Wildlife expert and cryptozoology researcher Gareth Patterson took over the famous "Born Free" lion research in South Africa - he's lived with lions and elephants. He's tracked - and encountered - Africa's own version of Bigfoot...!
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is definitely The Unexplained. | |
| Thank you very much for being part of my show, and thank you also recently for supporting me through a long run of filling in for The Amazing James Whale on talk radio. | |
| It was quite an experience for me to do regular radio like that, and you know, I massively enjoyed it. | |
| I've had to take just a little bit of a backseat from things because I've had a flare-up of the tinnitus, the ringing in the ears that I've suffered for years. | |
| I was basically doing seven days a week for a while, and, you know, which was a very different routine from my podcasts and my weekly radio show, The Unexplained on the Radio. | |
| So that's basically where I'm at, but it's been a heck of a time, and thank you very much. | |
| You know who you are, so many of my Unexplained listeners, who supported me through those weeks of doing something that is a little bit out of my comfort zone, and I greatly enjoyed. | |
| So thank you for that. | |
| We've got great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained. | |
| Slightly behind on the podcast, but not very. | |
| I think this week we'll only be putting out this one. | |
| And then I hope to get back to, for the moment, doing two per week, if I can. | |
| But, you know, the old way that we did it, I always used to aim for four per month. | |
| But we'll see how we go during this weird lockdown period that I'm still in. | |
| Oddly enough, caught in this kind of limbo, I've been churning out podcasts and have learned an awful lot of things about how you are productive, how you're productive at making podcasts. | |
| I've sort of become an expert on all of that stuff without meaning to. | |
| But thank you very much for all of your support. | |
| My website is theunexplained.tv. | |
| That's the place to go where you can find all of my back catalog and find out more about me. | |
| Adam is my webmaster. | |
| Thank you to him. | |
| And Haley books the guests on the online show. | |
| So thank you very much, Haley. | |
| What you're going to hear right now is something, an extended version of something that I did for the radio. | |
| This is a man called Gareth Patterson. | |
| He is originally a British guy, but lived most of his life in Africa. | |
| At the moment, he lives near a big forest. | |
| That's all I know for right now. | |
| And is an expert on the lions and the elephants, but also a kind of Bigfoot creature called Otang, which I've never heard of until recently. | |
| So we're going to talk about all of that and the mysteries of communication, the sort of ESP that seems to be used by lions. | |
| How do they understand? | |
| And if it's non-verbal communication, are they using telepathy? | |
| How does that work? | |
| So it very much fits into the unexplained. | |
| Some lovely stories to come with Gareth Patterson. | |
| I think you're going to enjoy this. | |
| Thank you very much for all of your recent emails. | |
| People like Marcus in Portugal and Simon in Aberdeen. | |
| My thoughts are with you and everybody in Aberdeen right now. | |
| Simon, thank you very much for all of the emails. | |
| And do know that every single email that comes in is seen by me. | |
| And, you know, a lot of the big media, they don't do that. | |
| So that's one thing that I've always done. | |
| Thank you very much for being part of all of this. | |
| All right, let's get down to very nearly Cape Town, way, way south of here. | |
| We're in high summer in London. | |
| They're in kind of mid to late winter, I think, there. | |
| And let's speak with Gareth Patterson. | |
| Gareth, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained. | |
| Thank you very much, Howard. | |
| Talk to me first, would you, about your location, because you have a very different location. | |
| Well, where I stay at the moment, where I've stayed for quite a few years now, is right on the edge of the Nysner Forest, which is about six hours up the coast from Cape Town. | |
| I live in a little tiny wooden cabin on the edge of the forest. | |
| Literally a stone's throw from me is about 600 square kilometers of Afro-Maintain montane forest, and that's all part of a national park here. | |
| I think it's the third or fourth biggest, largest national park in South Africa, which is the Gardenroot National Park. | |
| And it's in the forest and the surrounds there that I did a lot of work rediscovering the world's most southerly elephants, if you want to call them that, the famous Neisner elephants, which were thought to be extinct back in 1999, or they thought there was only one left, the functionally extinct population as they described it at the time. | |
| And thankfully, that's not the case today. | |
| And we have to explain to people, maybe some people hearing this have been to Cape Town, been to the Cape. | |
| They've done the winelands and all the rest of it. | |
| But when you go to Cape Town, you do the Winelands, maybe you see a little bit of the coast. | |
| You don't actually go inland, not very much. | |
| And that's a pity because once you start going up from Table Mountain and further up, up, up from there, the landscape changes dramatically, doesn't it? | |
| It does. | |
| I mean, if you're following from Cape Town, running up the east coast, this is where Nysen is actually very, very different to large parts of South Africa. | |
| I mean, South Africa is generally a very arid country, and yet we've got this huge chunk, like I said, about 600 square kilometers, which you can really regard as rainforests, which is a remnant sort of rainforest system, which used to exist back in millennia, which used to exist from here right the way up the east coast, the Rift Valley, to Central Africa and East Africa. | |
| And through climate change and all the rest of it, it's shrunk and shrunk and shrunk until you've got this little tiny island of this almost impenetrable rainforest. | |
| And it's only about seven kilometers inland from the little tourist town of Nysner. | |
| And if there are mysterious creatures to be found, if there are wild creatures to be found, then you will find them in that forest aplenty, won't you? | |
| It is a mysterious place. | |
| And I think, you know, it's largely unexplored. | |
| I mean, the first settlers really came here about, I don't know, in the late 1780s or whatever. | |
| It was a difficult place to get to in those days. | |
| When they were coming by oxwagon or stages or whatever, coming from Cape Town, before they got to Nisno, as they're coming along the coast, they'd actually detour inland to the arid Karoo and then Around this portion of the country, because you've got such incredibly deep ravines and gorges here that they couldn't get across. | |
| So it was really a bit of a lost world, a little lost world. | |
| And I think that's why the elephants managed to hang in here for so long. | |
| If you consider when the settlers first came to South Africa, it was estimated a number of years ago, computer modeling, that South Africa probably had a population then of about 100,000 elephants. | |
| And within 200 years, because of ivory hunting and sport hunting and just the encroaching people and all the rest of it, that population within 200 years went down to about only 200 elephants, of which the Neisna elephants was probably the last little, you know, largest group that was left. | |
| I mean, it's unbelievable figures. | |
| I mean, in the southern Cape where I was, where I am rather, it was thought to be about 10,000 elephants. | |
| And today, if we've got 12 left, that's a lot. | |
| But it's actually a miracle that they're still here, considering that in the majority of the country, they were completely wiped out. | |
| What was that number again? | |
| Historically in South Africa, there would have been about 100,000. | |
| No, I got that one. | |
| What about now? | |
| Well, today, where there was once about 10,000 elephants, we've probably got, with my estimations, probably only about 12 or so left. | |
| A dozen. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that is largely because of the actions of man. | |
| That is, yeah. | |
| And so it's a double-edged sword in the sense that it is literally a miracle that there's any elephants left at all. | |
| I mean, when you consider elephants were existing, you know, right down in Cape Town, the west coast, right the way through most of South Africa on the arrival of the white man in those few hundred years, they were wiped out to the, I mean, there were no elephants, for example, what is in today's Kruger National Park, which I think today, I think it's about 10,000 elephants or somewhere around there. | |
| Back in the day, back in those days, a few hundred years ago, there were no elephants in what is today the Kruger National Park. | |
| The Kruger National Park elephant population is actually made up of refugee elephants coming across from present-day Mozambique and recolonizing in the Kruger National Park because historically they were wiped out of that part of what they used to call the old Transvaal. | |
| You know, I'm really embarrassed actually that I didn't realize that the figures were as you put them. | |
| I don't know where I've been and I've been to South Africa many times. | |
| But you know, you go and do the tourist things. | |
| Like I remember in my first encounter, which was 1994, long time ago, and I'd been doing some training for the SABC there, like the South African equivalent of the BBC. | |
| And I went for two weeks. | |
| I did a week of training with them. | |
| And then they said you can have a week to go and do whatever you want. | |
| And I think for a while they lent me a car. | |
| It was, you know, these were different days. | |
| And I went to a game reserve or a nature park called Shishlui, very much for the tourists, which is up near Richards Bay, north of Durban. | |
| You're going north-north there. | |
| That's kind of near the border with Mozambique, isn't it? | |
| Yes, it is. | |
| But, you know, I saw elephants there. | |
| In fact, the little hire car that I'd got was pretty much chased by elephants. | |
| And I just thought, well, this is Africa, plenty of elephants in Africa. | |
| And I thought no more about it. | |
| I thought they were rather lovely. | |
| I was glad that I was able to put the car in reverse and get out of there before being chased out by them. | |
| But I really thought that elephants were plentiful. | |
| No, I mean, that's the whole thing. | |
| Generally, across the board, mammal populations, certainly large mammal populations, I mean, were pretty much wiped out of South Africa. | |
| And yeah, I mean, lion populations, I mean, probably another thing that you might not be aware of, because a lot of people are not aware of the fact I come from a lion background. | |
| For the majority of my adult life, it's been lions and elephants. | |
| But I first started studying lions back in 1983. | |
| I think it was a population in Botswana. | |
| And I wrote a book about my research on that population there. | |
| It sort of gave me an indication of what's happening continent-wide in Africa then. | |
| We had a population in that portion of Botswana of about 60 lions that I knew of. | |
| And within three and a half years, they had been reduced by about half down to about 30 by trophy hunting, by snaring, poaching, poisoning. | |
| And this sort of gave me an indication, sadly, that this was what was being duplicated throughout Africa. | |
| Now, when I first started studying lions back then in the early 80s, it was estimated more of a sort of thumbsuck estimate that there was probably about 250,000 lions throughout Africa. | |
| And today, we are now realizing that we probably only got between 15 and 20,000 in the entire continent of Africa. | |
| And so, I mean, within my working life, we've seen a reduction of over 90% of the African lion, which is the lion is in many respects its own worst enemy because it's such a visual animal. | |
| Everyone knows what the lion is. | |
| We think of the king of beasts, but not many people realize that it's actually a very endangered species. | |
| Some sort of analogy there, if you can imagine a stadium, well, I mean, post, you know, pre-COVID times and all the rest of it, of capacity of 100,000 people in a stadium, and it's only got 15 to 20,000 people in, and every person represents a lion. | |
| That really sums up what the situation of the lion is in Africa today. | |
| Boy. | |
| So literally, if you imagine, and I've seen it, the Moses Mobida Stadium in Durban, or you imagine the big stadium, the F ⁇ B Stadium in Johannesburg, full of people, that's how many lions are left. | |
| If there was only 15 to 20,000 people in the stadium with a capacity of 100,000, let's say, yeah, that's basically what the situation is of the African lion. | |
| Now, this program is called The Unexplained. | |
| It is about mysteries, and you have examined mysteries. | |
| And in fact, the behavior of those creatures is mysterious and not as well understood now as it should be. | |
| So we can talk about, I thought we'd talk about the lions, the elephants, not necessarily in this order, by the way, the elephants, the lions, and also Africa's version or South Africa's version of Bigfoot. | |
| O-Tang, isn't it? | |
| O-tang, yeah, that's correct. | |
| Which I know that you've been involved in. | |
| So we'll talk about those three things in different segments. | |
| But can you tell me first of all, because people will be wondering, you are a British guy who found his life and made his life in South Africa. | |
| Why was that? | |
| Yes, I mean, British by birth, but really an African in outlook, if you can put it that way, in the sense that I was taken over to Nigeria when I was, oh, I think 18 months old. | |
| And I grew up in Nigeria, in post-independent Nigeria. | |
| And then we moved to Malawi, the warm heart of Africa, a beautiful, fantastic country to grow up in. | |
| And then I think my mother and my stepfather, you know, they were expatriates and they were thinking about the years to come that eventually they would move back to the UK. | |
| I think they knew where my heart was, but they sent me off to boarding school in the UK, I think to, I don't know, it was actually. | |
| Take me. | |
| Maybe something like that, because I was a child, you know, I was just a child in the bush running around in the mountains. | |
| I mean, if I wasn't looking after things in the reptile department at the local zoo, I was out catching snakes. | |
| Her pathology was really my first love with lions. | |
| And so I had, you know, I was just growing up in the wilds. | |
| And so I had that two-year period of boarding school in the UK. | |
| And you can imagine what a contrast that was for a kid, you know, growing up with the freedom of Africa and then the constraints of a boarding school. | |
| Did you rebel? | |
| Sorry? | |
| Did you rebel? | |
| I got on top of it. | |
| I got on top of it in the sense that I went through a terrible time. | |
| I mean, trying to adjust to it. | |
| I mean, I was a very healthy kid, but put in that environment, I got very depressed, I got very overweight, all sorts of things. | |
| I mean, I wasn't a happy boy at all. | |
| And then I got on top of things and I got very fit. | |
| And I just remember when I was finishing off, I did the O levels and I was just finishing off OA levels. | |
| And I knew where I was destined to head back to, and that was to Africa. | |
| And it was from a very cold classroom. | |
| It was a school in Sandwich in Kent, Sir Roger Manwood's Grammar School. | |
| And I just remember one cold evening, I think it was the last term, a second last term of school, and I wrote a letter to an old man living in Africa who lived amongst lions. | |
| And that was the famous George Adamson, the lion man of Africa. | |
| Born free. | |
| Born free fame. | |
| And basically in the letter, I was writing to George, offering him my very untried, you know, no experience qualifications, apart from being a white African, if you want to call it that. | |
| And George actually never actually got the letter. | |
| I was on holiday in Malawi a few weeks later and I got a letter from his wife Joy Adamson. | |
| The two of them, they were very famous for obviously rehabilitating Elsa the Lion back into the wilds. | |
| And Joy, for some reason, had seen my letter to George and George didn't need an assistant at the time. | |
| And so Joy actually offered me a job. | |
| I mean, goodness knows why, but she offered me a job to be her assistant with her leopard project in Shaba, in Kenya, Shaba Game Reserve in Kenya. | |
| And I replied very quickly. | |
| I don't think she ever got the letter. | |
| I flew back to the UK to do the last term of school and I picked up a newspaper at Heathrow and the headlines was, Joy Adamson killed. | |
| Joy Adamson, at the time, they thought killed by Lion. | |
| And then the next day, they realized that she had actually been murdered by someone. | |
| And I never thought that, you know, eight years onwards from that, that I would actually be meeting with George Adamson. | |
| On the publication of my first book about lions, Cried for the Lions, I sent George a copy and he wrote back to me and invited me to his camp. | |
| And I think this is all synchronicity and fate in a way, you know, because George invited me to work with him. | |
| And he said to me, look, I'm getting a bit long in the tooth now. | |
| He was 82 years old. | |
| And he said to me, I'd like you to work with me and work after me, which was an incredible honor for him to bestow upon me. | |
| And a year later, George was killed by ivory poachers. | |
| And I had to work very rapidly to rescue his last three Lion Cup orphans, which were like, Elsa was the born, first of the three. | |
| These were the last of the three. | |
| And I rescued them and relocated them to Botswana, where I'd been studying lions. | |
| And there, living as a human member of a pride, I successfully rehabilitated George's lions back into the wilds and their established territory and had cubs of their own. | |
| And I like to think the bloodlines of those lions still live today in that area. | |
| It's a lovely thought. | |
| Okay, we need to pause it there. | |
| Just one quick thing before we have to get to commercials here, which is one of the constants in broadcasting. | |
| You mentioned The hunting of, the poaching of, the game trade in South Africa. | |
| Now, look, there's a lot of money involved in this, and there are a lot of interests involved in this. | |
| And that involves a certain amount of risk, doesn't it? | |
| I mean, you've just alluded to that. | |
| Have you been at risk because of the conservationist stand that you've taken? | |
| Well, I was in the late 1990s. | |
| I was the first person really independently who went out there to expose this real shame of South Africa, which is what is called the canned lime industry, a sordid industry in South Africa, whereupon lions are bred in captivity. | |
| There's three stages of it. | |
| They're bred in captivity, the cubs taken away from the mother, then they're used for volunteer work. | |
| Volunteers naively think these cubs are going to be returned to the wilds. | |
| Then they're used for tourism, walking with lion trips and that sort of stuff. | |
| And then ultimately, they end up in the trophy hunting industry, breeding industry, and they're shot by overseas trophy hunters. | |
| It's appalling that that still goes on. | |
| We've seen this in our newspapers here, and it always brings out horror in people in this country who simply don't understand that these things still go on. | |
| And when I first exposed it, I mean, there was about two, three hundred lions caught up in this whole system here in South Africa. | |
| Today, we estimate there's between six and eight thousand lions caught up in this sordid industry. | |
| We've only got two and a half thousand lions in the true wilds here. | |
| We've got eight to twelve thousand, I think it is, in captivity. | |
| And so it's just escalated and mushroomed. | |
| Yes, and as a result of exposing that, the independent work. | |
| And then I worked with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, who collaborated with the Cook Report from the UK. | |
| Yes, I remember. | |
| Did the expose on that whole thing. | |
| And yeah, as a result of that, I received my first lot of, yeah, for two consecutive years. | |
| I got death threats because of exposing canned lion hunting. | |
| And then I got the next year death threats again for exposing the capture of 30 baby elephants from where I lived in Botswana, which were sold to a trader in South Africa who was brutalizing them, actually, for breaking their spirit, for resale into the wildlife trade. | |
| Well, Gareth, it's tragic. | |
| It's frightening. | |
| It's awful. | |
| And I realize now, I think probably one of the reasons why you live in such a remote location, perhaps, is for your own safety to an extent. | |
| But listen. | |
| No, but it's not a problem. | |
| It's not a problem now. | |
| I mean, this was like 20 years ago. | |
| So things are better. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Good. | |
| Okay, we'll continue. | |
| I want to talk about mysteries of the animal kingdom, but I think we had to explain all of those things to set the backdrop for where we're about to go. | |
| So I want to do it in this order. | |
| Lions we'll be talking about. | |
| We'll also talk about the elephants and also about Africa's version of Bigfoot. | |
| Animal mysteries in Africa, I guess, would be a broad brush way of describing this hour, but it's much more than that. | |
| And it also will involve discussion of a kind of Bigfoot, which Gareth Patterson has been on the trail of. | |
| But Gareth Patterson's done an awful lot of work, as you heard, with the elephants and the lions. | |
| Now, Gareth, I'm fascinated by the lions because, of course, every time you go there, there is a great enticement to go and see a lion park of various sorts. | |
| And I got to know Kevin Richardson, who you might know, who worked with the lions a lot at his lion park in Charteng, near Johannesburg. | |
| And I love the lions. | |
| I know that your experience is with lions in the wild, but there's a lot that is misunderstood about the lions, isn't it? | |
| About their communities, the way that they behave. | |
| Most of us think lions in the wild, very dangerous. | |
| If they bite you, they'll kill you. | |
| And that's all there is to them. | |
| They're killing machines. | |
| And of course, their lives are much more complex than that. | |
| They are. | |
| They're social animals like us. | |
| And, you know, in terms of their reaction to people, for very good reason, they're actually far more fearful of us than what we are of them. | |
| And that's because they know. | |
| Let me put it this way. | |
| It's a very misleading impression you get when you're a visitor to South Africa and you're sitting in a game drive vehicle and lions, wild lions, walk past the vehicle, whatever. | |
| The situation is there, is that they have become habituated. | |
| They know jolly well that those are human beings sitting in a vehicle. | |
| They do know that. | |
| But if you stepped out of the vehicle, if you're walking in the bush and you come across those same lions, nine out of ten times they will run away. | |
| They have an instinctive fear of the upright figure of the man. | |
| That just sends absolute danger signals. | |
| But we have to say, please don't try that because as you know, the South African newspapers once a year or so carry the story of somebody who rolls down a window or they'd think, I can just step out here because they look so lazy. | |
| And you find out they're not lazy. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | |
| It's a completely different animal if anything like that happened. | |
| If you're on a wilderness trail in some of the wilderness areas here and you accidentally walk into a pride of lines, there's a hell of a commotion. | |
| There'd be mock charging and then they'd probably move off. | |
| And yet you might be in a vehicle a couple of hours later, you might come across the same pride and they're quite relaxed because they're habituated to people in the vehicles, but very fearful people on foot. | |
| You know, I can remember having the car pounced, well, a number of times actually, having a higher car or whatever car I was in pounced on by young lions. | |
| And the first time I was scared. | |
| Anybody who doesn't come from an African background probably would be scared because you don't know what they're going to do. | |
| And it was explained to me later, you know, chill out, relax, they're playing. | |
| Yeah, I mean, that would be unusual to happen in the true wild situation. | |
| That might happen in a lion park situation, but that's unusual to happen in a proper wild area. | |
| Now, the true unexplained part of this, and the interesting part of this, is the lion behavior and the fact that some people, and they've got themselves into the newspapers and they've become quite well known, have actually lived with the lions. | |
| I don't know whether you could be classified as one of those people. | |
| I know that you've lived around the lions, but there are people today who publish videos and things, and they live among the lions. | |
| And I think, you know, a lot of people hearing this now will be surprised to hear that, but there are some people. | |
| There aren't very many of them. | |
| How are they able to do that? | |
| Because our knowledge going to school and learning about things on television is that you don't mess with them. | |
| But there are people who actually become part of the pride. | |
| How is that part? | |
| What do they do? | |
| How do they key into the world of the lions? | |
| There's actually very few of us who have actually truly lived with lions in the wilds. | |
| There was George Adamson, who I mentioned earlier, and his assistant at the time, Tony Fitzjohn. | |
| And then there was myself. | |
| And that's really it, largely, as far as truly living with wild lions in the wilds. | |
| People who are living amongst Henriette lions, and it sort of gives the impression that they might be living with wild lions. | |
| But these are lions that grew up with people and are habituated. | |
| So it's a very different kind of lion. | |
| So you literally, let's get this clear. | |
| You literally lived among wild lions and you got to know their ways and you were able to do that safely. | |
| Yes. | |
| When I rescued George Adamson's last lions, I moved them to an area in Botswana where I was studying lions. | |
| And I basically had to act as mother and father of those three lions. | |
| And lions in the wilds have a very long childhood before they become really prolific at hunting and fending for themselves. | |
| And it's not just that, because they've got to establish themselves territorially. | |
| So I chose the area very, very carefully. | |
| I did not start the rehabilitation of the lions in an area where there was a resident pride. | |
| That's very, very important because otherwise your lions would just be killed. | |
| And I literally lived as a human member of the pride. | |
| So every single day, for eight hours a day, every day, I was out in the wilds with the lions, exploring the area, hunting with them. | |
| I can tell you many stories. | |
| They once saved my life from a leopard that they had attacked when the females were pregnant and eventually had cubs of their own. | |
| They led me to their newborn cubs. | |
| I mean, it's just unheard of for a human being to be led by a wild lioness. | |
| I mean, they became truly wild lions in every single sense of the way. | |
| I mean, they'd run away from people on foot, and yet they had this incredible bond with me. | |
| And how were you able to communicate with them? | |
| You know, the people that I've seen doing this, and the only people I've seen doing this are people, as you rightly say, are among lions who've been bred in captivity. | |
| So they're used to people. | |
| But you were with lions that were not initially used to people. | |
| It's almost as if they are tapping into your thoughts. | |
| I know they're not, but they're certainly tapping into your behavior. | |
| Well, they are tapping into my thoughts as well. | |
| I remember on a number of occasions, on about three, four occasions, I had to do book launches in the UK while I was rehabilitating the Lions. | |
| Well, actually, at that stage, they were completely rehabilitated back into the wilds. | |
| And they would just periodically visit me at my camp, or I would find them out in the wilds when I was doing anti-poaching work or whatever. | |
| But while I was in the UK, on those three occasions, they wouldn't go anywhere near the camp. | |
| And yet when I returned to the camp, and not just because they can hear my vehicle, because that same vehicle was in and out of my camp during my absence, but on my return, on each three occasions, they would be literally waiting for me. | |
| So there is that communication at work. | |
| But also, I had a background in line behavior because I was studying them, studying wild lines. | |
| That's what gave me the experience, if anything, or the background, all the cornerstone or whatever, to be able to rehabilitate lines. | |
| Because like I said, only George Adamson, Tony FitzJohn, and myself had truly done this work in that particular method, which is living with them and being part of, literally part of the pride. | |
| So knowing the behavior of lines was essential to that project. | |
| But how is it that they were able to know that you were absent? | |
| This is almost like, you know, when I was a teenager, I had a dog who knew when I was coming home from school. | |
| But I mean, this is of a completely different magnitude. | |
| No, it's exactly the same thing. | |
| I was first introduced to it when I was living, working with George Adams in Kenya, and he had a wild pride of lions. | |
| These are second and third generation descendants of the lions that he rehabilitated back into the wilds. | |
| These are lions that have never been handled by people. | |
| Like I say, second and third generation wild porn. | |
| And Yorkshire TV at the time were making a documentary on George, the last documentary on his life, Lord of the Lions, Adamson of Africa. | |
| And George was flown out of where we were to various places where his adventures took place in Kenya. | |
| And on the couple of occasions that he flew out, this wild pride was the wild pride is actually the opposite in the sense that one hint of the film crew, when they were filming, that the lions didn't want anything to do with the camp and they wouldn't visit George. | |
| And I spent all my time tracking these lions. | |
| And during his absence, they wouldn't be there either. | |
| But when he would get back, and for example, he went off for an eye operation to Austria once, and the lions didn't go anywhere near the camp. | |
| And on his arrival, the lions were there. | |
| On a more sort of somber note, I think it was the night before he was murdered. | |
| This wild pride actually came to his camp and he walked amongst them. | |
| The following day, he was murdered. | |
| In the days that followed, his funeral, he was buried near his camp. | |
| And the funeral, there were like several hundred people from all over the world, dignitaries, celebrities were there at George's funeral. | |
| And when things calmed down and the helicopters had left and all the rest of it, an old friend of George was looking after the camp and looking after the lines that I inherited, the wild pride actually went down to George's grave. | |
| And this man, Douglas Hamilton, Dougie Collins, sorry, he went down to the grave, a carnives, the next morning. | |
| And there was the imprints. | |
| And you could see where the lions had actually laid down next to George's grave. | |
| It went even beyond that with my own male lion, who was lured out of Botswana. | |
| Similar situation, you know, this was 25, 26 years ago, very similar situation to Cecil the Lion, a number of years ago. | |
| My lion, Batian, was lured out of a protected area by a trophy hunter, by a professional hunter, shot by an American client. | |
| Same story, used a bait, all that sort of thing. | |
| Eventually, when I got Batian's remains back, my lion's remains back, and I buried him at a place close to my camp, all sorts of things happened. | |
| His sisters had cubs at the time, and his one sister, Rafiki, I didn't know this until the following morning. | |
| I went down to Batian's grave, and then I just saw around his grave, there was these tiny pug marks of little tiny cubs. | |
| And the first thing that this was the first time at about six weeks old, mothers take them out of the nursery site. | |
| And Rafiki had the night before taken her offspring, her cubs out of the nursery site and amazingly took them straight down to where Batian was buried. | |
| And there I was standing there with these little pug marks around his grave. | |
| I can go on if you want. | |
| I mean, please, dude, these are astonishing stories. | |
| And, you know, people who go on safaris and people who go to zoos just don't understand this stuff. | |
| So, I mean, if you have more information of that kind, then I'm keen to hear it. | |
| Yeah, another very poignant time. | |
| I think it was the anniversary of Batian's death. | |
| And I walked down to his grave, which was in a very beautiful spot. | |
| There was a big tree there, a tree fugia, and a water hole, a little water hole nearby. | |
| And that's where I buried him. | |
| And when I buried his remains, a number of months previously, he had an identification collar on earlier, about a year earlier. | |
| And I took that collar and I, for some reason, after I buried him and piled up this carnival stone and whatnot, I put this collar, his collar in a hole in that big tree. | |
| And I went there the next day and I thought that was actually really stupid, Gareth, because baboons probably found it or an inquisitive trunk of an elephant would sniff it and find it. | |
| And I've never seen it. | |
| So you look the baboons get everywhere. | |
| Even hotels, they get everywhere. | |
| Exactly. | |
| So I'd never thought I'd see that collar again. | |
| But exactly on the first, I think it was the first anniversary of his death, I walked down to his grave. | |
| You must understand that Batian was like my son. | |
| And so the grief was very great. | |
| And I walked down to his grave and I walked past his grave and I sat beneath that tree and I just thought about him and I visualized him a year later, what a big lion he would have been because he was growing into probably going to be one of the biggest lions that that area had ever seen. | |
| He was killed when he was three and a bit years old. | |
| And then I stood up and then I walked to the grave and then I stepped onto the same game path, the very same game path that I'd walked down on to the grave. | |
| And the ground is my newspaper. | |
| I mean, I live by what the ground is telling me. | |
| That tells me who's been where, when, and all that kind of thing. | |
| So I walk on this same game path and I go for, I don't know, maybe about 30, 40 meters. | |
| And I couldn't believe it. | |
| There on the game path was the footprint of a young male lion, approximately Batian's age. | |
| Now, how I could have missed it on the way down, someone who lives in the wilds amongst lions, I mean, it's just impossible. | |
| So I couldn't believe that for starters. | |
| Then I carried on along the path, and then lo and behold, there was his collar. | |
| Now, the collar is linked together just like a belt on your trousers. | |
| It's got that buckle. | |
| And the belt was actually laid out in front of me, but the buckle was unbuckled, if you know what I mean. | |
| It had actually been cut somehow. | |
| So it was laying out in front of me. | |
| And I just couldn't believe what was going on. | |
| It took me some time to really think about that. | |
| Like I said, emotionally, I was grieving for him. | |
| And it was only days and weeks later I thought to myself, well, if Batian could give me a sign of letting go, it couldn't be more blatant than showing his collar, you know, letting go and that it's unbuckled. | |
| Though it was buckled, it was laid out stretched in front of me. | |
| And that was a source of a lot of comfort to me. | |
| It would be. | |
| And it's, again, something that people don't really get and understand. | |
| Just to round off this segment then about the lions, when you are up close and personal with the lions, when you are part of the pride, when they understand and respect you, and because they seem to be perceiving things in non-verbal ways, let's put it that way, you know, reading your thoughts, reading your actions, whatever, do you have to be careful about what you think? | |
| You know, you're so set in that lion world, that lion moment, and hours and hours and hours of it. | |
| You know, I'm spending more time with the lions than what I was with my own kind. | |
| So I was in the lion's world. | |
| And so, yes, I firmly believe that whether it's hunting strategies or whatever, telepathy is at work, they are communicating over distances through not only through calling and communication, but also telepathy again. | |
| I'll give you an amusing situation once where I obviously wasn't picking up what they had in mind. | |
| So they were wild lions and they're doing their thing. | |
| And we came across a huge, huge herd of eland, which are the largest antelope in the world, yes, in the world. | |
| And big bull elands are about six foot, almost six foot at the shoulder and weigh over a ton. | |
| And we came across a massive herd, 250 of them, and the lions saw these eland and they got into their very elaborate pincer movements of who's going to go where to encircle them and all the rest of it. | |
| And it does seem with lions, it's almost like a pre-organized thing. | |
| Who is actually going to make the kill? | |
| I mean, their elaborate pincer movements are quite extraordinary. | |
| So they went off and I just stayed behind on that occasion. | |
| I just stood there to see what was happening and they disappeared. | |
| And then a few minutes later, I just had this dust storm in front of me heading towards me. | |
| And it was like a scene out of the Wild West. | |
| And before I knew it, there was this massive herd of Elan just pouring towards me. | |
| And we always say in the bush, there's never a good tree when you need one. | |
| And all I had nearby was this small Mapani tree, which was probably only about six inches wide and about eight foot tall. | |
| And I just stood behind that and these Elons just eland just crashed past me. | |
| I could almost touch them and they thundered by. | |
| And then when the dust settled and everything calmed down a bit, apart from my heartbeat, and then suddenly I heard, and it was the lions and they were coming to me and they looked at me and they're very expressive animals facially. | |
| And then they looked all around them and then back at me to say, as if to say, well, where is it? | |
| You know, where's the kill? | |
| It was your turn to do it this time. | |
| Gareth Patterson, a man who not only lives among the wildlife, but is very much a part of the wildlife of southern Africa. | |
| And many things that you won't have heard and many things that don't get reported in the newspapers, I think we're talking about now. | |
| We talked about the lions and how they have a kind of ESP or something so that they can know what you're thinking and perhaps anticipate your behavior and perhaps predict that you're the one who's supposed to be doing the kill now. | |
| So why didn't you do the kill? | |
| All of those things. | |
| Fascinating stories. | |
| Let's talk about the elephants then, Gareth. | |
| And again, similar to the lions, there are far fewer of them than there used to be. | |
| And I didn't know that and I wasn't aware of that. | |
| What about the mysteries of the elephant, if we can call it kingdom that you've discovered? | |
| Things that we wouldn't know? | |
| Well, you know, I think going back to again the historical side, putting that into some sort of perspective, I think when I was born, it was estimated that there was about 1.2 million elephants in Africa. | |
| And the recent continental census a couple of years ago came up with a figure of about 300, I think 345,000. | |
| So that puts it in perspective once again on the massive decline of these animals. | |
| But living amongst them, the lion has been a large part of my life, but the elephant have always been there. | |
| I've always been fighting for the elephants as well. | |
| And I can only describe them as having almost uniquely human qualities. | |
| They literally cry salt tears. | |
| They will cover their dead. | |
| They will almost bury their dead. | |
| It's been recorded historically. | |
| It's been recorded in modern times. | |
| Scientists know about this. | |
| We can't explain it, why they do this. | |
| But they seem to have a very real sense of death and what death is all about. | |
| And very strangely, they cover and bury their kind, but they do that to one other kind very strangely, and that is humankind. | |
| And the very first dead human I ever saw was someone who was killed by an elephant in Botswana. | |
| And cutting a long story short, I was alerted to this man had walked into a herd of elephants at night, and I went out to try and find him, and I found him with my tracker. | |
| And yes, and his body was partially covered. | |
| They will cover people that they come across who have died in the wild or they have killed out of retaliation or whatever. | |
| So they're almost like unique in that sense. | |
| So very humane animals. | |
| We can relate to them. | |
| They've got a similar sort of lifespan as us. | |
| And yeah, they're incredible animals. | |
| And when you consider that they are, in terms of behavior, the most studied mammal on Earth. | |
| And we've only been studying them for less than what I've been alive on Earth. | |
| I'm 57 next month. | |
| It's incredible what we've learned about them, that they're communicating with infrasound, this low frequency sound that travels over tens of kilometers at a frequency that we can't hear. | |
| This whole thing about them mourning the death of their dead ones and all this sort of thing. | |
| There's a lot to learn from elephants. | |
| Well, that long distance communication is at the risk of making a crass joke. | |
| It's almost, it is literally a trunk cold, isn't it? | |
| Why would they want to make communication over such distances? | |
| I think because you would have breakaway groups of elephants from the main herd. | |
| They're keeping in contact. | |
| And when those groups do get together, you think that it's almost like a battleground. | |
| But it's actually such excitement when two subgroups of a herd get together, they are so delighted to be amongst one another. | |
| And so they're communicating over large distances. | |
| And like I say, it's almost like someone described it as silent thunder. | |
| And I think that's a very good way of describing it. | |
| And if something bad is happening to one group of elephants, is that group of elephants then able to alert another group of elephants perhaps adjacent, separated by 10 kilometers or so? | |
| That's an excellent point because back in the day, fortunately, no culling of elephants takes place anymore in the Kruger National Park here in South Africa, not since, I think, 1994. | |
| But for about 30 years prior to that, every year, about 500 elephants, the management idea at the time was that you've got to regulate their numbers. | |
| And today we realize that they actually regulate their own numbers by themselves. | |
| So for 30 years, we were just inflicting enormous trauma upon elephants in South Africa in Kruger National Park by slaughtering elephants, whole entire family herds. | |
| And then even worse than that, capturing their babies and then selling them to zoos. | |
| Hundreds of these babies went worldwide to zoos and walking with elephant safaris and all this sort of stuff. | |
| And what you're talking about now, yes, exactly. | |
| So one traumatized herd of elephant, that trauma could be heard tens of kilometers away by other elephants. | |
| And so it's almost like a domino effect. | |
| So you traumatize one herd and it reverberates through the whole population. | |
| They can all feel the trauma of the elephants that have been slaughtered. | |
| And do they cooperate? | |
| If one bunch of elephants is under threat, does another group of elephants go to their assistance or do they simply react accordingly and make themselves scarce? | |
| They make themselves scarce. | |
| But very interestingly, what I've seen here in Nysner and in other parts of Africa is that when terrible things have happened there, they tend to leave those areas and don't revisit them. | |
| Here in Nysner, where elephants have wiped out in the past, it's only in the time that I've been here in the last 20 years that I'm finding that these elephants here, these few remaining elephants, are actually recolonizing and going back to areas where their ancestors used to live. | |
| It takes generations, literally, before they will go back to a place of trauma. | |
| How astonishing. | |
| And it was while you were living with and investigating the elephants that you came across, I believe, this phenomenon that I'd never heard of, the South African Bigfoot or O-Tang, that doesn't quite look like Bigfoot or Sasquatch. | |
| It's rather different, but it's very much ingrained in the culture, in the folklore. | |
| Yes, I mean, I came down here in 1999 and I was actually to a town quite near here called George, and I was setting up a natural habitat sanctuary for four lions that we had saved from that canned lion industry and setting up this huge sanctuary for them. | |
| And this town is about 50 kilometers away from Neisner. | |
| And I came to Neisner. | |
| I've never been to the forest before. | |
| And I'd always been intrigued by these miraculous elephants that are still existing here on the tip of Africa. | |
| And I decided with my girlfriend at the time, Francia, that we should take the opportunity to go into the forest. | |
| And we were staying at a hotel in Nisner. | |
| And we got to know the manager. | |
| And he gave us instructions on how to get into the forest the following morning. | |
| And he said to me, you know, Gareth, when you're done exposing this whole canned lion thing, why don't you come to Neisna and learn more about these elephants? | |
| Because the authorities say there's only one left. | |
| But us locals believe that there's a few more. | |
| And he says, but actually, there's something even more mysterious. | |
| And I asked him what it was. | |
| And he says, well, I had a group of German tourists here a few months ago. | |
| And they did the same as you. | |
| They asked for directions into the forest. | |
| I gave them directions. | |
| And then that afternoon, I saw them again when they had returned. | |
| And they were very shaken up people. | |
| They were in the bar and they were silent. | |
| And I went up to them and said to them, you know, is something wrong? | |
| And they said, yes, there is. | |
| And they explained to him how they were driving on the fringe of the forest. | |
| And these three human-like figures, at first they thought they were humans, but they were covered in hair, in rustic brown hair, ran across the road in front of them. | |
| Now, the hotel manager's response to that was, of course, he said, no, I mean, obviously you saw baboons. | |
| And they turned around to him. | |
| Actually, they got quite angry with him. | |
| And they said to him, listen, we are well-traveled, well-educated people. | |
| And we certainly know what baboons were. | |
| In fact, when we left into the, as we went into the forest, we saw a troop of baboons. | |
| And what we saw later on was certainly not baboons. | |
| And they duly then actually, they were in such shock that they actually checked out of the hotel and left. | |
| And they were in a total shock. | |
| So that was my first introduction to it. | |
| I mean, when he told me the story, I thought to myself, yes, there must be baboons because baboons do stand upright to look over distances and all the rest of it. | |
| I had no idea of what else it could be. | |
| But your maximum height for a baboon is, what, three and a half, four feet, you know, one meter? | |
| That's about it. | |
| Exactly, exactly. | |
| So, you know, I didn't know what was going on and I didn't dwell on it. | |
| I mean, so two years later, when I came down to formally look into the elephants and to find out and to study them, actually the last thing on my mind was this story about these German tourists coming across these relic hominoids in the forest. | |
| But these stories started drifting towards me. | |
| And then I was discussing food plant samples with a forestry department scientist when out of the blue in his office, he turned around to me and says, Gareth, you're walking hundreds of kilometers in the forest. | |
| Have you ever come across In your research of the elephant, have you ever come across a strange, upright, human-like figure, creature, being out there? | |
| And I said to him, No. | |
| I said to him, Why do you ask? | |
| And he says, Well, just over the last two months, we've had two separate reports from our forestry workers in two separate areas, and they swear blind that they've seen such a being. | |
| And then, obviously, the story of the tourists came flooding back into mind, but that went again. | |
| And then another story came to me. | |
| And then months later, I became friends with a wonderful old lady called Mrs. Jordan. | |
| She was probably the last generation of the original first people of this land, which is the bushmen, the sand people. | |
| She died a few years ago, and I would stop at her little place on the edge of the forest. | |
| There were forest people. | |
| She lived there with her daughters and the family. | |
| And I got to know her, and she would tell me about the elephants. | |
| And she spent over 60 years living in the environment of the forest, in the edge of the forest. | |
| And then out of the blue, she started telling me about this being called the Otung. | |
| And that's where I actually got a name to it. | |
| You know, I'd heard about it, but it didn't have a name. | |
| And she described to me her own sighting, which was amazing. | |
| She heard something at night in her little house. | |
| And it must have been summertime because the window was open. | |
| She was doing knitting by a paraffin lamp. | |
| She had a little dog next to her. | |
| The dog started barking. | |
| She got a little torch out. | |
| She shone out the window, couldn't see anything, went back to her knitting. | |
| And then the dog started barking again. | |
| She shone again. | |
| And she knew, though she hadn't seen the Otungs before, the forest people, they know about them. | |
| They are no more mysterious to them than the elephants, for example. | |
| They are flesh and blood. | |
| This is not a ghost or a spirit-like being. | |
| They recognize them as being flesh and blood. | |
| And yet they have mystical qualities in many parts of the world. | |
| Yes, I'm not too... | |
| Here they seem very flesh and blood. | |
| And anyway, she picked up her torch again and she shone out. | |
| And then lo and behold, she had a little vegetable garden not far away. | |
| And there was an otung standing there, this human-like figure. | |
| And she saw it and she was shocked. | |
| I mean, even though she knew of the existence, she'd seen the footprints of these beings before. | |
| She looked at it and it was quite interesting. | |
| You know, it's in the detail of the eyewitnesses that I find so fascinating because she said, as she was shining the torch, she said this being was trying to look around the beam to see her, if you know what I mean. | |
| So she was keeping the beam on it and it was trying to look around to one side to the other to try and look at her. | |
| And then it turned to one side and then it just vanished. | |
| I mean, these beings are so incredibly fast. | |
| And it took off and she went back and she was really shocked. | |
| And she sat down and then about five minutes later, she heard a rumble of a truck coming past her place. | |
| And obviously this being heard the truck a long time before she did. | |
| And that's why perhaps it disappeared. | |
| And then came the fateful day. | |
| I was doing research. | |
| I think it was August 2002. | |
| A very clear Sunday morning. | |
| I'd just come back from a place I call the secret place of the elephants. | |
| I discovered where these nice elephants will routinely go to a spring in a very remote area to drink. | |
| They're connoisseurs of water. | |
| This is such brilliant water. | |
| They will keep on going to this one particular spot. | |
| And I was returning to my vehicle at quite a distance. | |
| I was on foot. | |
| Last thing on my mind, you know, would be upright human-like beings. | |
| And I was focused on the elephants. | |
| I was enjoying the day. | |
| I'd done my work for the day. | |
| I was heading back to the vehicle. | |
| And I just had, because of my bush awareness, you don't need bush awareness. | |
| You could be in a restaurant and someone could be staring at you and you just feel that stare and you can turn around and you can see that person looking at you. | |
| So it's not even, it's just an instinctual thing. | |
| So I just felt I was being watched and I turned around and there was a strand. | |
| There's a lot of plantations here as well. | |
| There's a stand of pine trees to my left, about 30, 40 meters away or a little bit more. | |
| And I just saw this small upright figure. | |
| I say small, over five foot, I'd say about five, three, five, four foot, five, yeah, five foot three inches, somewhere around there. | |
| And it was just peering out of the, out behind this one tree. | |
| It was russic in color. | |
| My bush instinct, when it comes to that situation, if that was a predator, for example, you don't turn around and stop and stare at it because that's interpreted as a threat and you might get charged or whatever. | |
| So my instinct was just to, I don't even have to think about it, it's unconscious. | |
| I saw what I saw and then I kept it in the corner of my eye for as long as I could, carried on walking, and then I walked for about, must have been close on half a kilometer or a kilometer. | |
| And then I turned around, saw nothing was there, obviously, and then I just sunk to the ground completely in shock. | |
| And this shock, you know, whether it's what I experienced or the German tourists or the many, many witnesses that I've spoken to over the years and recent, I mean, when my book about this came out, Beyond the Secret Elephants earlier this year, people have been coming forward with their experiences of these otung. | |
| And this shock is very, very real. | |
| It's almost like a post-traumatic stress disorder. | |
| And it hits you immediately with the immediate shock. | |
| And I felt as if I was just in a fog. | |
| I don't know for How long? | |
| I just sunk to the ground with my rucksack, my backpack, and then I just stood up. | |
| And eventually, this mist was rising of confusion. | |
| I carried on to the car, and yeah, and I was in a very confused state for some time. | |
| My girlfriend at the time, when I was writing the book, I had to contact her to say, you know, what did I tell you after that first experience? | |
| Because I've had four, four, full sightings of them. | |
| I said, what did I say to you? | |
| And she said, you were very confused, Gareth. | |
| And for days, you were very, very confused until finally you accepted that you had seen something like a relic hominoid. | |
| A relic hominoid. | |
| Something beyond time, beyond our conception of time. | |
| So what sort of research then is going to be done about this? | |
| I mean, sadly, we're coming to the end of this hour, and we need to have another long conversation about this. | |
| But what sorts of research are being done then? | |
| I'm continuing with the work. | |
| I mean, Beyond the Secret Elephants is the sequel of my book, The Secret Elephants, which was largely about the rediscovery of the Nisner elephants. | |
| And this is taking it to the level of letting the world know that these beings do exist here. | |
| And I'm going into the second stage of the research now. | |
| And I'm studying them just like any other species that I've studied, like the elephants, like the elephants and like the lions, you know, looking at just learning more about them. | |
| You know, what is their range? | |
| What do they eat? | |
| What is their behavior? | |
| This kind of thing. | |
| How are they related to creatures that seem to be very similar to them in vastly different parts of the world? | |
| And that's why there's been so much interest since the book has come out from people in North America contacting me and I've been doing interviews there because there it's a very well-known, it's part of pop culture there. | |
| Here it's part of, very much part of African culture, but of an African culture that has been suppressed for so long. | |
| So these stories have not been coming out of indigenous people in South Africa for many, many years. | |
| And with me talking to people who are born and bred here, these are probably the first time that stories are coming out from the people of the land here in South Africa. | |
| So it's not for lack of stories, it's just they're not getting told. | |
| Gareth, we're out of time, but if it's okay with you and if there's enough material, I'd love to talk with you again in a couple of months and we'll expand on this if you're up for that, if that would be good. | |
| That would be tremendous. | |
| Thanks very much. | |
| And Gareth, if people want to read about you, you have a website. | |
| I have a website. | |
| It's just GarethPatterson.com. | |
| They can find me on Facebook as well. | |
| And I've written, what, about 12 books now, and they're all available on Amazon. | |
| Those in print and those not in print, they're available as e-books, Kindle. | |
| And as they say in South Africa, go well, Gareth. | |
| Go well. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Thank you. | |
| That was an amazing conversation. | |
| Gareth Patterson, check him out online and check his books out too. | |
| What a life that man is leading. | |
| We will speak again, especially about O-Tang. | |
| I wasn't really expecting so much material there. | |
| And more to come, I think, in our next conversation. | |
| We're out of time. | |
| Thank you very much for being part of this. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes. | |
| This has been The Unexplained. | |
| And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| Take care. |