevasse.
	That would be the end of you.
	Peter, hold tight.
	We're here at the top there.
	Hold on.
	When we get back, we're going to open the phone lines, so those of you that know the portal numbers, feel free to join us now.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Morning, evening, afternoon, whatever it is, wherever you are, Peter von Puttkemmer is my guest.
	He went to a lost world in Venezuela.
	One of the things that he found was a microbe that apparently eats silica.
	Now, if you think about that a little bit, as Tom in Texas did, said, holy cow, silica-eating microbes, modern computers, not a good combination.
	Imagine some of these things getting loose in an Intel lab somewhere, or even just around your computer.
	I'm also seeing people sending me fast blasts, suggesting they're seeing on the internet that maybe as many as a thousand were killed here in the typhoon.
	I surely hope that it's not that many, but I'm afraid I imagine it might be.
	All right, those are the numbers.
	If you'd like to join us, ask a question about an amazing expedition that you're about to be able to see on the animal planet.
	December 10th, 8 o'clock in the evening local time for all of you wherever you are.
	I hope you'll take the opportunity to take a look-see this incredible, incredible expedition that Peter just came back from.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Joe in Detroit, Michigan asks, how much roughly, just in ballpark figures, did the expedition cost?
	It must have been a lot.
	It cost approximately $75,000.
	$75,000.
	OK.
	Well, actually, that's not as much as I might have imagined.
	No.
	Now, I'm saying, I mean, that's pretty well On the ground.
	I mean, if I'm if I were to add in camera costs and all of that, it'd be significantly higher, obviously.
	I mean.
	I don't really want to give you the whole budget of the film at this point, but suffice it to say, it would be hundreds of thousands of dollars.
	I'm sure it would.
	All right, and Jackie in North Las Vegas, Nevada asks, please ask him if he has longitude and latitude of the plateau.
	There are some people out there who would like to go to Google Earth, I guess, and look at it by satellite.
	Oh, gosh.
	At my fingertips, I don't have the longitude and latitude, but you could certainly go.
	Put, Google Earth, Mount Roraima, and you'll be able to see exactly where it is.
	Mount Roraima, R-O-R-A-I-M-A, in Venezuela.
	And, you know, we also have this website, thereallostworld.com, and I believe there's a link even on your coast-to-coast site on that, and you can read some more.
	About it.
	For people who are in the L.A.
	area, we have a few seats left for the premiere and we're going to have a high-def projection of it here in Surround Sound.
	It's some information on the website about that.
	That's actually tomorrow night for people in the L.A.
	area.
	So there's a lot of, you know, previews and things coming up.
	You can view a little bit of the trailer and you'll get to see what this place looks like On the site.
	And it's a pretty phenomenal place.
	And you know what's really fascinating?
	I think all of us grew up with, you know, dinosaur movies and journeys to fantastic places.
	And The Lost World has been done many times as a film.
	The first one was 1925.
	It was the original.
	No, I think I've seen them all, actually.
	Yeah, and, you know, Wallace Beery was in the first one, and Willis O'Brien, who did all the effects for King Kong, cut his teeth on The Lost World.
	That's where they worked out all the claymation, all the stop motion, and what was so fascinating is, so seven, eight years later, he does King Kong, because, you know, The Lost World was the granddaddy of all of them, and it's really fascinating.
	Arthur Conan Doyle was a friend of Harry Houdini's and they took the Lost World and they presented it to a group of magicians in New York and they defied them to figure out how they did it and the magicians just could not figure this out because this is the first time anyone had seen huge dinosaurs depicted on screen with people walking in the foreground and shooting at them and being chased by them and
	And, you know, by today's Jurassic Park standards, it's pretty primitive, but you can certainly see how people would have been blown away by this.
	Well, Peter, as they say, this one's in the can.
	So what do you imagine to do next?
	Are you going to stick with this genre?
	Do you have something else planned that you can talk about?
	I'm working on a doc... I was back in the Amazon this year.
	I'm working on Another slightly different documentary, but it'd be pretty fascinating.
	It's a story of the greatest botanist explorer of the 20th century, Richard Evans Schultes, and among his 2,000 plant discoveries were several well-known hallucinogens, beginning in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
	And it's an adventure tale on the footsteps of Richard Schultes, And what happened to the West when these sacred plants of indigenous peoples that were used very specifically in ceremony ended up hitting the West and impacting our culture?
	And how the jungle discoveries of Richard Schultes led to the psychedelic era?
	Fascinating.
	You know, in that area, obviously there were plants, there were animals that are not elsewhere on the earth.
	And I think we all know from having watched a lot of films, Peter, that it may be that the next cancer cure or the next cure for some terrible disease will be in one of those plants that just don't grow anywhere else at all in the world.
	And so that makes it even more difficult not to be able to collect these things and analyze them.
	It just would drive me crazy.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, that's why, you know, it's so every day, you know, every week they're destroying hundreds of acres in the Amazon and it could be the next cure for cancer or what have you.
	And in fact, Richard Schultes discovered Did most of the work on the Karari, which was a muscle relaxant, what's used in blowguns, the aeropoison.
	So the Amazon, very little was known about it until he went down and figured out there were at least 15 or 20 plants involved in producing Karari, and it ended up becoming the surgical anesthetic for Many, many years.
	For decades.
	If you actually have discovered something that actually feeds on silica, it's a monstrous discovery.
	Just gigantic.
	It's going to rewrite everything we know.
	All right, I've had you on here a long time.
	I want to let the audience chime in, but congratulations.
	If that's really the case, my God.
	First time caller line, you're on the air with Peter Putkammer.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	I'm from Wisconsin here.
	I'm a truck driver.
	Oh, yes.
	Okay.
	My question, this goes on my calendar.
	I can tell my grandchildren.
	I actually talked to Art Bell.
	I want to know if they took precautions before going into the cave of contamination, and if they decontaminated after coming out.
	I'm thinking fibers from clothing and things like this that these organisms have never had a chance to feed on before, and if they're wondering if there are going to be any long-term consequences of having gone down.
	The indigenous people stay in that area, but he's traveled around the world with all this camera equipment and stuff.
	And I'm really wondering if any thought has been given to contamination in both directions.
	Yeah, it's a very, very good question.
	You always think of it the other way around, I suppose, Peter.
	What are we going to run into?
	What's going to make us sick?
	But the other way around, what about contaminating the environment you went into?
	Well, I think we could safely say, if we were talking to Hazel, that those microbes are pretty happy living on the rocks, and they're not really jumping onto Biological organisms and hitching rides and things like that.
	I mean, more often what happens, I mean, put it this way, we were in a cave with a couple of expert cavers and I had been in a cave with Peter Sprouse before in Oaxaca, Mexico, where we did personally take precautions because we had big HEPA masks that we wore.
	And HEPA suits.
	And we went in there because very often the bat guano carries a spore that can kill you, basically.
	And it's actually not the vampire bats you've got to worry about.
	It's the fruit-eating bats that have this in their feces.
	And there's also aerosol rabies that you can get in caves from bats, from their urine.
	Oh, brother.
	Oh, brother.
	And so, the good news was, and actually what makes this even more amazing is that this was a relatively starved cave.
	It's a starved cave on a starved tepui.
	It's one of the reasons these things are eating rocks, is because there's very little else for them to eat.
	The scientists are going to just go crazy trying to figure out what nutritional value can... That one just has me lost, and I'm sure everybody else too.
	Let's go to Wildcard Line, Houston.
	Ivan, you're on the air.
	Hi, I'm 17 years old.
	I've been in Ecuador for five years.
	And I want to ask Peter a question.
	Has he ever heard of a cave in Ecuador that leads to China?
	Wow.
	A cave to China, huh?
	I sort of doubt it, but Ivan, don't go away.
	Peter, I'd say you probably haven't, right?
	I haven't heard of a cave in Ecuador that leads to China.
	Being a big fan of Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth, I think we all imagine you could, you know, run on underground tunnels around the world.
	I don't think that it would be physically possible, though, really.
	Let us reverse the question.
	Ivan, have you heard of such a cave?
	Yeah, actually, yes I have.
	What do you know about it?
	I don't know much.
	I was told a story about six, seven years ago.
	But yeah, it's a cave, it's a top secret, and supposedly some of the government knows.
	I'll tell you what, Ivan, if you would be so kind, simply send me an email and tell me what you do know about it, like its location, that sort of thing, please, and we'll see what we can do from there.
	I'm artbell at mindspring.com.
	Artbell, A-R-T-B-E-L-L at mindspring.com.
	And Peter, if people want to get in touch with you, is there a way for them to do that?
	I mean, you just never know what you might run into.
	Right.
	They can write me at GriffinProductions at Hotmail.com.
	That's G-R-Y-P-H-O-N Productions with an S at Hotmail.com.
	You could write me there.
	Okay.
	Alright, you never know.
	I mean, there may be somebody with knowledge of a cave or something unusual that nobody knows a thing about except one or two people out there, and you never know what just might drop in your lap.
	Karen in Spokane, Washington.
	You're on the air with Peter.
	Hi Art and Peter.
	I was out in the woods north of Spokane about, oh, ten years ago and I heard Bigfoot.
	I was with five other people.
	One of them was a Native American guide for us and it was unlike anything I have ever heard in my life and I heard it seven times.
	Oh well, all right, you heard it.
	How do you know that it was Bigfoot you were hearing?
	He told me that his grandmother used to take them out in the woods and he swears that he has seen Bigfoot and that he said that was what he sounded like.
	And I've never heard anything sound like that.
	Well, as do many people.
	So many people have heard.
	Go ahead, Peter.
	What did it sound like?
	The closest thing I could come to, and it doesn't even sound like it, would be a cougar.
	But I've heard cougar.
	It's like Kind of between a woman's high screech and a cougar.
	It was just awesome.
	That's the closest, but it wasn't really like that, but that's the closest I could even think about relating.
	Well, I've heard different accounts of what Bigfoot is supposed to sound like, and I know I've been out with Bigfoot hunters like Rick Knoll, and they actually play back Bigfoot sounds.
	In the hope of attracting Bigfoot, and it did sound sort of like what you're describing, a high-pitched sound like that.
	I've also heard about whistling, like whistling sounds, and I know for a fact with the Native people, the Kwakiutl Indians, that when they portray this wild man in the dance, that that's what he does, is he whistles.
	He makes this shrill whistle sound.
	I always found that really interesting because there's accounts of high-pitched whistles.
	Well, I had a recording that was allegedly a Bigfoot and it'll stand the hair right up on the back of your neck.
	It's a high-pitched screeching.
	Inhuman scream is the only way I can put it.
	Wild Card Line 1, Chuck in Kentucky, you're on the air with Peter von Puttkamer.
	Hello Art and Peter.
	Hi.
	I was fascinated when you were speaking earlier on the Jersey Devil.
	I grew up in South Jersey, right on the outskirts of Lebanon State Forest.
	And I remember hearing those stories from the time I was about first grade on.
	I mean, contrary to the one thing you had said about it killing the parents, I hadn't heard that part of the story.
	I heard everybody was appalled at the look of this thing, and it went screaming into the night, but it didn't hurt anybody.
	Go ahead.
	Well, there's an interesting angle to that human version of the tale, that it could be a human that is more of a demon than anything, right?
	It's born as a baby, you know, a normal baby, and then turns into this demon, and in some versions it kills the parents.
	And the interesting angle is that this Leeds family, from which it is descended, might have... that their true background to the story might be that this was a deformed child.
	And in those days, in 1735, if you had a deformed child, the mother might have been You know, accused of sleeping with the devil or something like that.
	And so, the child may have been kept away, locked in an attic.
	And indeed, when it came out in public, it might have been cloaked in a cape.
	And so, the black wings of the Jersey Devil may have been a deformed child out in public, covered in this black cape.
	All right.
	Peter, there's something I want you to hear.
	We don't have a lot of time before the break, but I'm told that we have that sound.
	So go ahead, folks, and play it.
	it. Let's hear it.
	Now there you go.
	meh You ever hear anything like that, Peter?
	I actually have heard a similar kind of sound in the ones that Rick was using.
	And they're said to be, you know, come closer, closer by.
	You know, I just want to mention that we did pursue the Deedee Tales and Legends further, the same creatures that ended up, Bigfoot-like creatures that ended up In the book, The Lost World, and, you know, told to the explorers.
	And the follow-up, really, is this Deloitte's ape.
	Deloitte's ape was a creature.
	The story is that there were two five-foot-tall ape-like creatures that appeared at night at a camp very close on the border of Venezuela and Colombia.
	And this Francois Deloitte shot one of them.
	And there's a very famous photograph of it.
	And it appears much, much bigger than any known ape in South America.
	And speaking of caves, I was able to track down some photographs of a prehistoric spider monkey-like creature that is twice the size of Deloitte's ape found in Brazil.
	And maybe Deloitte's shot one of these apes in the 1920s, a holdover, a prehistoric holdover.
	All right, hold it right there, Peter.
	Peter Von Putthammer is my guest.
	He's an adventurer.
	He's about to have some video on the Animal Planet, 8 p.m.
	local time, December 10th.
	You don't want to miss it.
	From Manila in the Philippines, I'm Art Bell.
	Would you believe?
	The mountain is completely hidden by clouds.
	What are the odds?
	Peter von Puthammer is my guest.
	He's the guy who did the show that'll be on December 10th, Animal Planet, 8 o'clock.
	You don't want to miss it.
	It's a two-hour special.
	Among other things, they found an organism that apparently eats silica.
	Eats silica!
	Now, if that's true, they've made a monstrous breakthrough.
	That just can't be.
	So NASA is going to fund another expedition.
	Tomorrow night, Sean Carroll, Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology.
	Time travel, physics, astrophysics, cosmology, field theory, gravitation, that sort of thing.
	Tomorrow night.
	Absolutely fascinating stuff.
	Art Bell, back to Peter in a moment.
	By the way, folks, a bit of a promo.
	I've got a three-day weekend coming up.
	Three days, that is, to save work.
	George gets a well-deserved day of vacation coming this Friday night, Saturday morning, and I will be here doing open lines.
	Always open for suggestions, by the way, on what we talk about.
	Peter, here we go again.
	First time caller of the line, Jeremy in Pennsylvania.
	You're on the air with Peter.
	Hi, Art.
	How are you doing?
	Okay.
	I'm a big fan of Chuck Palahniuk.
	He's a fiction writer.
	I think he stumbled across the answer for Bigfoot.
	He basically stated the reason we aren't finding any bodies is because Bigfoot is related to werewolves.
	And when, of course, a werewolf would die, it would turn back into a human.
	I was wondering what you thought, or if you'd even heard this theory before.
	It's similar to what I said earlier.
	I mean the fact that we have not discovered any hard evidence at all, we don't have any bodies, has to allow at least the possibility that this thing is not completely of this world as we know it.
	Peter?
	Well, I mean the best evidence, physical evidence that I've seen so far was Not in North America but in Bhutan near Nepal and there was a expedition that went over there and they found some, they were directed to supposedly a, now this would be like a Yeti type snowman, home I guess inside of a hollow tree and they took some hairs from that
	And it was sent to England, and I watched an actual news report where the British scientist said, look, we've tested this against all the known mammals in that region, and this is something completely different.
	And I don't know what happened to that.
	Well, there's a million things like that, Peter.
	These things do get tested, and they come up with anomalous results, and they just sort of get put up on the shelf because they simply can't be explained.
	Right, well... So, I mean, if you're a person who's collected a sample like this, and you send it off to the lab, I've had this done myself, and I know, and you get an anomalous result of some sort, it doesn't mean that you just stumbled into the Holy Grail, because they simply say, well, it's not of this earth, or we don't know, or whatever, but then it gets put up on the shelf.
	Yeah, it doesn't fit the criteria.
	Well, certainly, as far as Bigfoot, you know, it is It does cross over with a lot of other stories and legends, certainly in Quebec, you know, you've got Loup Garou, it's a werewolf, you know, belief.
	And in South America, you know, one of the theories about the Didis, these Bigfoot-like creatures that are said to be down there, that they get stories about giant sloths And these creatures get mixed up that there's a, you know, giant sloth with 15 to 20 feet high.
	They're even bigger than Bigfoot and 5,000 pounds.
	Peter, did you investigate these sightings they had a few years ago in Florida?
	And if so, what did you conclude?
	Oh, Skunk 8?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I don't know an awful lot.
	There were some pictures circulating on the Internet about that.
	And I certainly know that, you know, there's been a lot of serious investigation about the skunk ape down there.
	It's one of these, you know, you know, what is a great discovery, though, is Flores Man, not that, you know, in your neck of the woods there anyway, on the Indonesian island, a hobbit man.
	You know, people are always looking for proof of something.
	Well, for years, Indonesian Native peoples have been talking about Oran Pendak, a little man of the forest, and here is this discovery that shows an entire race of human beings that existed as recently.
	The bones they found were only 13,000 years old.
	I mean, that's nothing in geological time.
	And the suggestion is that Flores Man may indeed, even the scientists suspect that it would have been around during the Dutch colonial period.
	So, this is an amazing finding, and this human lives on an island with a pygmy elephant and a giant rat, so it's something out of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, and it's really shedding new light on the native stories about a little wild man in the forest that people lived side by side.
	Similarly, I mean, you know, what happened here in North America?
	Some people think Bigfoot is tied to Neanderthal, right?
	That it's a collective, you know, memory that we have stories of Bigfoot because our species, Cro-Magnon, lived for 60,000 years side-by-side with a harrier other.
	Have you considered one day an expedition to this part of the world?
	It is a very mysterious part of the world.
	To the Philippines?
	Oh, Philippines or Indonesia or, you know, Southeast Asia in general?
	Yes.
	Yeah, well, absolutely.
	I mean, we're actually putting together a series on missing links right now, and I think some of our stories will indeed take us there to Southeast Asia.
	And indeed, Flora's Man, we might end up pursuing that tale as well in remote islands of Indonesia.
	All right, let's go to a wild card line.
	Bill in Salt Lake City.
	You're on the air with Peter.
	Hey, Art.
	First of all, I wanted to say you're my hero, buddy.
	Thank you.
	You nailed it right on the head when you said that people need to get out of the country to see what it's really like out there.
	I have a philosophy that It might be a little extreme, but we should at least do a couple years coming out of high school in the military to get away from the United States to really get to appreciate what we have here.
	I couldn't agree more.
	At one time it was done by draft, and now of course people don't have to go, so they don't, and they don't get a larger sense of the world, Collar, so yeah, you're right.
	Okay, hey Art, did you know, I don't know if it's still today, but I was in the Philippines in the early 90s in the Navy and they're saying that there's some islands there that I guess are cannibal and the government won't even go there or something like that.
	I suspect that's true.
	Do you have a question for my guest?
	Sure do.
	I was wondering if you come across any traces of prehistoric stuff or maybe seen stuff there in the lost world that would relate to prehistoric things as far as animals.
	Right.
	Well, I mean, we didn't, other than, you know, some of the largest crocodiles in the world and the largest snake in the world, which we, you know, pulled out of a 20 foot specimen, we pulled out of the swamp there.
	We, you know, we didn't, you know, come across hard evidence of dinosaurs.
	But I will tell you another thing that happened in that when we were talking to A Pomona Indian shaman, a 90-year-old medicine guy there, and we, Dean, who was our resident cryptozoologist on the trip, he produced a model of a pterodactyl, and he showed it to this guy, and his eyes lit up.
	He grabbed it, and immediately had a word for it.
	He said, this is such and such, and one of the, I think he said, And this is a creature that would come down from the top of these plateaus and take our children.
	Now, he said that not again like, oh, once upon a time, legends have it that, you know, like this was talked about as something very real and certainly fits in with the Lost World legends.
	I'm telling you, Peter, the Oswong here in the Philippines, half human, half animal of some sort, winged, also goes after children.
	And it's more than just a legend here.
	I laughed it off and I don't laugh any longer.
	It's believed by everybody here.
	All right, let's go to yet another bill on another wildcard line.
	Bill in Las Vegas, close to home.
	You're on the air.
	Yes, hi Art and Peter.
	It's a pleasure always to speak to you.
	Art, you had done a couple of programs on Mel's hole and the sounds from hell, and I wanted to know if Peter could address anything about that.
	I doubt it, seriously.
	I will ask.
	There is, Peter, the Holy Grail waiting out there, perhaps somewhere in some cave.
	I wonder if the cavers that you talk to do imagine that it's possible that one day they
	will come upon a cave that will lead very, very deep into the earth, deeper than man
	has ever gone.
	I think you're, I don't know about it specifically, but you're referring, there's a place that's
	basically a bottomless pit, right?
	He's referring to Bell's Hole, a story of basically a bottomless pit, yes.
	I'm not quite sure how to answer that.
	I mean, I don't, I'm not quite sure how to answer that, but, you know, caves...
	That's why I kind of rephrased the question.
	Caves are, you know, one of the reasons, I mean, we go, you know, we go into deep ocean...
	I mean, it's not that difficult to, you know, go into a submersible and go down, you know, 20,000 feet nowadays, right?
	But going into a cave is an extreme environment for humans, and it's very difficult.
	You can't rapidly travel into a cave.
	It's a slow process of, you know, figuring out, first of all, getting in on the surface level, then figuring out how hostile it is as you go in and if you're going to need breathing
	apparatus and this sort of thing.
	But all I'll tell you is, unlike the movies, caves aren't all lit up like in the Star Trek
	movies.
	It's darn black in there and you better have two or three backup lights when you go in
	because once you leave the cave...
	It's a very good point, Peter.
	In most of the motion pictures, they have this fortunate, lucky, luminous substance on the walls that lights their way the whole way down.
	Now, what I was asking, Peter, let me try again, is whether the cavers that you talk to think that there may be somewhere, sort of the holy grail of caves, something that would go very, very deep into the earth, much deeper than man has been.
	I haven't, I actually haven't heard that.
	I haven't discussed that with them.
	I will tell you about one interesting thing that relates to the Lost World, and that is that they have massive sinkholes there.
	That's actually something that I would like to go back and investigate.
	Just like the Roraima Plateau in our documentary is a land cut off from time, they have sinkholes that are, you know, More than half a mile deep.
	Peter, I've seen a number of documentaries on these sinkholes, and as you point out, they have their own closed ecology, which has no relationship to that which is above it at all.
	You know, limestone sinkholes and water or something.
	Of course, these are in the jungle, and you basically have a whole new jungle ecosystem just dropped down, you know, thousands of feet down.
	And there may indeed be species there as well.
	I mean, let's not forget that 2005, in Indonesia, they found this lost world, as it was described.
	Tree kangaroo, never been seen before.
	Dozens of species of birds, rodents, brand new to the planet.
	And, of course, in Vietnam in the early 90s, this lost world was found with a large mammal, a Vu Thong Ox, I think.
	And so, you know, cryptozoology isn't just about Jersey Devils and Chupacabras, it's about You know, living, breathing creatures, mammalian life forms.
	And it's surprising how many places on the planet that we continue to find new life.
	And that's what Arthur Conan Doyle was saying.
	He wanted to challenge, even in those days, the scientific community.
	Because he probably would have been on this show.
	He wrote Sherlock Holmes, the most logical character in fiction, but he was also A spiritualist, you know, and he believed in life hereafter, and he wanted, writing The Lost World, he wanted to say to science, look, there's places in the world you know little about.
	We're finding new animals all the time.
	There could be a place, cut off from time, where dinosaurs still exist.
	And that's what he wanted to say, and that's what we explore in the film.
	All right.
	West of the Rockies, you're on air with Peter.
	Flip camera, hi.
	Hi, Art.
	Well, you're concerned, as I am, about the possibility of contamination creating, you know, like maybe the thing that could kill all life on Earth.
	And by the way, and I can think of a sci-fi horror scenario that would make a terrific movie that would actually be possible within the realm of possibility with these silicon-eating By the way, I missed the answer of the NASA scientist that you interviewed about a week ago when you asked him about whether NASA was taking precautions when they bring back stuff from Mars.
	Okay, well his answer was with great caution.
	He said, you know, we're worried about that.
	He said in some of the early missions it may well be that they did not take the proper precautions and it is their biggest scare that the contamination has occurred either on the moon or more likely on Mars.
	And we're going to go up there and find our own life.
	What about if these microbes We're exposed to a city like New York where everything is concrete or brick, okay?
	Whether they could even survive outside of this little environment that they're in, I don't know, and I guess Peter doesn't know, and I'm not sure we want to find out.
	Yeah, they might speed up in light or something like that, you know?
	I mean, that would be the horror story part of it.
	It would be sort of like Grey Goo kind of a scenario.
	Okay, Peter, again, of course, you can't bring samples out, but I wonder if in this next expedition, the one funded by NASA, they would bring, I would think, they would very much want to bring some of these microbes that eat silica back.
	Yes?
	Sure.
	I mean, it's going to be tested and, you know, I would say I mean, I could ask Hazel some more about this, but, I mean, rock-eating bacteria exist all over the planet.
	I mean, we're surrounded by it.
	And, you know, it hasn't killed us off yet.
	And, I mean, there's a lot more organic things in our environment that are much more dangerous than something like this.
	Even man-made things in our environment.
	such as secondhand smoke and asbestos in buildings and environmentally, you know, hazardous buildings
	with new building materials.
	We're absolutely out of time.
	Your special December 10, Animal Planet, 8 p.m.
	local time.
	Everybody watch it.
	If you're not interested from what you've heard, then you just weren't listening.
	Peter, thank you for being on the program.
	Thank you very much.
	Bye-bye.
	You have a good night.
	Ladies and gentlemen, we will be back tomorrow evening with a brilliant man, and among other things, we will talk about time travel.
	From Manila in the typhoon-ravaged Philippines, I'm Art Bell.

▲