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Nov. 9, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:27:12

Edition 494 - Gareth Patterson

Gareth Patterson, based near Knysna, South Africa - talking about his life's work with animals and telling the full story of his extraordinary years of research on the elusive African version of Bigfoot - the "Otang..."

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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 The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for all of your interaction with the show.
	Whether you've been to the Facebook page, the official Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, or you've emailed me through the website theunexplained.tv.
	All of your emails and thoughts gratefully received.
	Thank you for the guest suggestions and also your ideas about edition 500.
	As I say, it is looking like I have a big name guest for that show.
	So let's hope that that happens and we'll be finding out whether it does in the next few weeks.
	When I get to edition 500, it's very exciting.
	Can't believe that we're here.
	As you may have heard, as you may be experiencing, the UK is now again in lockdown.
	And I have to say that I've got to the stage where I'm finding all of this really difficult.
	In fact, a lot of the political debate, because it's become for some reason a political issue, I turn off now.
	I just don't want to hear it anymore.
	And for a news person to say that, you know that it's getting pretty serious.
	So, you know, I don't know how I'm going to get through the next months.
	And I never thought I'd be saying those words either.
	But, you know, you have my best wishes if you're finding it difficult.
	I know a lot of people are finding it really difficult.
	You know, I'll get on through this, but a lot of people are going to have massive problems doing that.
	And let's just hope that ingenuity, of which the human species has a lot, helps us out of this by next year.
	So that's just my thought about that.
	Emails.
	Had quite a lot of those.
	And I had one that basically said, for the love of God, Howard, was what it was slugged, what it was titled.
	Comes from David, whose email before, David, taking me to task on the fact that I don't have more copy, more writing, more information.
	I think he means on the website about different guests.
	Well, of course, this is a free show.
	I have very limited resources.
	And what I tend to do with it is put my resources and time into the actual shows.
	And then on the website, we give a quick description of what is going to be in that show.
	And there's a web link for them, or they will give the web link within the show so you can go and see their material.
	And I think for now, that is the best that I can do.
	But David took me to task about this and thinks that my podcast needs improvement.
	And he says he is a podcaster too.
	So I don't know what you think about that.
	I know that everything that I do needs improvement.
	In fact, everything that everybody does needs improvement.
	And it is constantly a work in progress for me.
	But I always take on board points that people make.
	And I will say that if this show ever changes or if I win the lottery, then I will invest a lot more resources into transcripts, more material on the website, more material peripheral to the shows.
	But at the moment, I think I'm doing the right thing by concentrating on the actual shows that you hear.
	And that's the thing that I love.
	You know, I'm not a web expert.
	I know nothing, very little about that, although I'm learning all the time.
	I leave that to Adam because he is an expert.
	And what I know is broadcasting.
	So that's what I do.
	For better or worse.
	So I'll leave that thought with you anyway.
	It's lovely to hear from you.
	The website is theunexplained.tv.
	Follow the link.
	Send me an email from there if you'd like to.
	Thank you very much to Adam for his hard work on this show and for maintaining, devising the website and getting the shows out to you.
	Thank you to Haley for booking the guests.
	On this edition, an update from South Africa from Gareth Patterson, a man who's worked all his life with lions and elephants and also Bigfoot.
	Now, when we spoke with him back in August, I said that we were going to make more time to talk about his work and about specifically South Africa's Otang, the Bigfoot effectively of South Africa, a large bipedal flame-haired,
	well not quite flame-haired, but sort of gingery-haired being of some kind that's been seen in many places in the world and goes by different names from Bigfoot to Sasquatch to Yeti to Yaoi, whatever it is called.
	And this creature inhabits South Africa.
	Gareth Patterson has had encounters with it and has been documenting its progress over the years.
	Fascinating stuff coming up in this edition.
	Thank you for being part of my show.
	You know, I'm not perfect.
	I'm never going to be perfect in anything that I do.
	And I am the last person to think that I ever would be.
	Believe me about that.
	But right now, after seven months of this coronavirus situation, a lot of those for me in isolation, not seeing anybody, I'm doing my best right now.
	And I hope that you're getting by.
	And I love to hear from you.
	And I love to hear that you're using my shows during this time as a support for yourself.
	It's wonderful for me to think that even though I may never meet you, that's the fact.
	All right, enough talking from me.
	Let's get to the guest in South Africa, Nia Neisner, and a return visit with Gareth Patterson.
	Gareth, thank you very much for making time to come back on my show.
	Thank you very much for inviting me back.
	Tell me how things are with you at the moment.
	I mean, how's the weather there and all that kind of stuff?
	No, the weather is fantastic.
	We've had a very protracted winter.
	It's been quite cold up, actually, until quite recently.
	But tonight, as I'm speaking to you, it's 8 o'clock here.
	It's about 22 degrees Celsius.
	And yeah, quite nice.
	Quite nice.
	The frogs are chirpy and so the crickets and the snakes are out and the scorpions and the spiders and everyone else.
	Well, no, no.
	Your life has been wildlife, I know.
	But you said the snakes are out.
	I mean, you have to be, if you're a Brit and you're coming down there for a trip or you're from America, wherever you're from, you have to be a little careful because, you know, the wildlife there, now in the UK, the wildlife will look back at you and Probably run away.
	And probably the same with the snakes in South Africa.
	But if you're unfortunate and if you disturb them, you could pay a big price for that.
	Well, particularly so.
	I mean, we've got to be very, very careful of the puff adder in particular.
	Now it's an interesting snake.
	They say it's a lazy snake.
	I think that's just us being anthropomorphic about them.
	They're extremely well camouflaged, but they discovered last year that they have the ability of actually disguising their own scent.
	Hence, dogs and cattle, livestock, they will, as they're grazing or dogs passing by, will actually step on them without even knowing that they're there because there's no scent to betray them.
	So without any scent and wonderful camouflage, they literally just sit there waiting for prey to arrive.
	So that's why they don't get out of the way.
	The other snakes have the boomslung, which is a highly venomous snake.
	Oh, the boomslung, that's the long, thin one, isn't it?
	That's right.
	He's a back-fanged snake.
	And that's hematoxic poison, very, very nasty in the sense that 24 hours later, you'll be bleeding out of all your orifices, your nose, your eyes, your ears.
	But fortunately, you get help before then.
	And actually, fatalities of snake bite are extremely rare, touchward.
	And the one that intrudes into people's living areas sometimes.
	And, you know, as more and more, even in South Africa, man is building out into the territories that were the preserve of the wildlife.
	So it's their territory.
	But sometimes people build these houses on stilts.
	They're, you know, wooden.
	And underneath the house, you might have a look one night.
	I've been in this position in South Africa.
	You look underneath and you have in residence there a black mumba.
	Yeah, no, that's a serious situation.
	It really is, yeah.
	And you don't mess with those guys.
	No, you don't.
	You don't at all.
	And, you know, but but not only that, but also the scorpions.
	I mean, I remember 30 years ago when I was a young game ranger in Botswana, I was out luring some lions that had been killing cattle in the village areas.
	And I was luring these lions back in.
	It was a long operation, about 10 days.
	And I managed, me and my tracker, Fishan, we managed to bring the lions back by luring them and calls and all this sort of stuff.
	And the last night, I was actually exhausted and laid down next to the fire and broke all the rules.
	I didn't look where I was sitting.
	And these things come out of the wood from the fire.
	And I felt this incredible, sharp, stabbing pain, burning pain in the top of my thigh.
	And I leapt up and it was a parabuta scorpion, which is highly, highly venomous.
	It's neurotoxic, affects the nerves, your respiration.
	It's like getting a medium-sized bite from a medium-sized cobra, let's put it that way.
	And my tracker recognized it for what it was immediately.
	He said, Gareth, we've got to get back to camp.
	And yeah, we got back to camp.
	And again, I broke all the rules because you must never drink alcohol if you get better.
	And I had a double whiskey, which really raced the adrenaline and the blood circulating around the body along with the venom.
	And within a couple of hours, I could hardly breathe.
	That's the frightening thing.
	It's almost like drowning.
	You can't actually suck air into your lungs.
	But yeah, the next day I managed to get to a doctor and I was on cortisone for the next three weeks.
	And yeah, healthy was next for that scorpion.
	Boy, you know, you've got to act fast and you've got to act right.
	And the one thing I discovered just before we move on from the scorpions there, the rule of scorpions is not the rule, perhaps, with other animals, that the bigger ones are the bigger threat.
	That's not true.
	I remember once being in South Africa and bringing in with a bag of shopping, God knows where it came from, because this was an urban area.
	You know, this was Johannesburg and bringing back a bag of shopping.
	And within that bag of shopping, somehow, was a little, almost clear scorpion.
	He wasn't black in color.
	He looked almost clear.
	And he didn't look threatening.
	I mean, he had a big stinger on the back of him there.
	But I just thought we've got to show this guy out and it'll be okay.
	I looked him up later and I found out that whatever he was, I can't remember the name, he was one of the most venomous ones that you can get in South Africa.
	Well, you see, you hit on the key there.
	That's the thing.
	If the tail is very, very thick and the pincers are very, very small, that means that the scorpion is using venom, a lot of venom to kill its prey.
	And if it's got large front pincers, like the ones we have here and very thin tails, then it's the opposite.
	He's actually using his front pinches to kill the prey.
	So like you say, it can be tiny, but it can be highly venomous.
	So it was this thing, I've always wanted to ask somebody who knows about these things.
	This was probably about eight years ago, maybe nine years ago.
	Like I say, I remember him because he wasn't very big.
	He was probably three centimeters long, I think, maybe four, probably not that.
	But he was almost sort of white or clear looking.
	But like you said, he ate a baby.
	Yeah, he was a baby one, okay.
	That I didn't know.
	But he had the big stinger at the back and not very much at the front in the way of claws, as you might call them.
	When you say that he's translucent, I mean, that's the thing.
	When the babies are terribly young, the mother, I guess, she carries the babies on her back, interestingly enough.
	So you have this mother scorpion.
	She's got all these babies that she's taken care of on her back.
	And so obviously that one dropped off somewhere and ended up in your shopping bag.
	Well, there was a guy on television just quickly closing out this bit about snakes and scorpions and what you will find in South Africa.
	A guy called Austin Stevens.
	And I watched his programs with great interest.
	He was the snake expert completely.
	And I grew to understand and respect snakes because of him.
	And I grew to realize that none of these creatures are out to get you.
	They are only out to defend themselves if they absolutely, positively have to, if you happen to be in their territory.
	If you're not in their territory, if you know how to move away from their territory, none of them are going to get you.
	No, I mean, that's the whole thing.
	If you take the average snake or whatever and you compare its size, they're actually terribly small compared to us.
	So it is out of pure defense.
	There's, you know, it's certainly not, it certainly isn't malice of any form.
	And they're much maligned snakes and they're such an important species, such an important being for the ecosystem and all the rest of it.
	And they're totally beautiful as well.
	I mean, I'm mesmerized by them.
	And when I was a teenager in Malawi, I mean, I was like an amateur herpetologist at the age of about 13 or 14 with a collection of about 60 different kinds of, not 60 different species of snakes, but 60, 50 to 60 snakes, much to my mother's horror.
	So you learned from a very young age how to interact and coexist more importantly.
	And there is no, for my money, there is no better place on earth.
	If you want to understand and experience wildlife than South Africa, you have the greatest diversity of everything.
	You have amazing birds.
	You have every, every color of the rainbow of birds and these great big birds that sit on the top of trees called hardy does.
	And they make a noise like their name.
	They do.
	They do.
	And now, and now, of course, we're getting, you know, the migrants from, from your part of the world.
	And I think it's the willow warbler, I think comes all the way from Ireland.
	And I think when it leaves Ireland, it weighs five grams and it flies all these thousands of kilometers and arrives in Southern Africa.
	And it's down to weighing only three grams.
	I mean, it's just miraculous how, how these birds traverse such distances.
	Not all of them make it, but the ones that do, they've traversed deserts.
	They've gone across every kind of territory.
	They've had to forage for themselves.
	They've had to evade predators.
	And then at the end of the season, if they make it through the season in Cape Town or wherever they happen to be, they're going to come back north to here again.
	Yeah.
	All the way back.
	Yeah.
	So we're looking forward to the swifts and the swallows now.
	I mean, listen, nature is wonderful, but, you know, you can tell me that more than I could ever tell you that.
	Your life has been, has been about wildlife.
	How so?
	Well, I grew up amongst it.
	My parents, expatriates took me and my brother Stuart out to Nigeria when we were, well, I was about 18 months old.
	We lived in, it was the time of the oil boom in post-independent,
	nigeria and and my father was with standard bank i always remember that because the logo was an elephant you know not that i knew back then that i knew that i was going to rediscover the southernmost elephants in the world the nisna elephant but i remember that logo and we were always moved to quite isolated places everywhere from the mangrove swamps in the in the south right up to the sub-Saharan areas like Kaduna and Kano in the north.
	So it's quite a diversity of land that we are seeing.
	And yeah, I just remember at a very, very young age, just always being out in the wilds.
	I remember my custodian, sort of my nanny, when I was about, I suppose, about five or six years old or whatever, was a Taraic warrior who's got, you know, who wear these magnificent robes and he would have this long sword on his side on the belt and you'd just see a little bit of his face.
	Otherwise, he's just covered in robes and all the rest of it.
	And one late afternoon, I decided to go off into the bush and to see, because I've heard that at the bottom of a rainbow is a pot of gold.
	So I just went off into the bush and yeah, and then again, to my mother's distress, noticed that I was gone and called the tarade warrior.
	And eventually this very tall gentleman found me out there quite happily wandering around trying to find the end of the rainbow.
	I mean, it almost sounds like, are you familiar with the works of the author Gerald Durrell?
	Yes, I grew up on his book.
	Your life as a kid sounds to me like an African version of my family and other animals.
	They were in Cyprus, weren't they, I think, or one of the Greek islands.
	Cofu, thank you.
	But it was all for Durrell.
	It was a journey of discovery of all of the creatures.
	And that's certainly the way that it was for you.
	I'm very envious of that upbringing.
	But you decided not only to be interested as a kid, but that interest persisted into a professional interest in your adult life.
	Not many people do that.
	Yeah, it was a case of growing up in Africa.
	And then I think my parents, they knew eventually they were going to move back to the UK.
	I think they knew in their heart of hearts where my heart was, was in Africa.
	But they did send me to finish off schooling in the UK.
	Well, they did when I was seven as well for a very short period.
	And that was a big transition for me.
	And it just made me more and more determined to, you know, where I felt my destiny was was Africa.
	So are you still there, Howard?
	I am still here.
	No, I'm here.
	No, I'm listening to the story.
	I went to a school called Sir Roger Manwoods in Sandwich in Kent.
	And I just remember my second last term of school there from a very cold classroom.
	I wrote this letter to the lion man of Africa, the legendary George Adamson of Born Free fame.
	And I was offering him my completely unexperienced abilities or whatever to be his assistant.
	And Joy Adamson actually replied to me and got back to me.
	I'd flown back to where I was living with my mother and stepfather in Malawi for the holidays.
	And I got this letter that came Kenya, UK to Malawi.
	And it was from Joy saying, you know, I've read this letter and I'd like to offer you a position as my assistant with my leopard study in the Shaba Gaming Reserve in Kenya.
	And I was totally surprised and delighted and I flew back to the UK and I replied to it and flew back to the UK.
	And as it was, I mean, arrived in Heathrow and I bought a newspaper and the headlines was Joy Adamson murdered.
	And I'd never thought then that I think it was eight years later that I'd end Up meeting George Adamson and actually working with him as his assistant for about six, eight months.
	But in between that time, I was a young game ranger in Botswana, first of all, in South Africa for a short time, but then in Botswana.
	And I was given the task of, it was developing ecotourism, very early days of ecotourism there.
	And I was given the task by the manager in the reserve, massive area, about 720 square kilometers, of trying to get to know the lion population.
	The lion population there was very, very skittish because before the land was turned into a game reserve, you know, just a couple of decades before or decade before, it was cattle farming area, or a large part was cattle farming.
	And the lions were obviously shot out to a large extent.
	And they were just sort of making a comeback when I arrived there.
	But they were still very shy of people and vehicles, well, particularly vehicles.
	It's, you know, I mean, the natural fear of man.
	I mean, they retained that.
	But of vehicles, no one could get anywhere near them.
	So I was given the task of doing an observer study to see how many lions we got in that area.
	What was the makeup of the prides?
	And that was, I mean, I was born a Leo.
	My mother was a Leo.
	I always had an affinity with lions.
	So it seemed a natural thing that I was, lions were always my thing.
	I mean, lions are my totem.
	And so I was given the incredible privilege of actually delving into these lions.
	And I got to know them, but very interestingly, they got to know me as well as an individual.
	And that was really the beginnings of me writing my first book 31 years ago, a book called Cry for the Lions, which I wrote when I was 26 years old.
	And that was my first book on lions.
	And as the title said, Cry for the Lions.
	Now, back then, it was estimated in Africa there was about 250,000 lions in Africa.
	And today, the recent, that book was really a plea from this young man to say we've got to do more to greater protect the African lion.
	And, you know, and unfortunately, people weren't listening back then.
	And for, you know, my little plea or whatever, because I didn't stop with that book.
	I was on a mission to try and do something for the lion in the years ahead.
	And we estimate today that there's probably only as many as 15,000 lions.
	We talked about that astonishing statistics in the summertime when we had our last conversation.
	And the realization that I hope has now gone around the world with your help, that these creatures have to be preserved.
	You know, they're not, as some of us when we were little kids have seen, you know, aggressive creatures dominating the landscape.
	Well, of course, they're the apex predator where they are.
	Of course, they are.
	They're magnificent.
	But they have a fragile ecosystem of which they are part.
	And they are very definitely under threat.
	And, you know, they all have, as you will have known from observing them better than me, they all have their personalities and their characters.
	I can remember one in one of the parks near Johannesburg.
	I call him a guy, but he was an archetypal guy, La Tatsi.
	La Tatsi up there, who was, you know, who was a big character.
	Everybody talked about La Tatsi.
	But the lion dominates Africa, and it's sad to see and sad to understand that they're all under threat.
	And that's been your work, hasn't it?
	Not only alerting people to the fact that that's the case, but also helping us to understand, and we talked about this last time, and this conversation is important so that we can get to talk about Otang, the Bigfoot of South Africa.
	But, you know, the Meisner elephants, the most elusive of all the elephants.
	I think some people even denied that they existed at one point.
	Yeah, they did.
	I mean, how that all came about was that after, yeah, I mean, there was that period whereupon when George Adams was killed by poachers, I rescued his last, the last of the born free lions, if you want to call them that,
	and spent an extraordinary time as a human member of Pride returning these famous, they were the most famous lions in the world back in those days, in the late 80s, early 90s or mid-90s.
	And that was an extraordinary thing.
	And then I moved to South Africa from Botswana and I exposed the whole cant lion story, which we spoke about here, trophy hunting.
	And then I just had, one day I woke up and I just felt almost like some sort of calling.
	Elephants have always been quietly in the background with me.
	Well, not always so quietly.
	I've always been, you know, fighting for them as well against poaching and all the rest of it.
	So it's always been lions and elephants.
	But I found myself coming down to where I am now in 1999 because the International Fund for Animal Welfare and myself and other people had rescued four lions from this canned lion industry.
	And we were setting up a natural habitat sanctuary for them.
	I mean, a marvelous area of 100 hectares, which they actually ended up in and actually lived out the rest of their lives in, you know, in this wonderful area.
	But I came down here for negotiations for that.
	And that was in the town of Mosul Bay, which is, you know, 170-odd kilometers from Nysner.
	And I think while I'm in the area, you know, there's always been this mystique with Nysner, with the Nysner forest, because you've got this extraordinary situation.
	South Africa is a very dry country.
	I mean, forests represent, I think, about 0.1% of the total landmass of the country.
	But down here, you've got about 600 square kilometers of this Afro-Montane, almost rainforest, forest here, which was, you know, so legendary, you know, is internationally known for the last of the most southerly elephants in the world, of which they thought then when I came down that there was only one.
	The authorities thought there was only one.
	And I've never been into these forests.
	And I remember as a youngster reading a book called The Elephants of Neisner by an ex-East African game warden who wrote many books.
	He's quite a legendary guy, Nick Carter, who came down here 69, 70 and he actually did the first study of these elusive elephants.
	And in a year, he actually managed to work out that there was a minimum of about 11 or 12 of them.
	And so when I was down here, then I said to my girlfriend at the time, Frontier, I said, we're down here, let's go to Neisne, let's go into these forests and just have a look around.
	You know, I'm a dry bush person, savannah, thornlands.
	So, I mean, coming into what other people would probably describe as jungle, it was a completely different Africa to what I was used to.
	And we set out on this journey, about a 60-kilometer drive through the forests or whatever.
	And the more I delved into the forest and I saw how dense it was, and not just the forest, because it's surrounded by what we call mountain fame boss, which would be like the equivalent of heath.
	But this fame boss, this heath can grow to like 11, 12 foot high, and it's actually denser than the forest.
	It's actually denser than the forest, less visibility in that.
	I mean, it all burned down two years ago with the wildfires here.
	Ecologically, that was a good thing.
	That's kind of purifying, isn't it?
	It is, because it hadn't burned for about three, four decades.
	But that's why it was so massive, you know, because it hadn't burned for all this time.
	And I just thought to myself, you know, I mean, elephants, coming from the bush, we call them great ghosts because you can have an elephant, a big bull elephant, just behind a bit of vegetation and it sort of masked an animal of like six tons or whatever.
	You know, it's just incredible.
	And they're so silent.
	They actually do actually walk on the tips of their toes.
	If you look at the skeleton of an elephant, they're actually walking on the tips of their toes and they've got this big sort of muscle behind the foot and that almost acts as a shock exorbitant.
	So they're incredibly quiet.
	So these huge animals, they are literally like grey ghosts.
	And I thought, well, in Savannah, I lived in an area where there were hundreds of elephants, almost a thousand elephants.
	And I've seen them on a daily basis for a decade, you know.
	And coming down here, I just realized that no one with any sort of certainty could say in this sort of habitat that there's only one left.
	It's just impossible because you'd be sure of that.
	As the terrain was then, and as the habitat was then, you wouldn't know.
	Unless you explored every square meter, you wouldn't really know.
	You wouldn't know.
	So that was in 99.
	I was finishing off things with the expose of the Cannedine thing.
	And it took me another year and a half, two years.
	On that first trip, I thought to myself, look, I'd love to come back here, but I'm not coming down here.
	I don't know this place.
	I'm not coming down here to try and prove anyone wrong.
	I'm the child to this place.
	This is not my territory.
	I don't know this place.
	But I want to see for myself what is going on.
	And thankfully, the estimates back then of only one old female proved, thankfully, to be wrong, because within weeks, it was fairly clear to me, even though tracks are hard to find, even the droppings are hard to find of these elephants, but just when I was finding the tracks, it was pretty clear to me that there were different sized elephants here.
	I mean, you come across relatively small spore, medium, when I say spore footprints, medium-sized footprints, large footprints.
	And it was pretty clear to me that there was definitely more than one.
	And I remember, so I came down in May 2001 and in August, I was out one Sunday and I saw there was feeding sign in this heath, in the fame boss.
	And I went off in there and I came across droppings, very, very fresh droppings of definitely two or three elephants.
	And they were heading up towards a road.
	And it had been raining.
	The substrate is very, very hard here.
	The best of times, it's very hard to see the footprints of these animals.
	That's half the thing.
	Right, so basically the soil is so hard, the ground is so hard.
	Even if you're the size of an elephant standing on your tiptoes, you may not make much of an impression.
	Exactly, with this hard sandstone soil.
	And even when you're walking along yourself, you can turn around and try and look for your tracks.
	And often you can't even find your own tracks.
	It's so hard.
	And then the rest of it off the road is thick leaf litter of the forest.
	Or in the fame boss, it's just totally dense, unless you know where the elephant pathways are.
	If you know where their pathways are, you know their movements.
	And that's what I learned in time.
	But anyway, on that particular morning, I moved back onto the road.
	And then, yeah, it was clear.
	There was three elephants walking along.
	From the size of the tracks, you can estimate the age of the elephants.
	And this looked like a young bull and a young adult female and a sort of teenage, young teenage youngster.
	And they walked merrily along the road for about two, three kilometers until they moved up a ridge onto one of when they reached the forest.
	So it was actually quite clear that there was definitely more than one.
	But I had to go about it to convince people.
	I had to go about it in another way.
	You can't go about it anecdotal, you know, to prove what's going on here.
	So I ended up doing a very elaborate DNA census with one of the world's leading conservation geneticists, Dr. Laurie Eggart in the States with the Smithsonian Institute.
	She had just, how would you say, formulated a way of actually determining numbers of elephants and sexes of elephants by the DNA, which is on the mucus covering of the elephant's droppings.
	So the droppings are a very, very good source of DNA.
	And long story short, we did the DNA sensors twice.
	And the first time we got five females.
	And we knew at the time that there was at least three balls.
	And I was coming across signs of little calves.
	So I did them all up together.
	That was about 11 or 12.
	And then we did it a couple of years later.
	And it was fantastic, actually, and very heartening because we've got the same five females, which is nice to know that they're fantastic to know they're still out there two, three years later.
	But on top of it, we've got a sixth female that we didn't get the first time around.
	So, you know, heaven knows how many others we met, we didn't find by DNA.
	So it gives you very much a minimum figure.
	Yeah.
	That was good.
	That's an astonishing and very gratifying thing.
	So you discover them and they are elusive.
	We didn't know about them.
	Now, if we didn't know about them, they wouldn't know about us.
	Does that mean that they behave differently from the elephants in other parts of South Africa and Africa generally that coexist with people?
	Yeah, I think they have a far better understanding of us than we definitely, than what we have of them.
	Let's put it that way.
	It's a relatively busy place here because on the boundaries of the indigenous forest, there's a lot of plantations, there's a lot of harvesting, planting, that sort of thing.
	When I keep on referring to the area, the bulk of the area is actually a national park.
	It's called the Garden Root National Park.
	And it's a fairly new national park.
	It's about a decade old.
	It used to fall under the forestry department.
	And now it's under the South African National Park.
	So it's about 1,000, oh, what is it?
	1,500 hectares, I think, 1,500 hectares.
	I could get my figures wrong now.
	No, 150,000 hectares.
	A big difference in size, yeah.
	And so it's a protected area in that respect.
	But even back then, I mean, they thought that the elephants were restricted to an area of about 100 square kilometers.
	And as time went on with my study, I was finding that the elephants were almost like recolonizing portions of their historical range because obviously they weren't restricted to this area.
	This is just the pocket that they found themselves in.
	Once upon a time, in the area where I live now in the Southern Cape, in this area, the Nysa area, right the way down to Cape Town and up to the Eastern Cape, they estimated through computer sort of modeling that there would have been about 10,000 of these elephants here at the arrival of Van Riebeck and everyone back in the day.
	So it's a miracle that they're even still here.
	But yeah, so they have a better understanding of people and they just keep out of their way.
	You know, it's not even sort of, it is a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
	If you want to see a nice elephant, don't look on the road ahead of you as you're driving along through the forest.
	Keep an eye on your rearview mirror because if you're driving along, they might be feeding on the road and they can hear you with their hearing.
	I mean, miles and miles and miles away.
	So they just step out of the road.
	They can step off the road.
	And then once you pass, if they're feeding on something particularly tasty, they just step onto the road and start feeding after you've gone or gone around the corner or whatever.
	Strange that.
	Do you believe in some respect that they might be telepathic?
	Some people suggest they are.
	I think certainly with my experience with lions, that there was telepathy at work and not only between them, but also between them and myself.
	And elephants being the animals that they are who are very self-aware.
	I mean, they know what death is.
	They will cover the body of their dead.
	They've been known.
	I mean, it's not an old tale, old wives'tale, or anything like this, but when they come across dead people, they will cover the, The first dead person that I saw as a young game ranger in Botswana.
	He walked into a herd of elephants at night and I heard that someone had been killed.
	I went out and searched for him.
	And when I found him, about two-thirds of his body was covered in vegetation.
	Yes, I mean, they're very emotive.
	They have emotions akin to our own.
	So, I mean, I think today, more and more, with ourselves, we're not seeing telepathy as anything paranormal.
	I mean, we all know what it's like.
	If we're in a restaurant and someone is staring at us, we get a feeling.
	We can feel it.
	You know, how many times you're thinking about someone and the phone rings, you know, that sort of thing.
	I think it's more or less been scientifically proven that telepathy is a real thing.
	And it's good that we're able to talk about it now, because I think years ago it was harder to talk about.
	So this is where you begin to diverge, though, because most wildlife people are not really into what they call cryptozoology, which is the whole field of Bigfoot and Sasquatch and Yeti and all of these creatures.
	And yet you have gone down that path as well.
	How come?
	The path led me down that path.
	You know, that's the only way that I can really describe it, because, I mean, I was minding my own business, doing a sort of scientific study on these elephants, and things just started happening.
	And it started actually in 1999 on that very first trip when I first came down here.
	First time I went into the forest, remembering that, you know, I only started the study in 2001.
	But during that 1999 couple days visit, I was staying with my girlfriend at a hotel here in Nysner, on the Nysner Lagoon.
	We got friendly with the hotel manager and he knew about my work with Lions and he'd read a couple of my books and we got to know each other a little bit.
	And the following morning, he came to where we were having breakfast and I said to him, look, can you just draw some directions of how we get into the main central forest, Nisner forest from here?
	And he talked about telepathy.
	This chap almost sort of read my mind.
	He said to me, you know, Gareth, when you finish with this whole canned lion thing, you know, why don't you come down here and have a look at what's going on with the elephants?
	Because, you know, us locals, we don't believe the authorities have got it right that they're saying there's only one elephant left.
	You know, why don't you come down and consider looking into the situation?
	And that took me a little bit back, you know, surprised, because he was reading my mind.
	But then he came up with this extraordinary story afterwards.
	Well, straight right at the time, and he says, yes, but the elephants aren't the only mystery here because there's an even bigger mystery.
	And then he told me how a few months earlier, he had a group of German guests staying at the hotel who, very much like me, asked him for directions on how to get into the forest.
	And he, like he gave me, gave them directions and they drove off.
	And they were very well traveled, very well educated people.
	And they headed off and then in the afternoon, he found very jovial people and very cheerful people.
	And then in the afternoon, they'd come back and he was strolling past the bar area or whatever.
	And he came across this group and they were silent and they looked very shocked, actually.
	More than just sullen.
	They looked shocked.
	So obviously as the hotel manager, he's now worried, you know, what's wrong with my guests?
	And he went up and he says, is everything okay?
	You know, how was the trip into the forest?
	And they said to him, no, everything is not okay.
	We saw something very strange out there.
	And then they recounted that as they were driving through a central part of the edge of the forest, they saw two human-like figures on the side of the road.
	And at first they thought that these were people.
	And then suddenly they darted out.
	I don't know how many meters, I approximately say about 30 meters or 40 meters ahead of them, in front of the road.
	So you've got thick forests on both sides.
	And then suddenly these two human-like figures dashed in front of them.
	And then so the manager, his name was Kwan.
	And so Quan said to them, no, no, no, you must be mistaken.
	That must have been baboon.
	And at that point, they almost got angry with him.
	And they said, look, we've traveled all over the world.
	We saw baboons as we were entering the forest.
	We know what baboons are.
	These were two human-like figures, bipedal, and they ran across the road.
	And that was the first time hearing this story was the first time that I was experiencing hearing the shock that people, which I've witnessed myself and heard from other eyewitnesses many, many times since.
	But that was the first time.
	And these people were in complete shock.
	And they actually, I think, booked out that day of the hotel and they just left.
	They just wanted to get out because they had seen what science says does not exist, what science says has not existed for about, you know, anything from 1.2 million to maybe, you know, 250,000 years ago or whatever, depending on what hominoid species they are.
	And it is a very, very shocking experience.
	And yet, though, Gareth, I've known South Africa intimately for, I'm just working out 26 years this year.
	Yes.
	And I've been backwards and forwards many times and know it very well.
	Nobody ever, you know, I've met Sangoma, you know, people who deal in magic and that sort of thing in South Africa.
	You'll know about the Sangoma, the magic people within communities.
	I've talked to them and I've talked to many people about myths and legends and beliefs of South Africa that go back thousands of years and different views of South Africa.
	And there's a place called Marapeng just outside Johannesburg, where if you want to, you can see what they will tell you as the story of the human race, of us arising from the apes and becoming us today.
	It's said to be the cradle of civilization.
	Nowhere is anything like what you are talking about mentioned.
	People tend in South Africa.
	I don't think, unless I've just missed it over the years, it's not something that people have on their radar.
	Well, the thing is, is that perhaps the most celebrated highest Sengoma in South Africa, and he died sadly.
	He was a very old man, well into his 80s or early 90s, was someone who I was privileged to, you know, he was a friend of mine, and his name was Credo Mutwa.
	Oh, I know of Credo Mutwa, very, very famous.
	In fact, my description is probably wrong, and please correct me on my description.
	Then, you know, I've described them as sort of magic people, you know, which makes them sound like wizards from Harry Potter.
	That's not so.
	These people are sentient people.
	They sense things.
	Exactly.
	I mean, Credo was described as the prophet of Africa.
	He had incredible sight of things and happening.
	He was just, to me, he was probably one of the most important figures of South African history, to be absolutely honest.
	And with the O-tongue, he was very, very aware of these beings.
	And I forget, I'm just trying to, I even have some notes here.
	The Oga was one that he referred them to.
	The Fuka Was another one.
	There's various, obviously, we've got so many hundreds of languages here in southern Africa, Africa generally.
	So these beings have been known since time began, or human time began in Africa, right the way through Africa.
	And Credo wrote about them, these beings, in his various books.
	And in East Africa, there's a smaller form that is known as the Ogogui, for example.
	And so it seems that these are, which is getting to my point a bit, and I'm glad that you brought this up because one of the first of the forest people who spoke to me openly about these otang here was a marvelous old lady called Mrs. Jordan.
	And she was probably the last of her generation of the first people here, which was the San or the bushman.
	And I got to know her very early days here, her and her family, who lived in a little settlement hamlet on the edge of the forest.
	And I got to know her and she talked to me about the elephants.
	She lived in the forest, on the edge of the forest for about 60 years.
	And she died.
	She was well into her 80s when she died.
	And she would talk about the elephants.
	She knew more about the elephants than anyone, than any of us people, so-called scientists or researchers or whatever.
	She had names for them.
	She knew the old matriarch.
	She would say that elephant would come down to check on them and all this sort of stuff.
	And this one's got a cow.
	And the matriarch's footprints aren't the biggest footprints because the big men are out there.
	And she's talking about the big bull elephants and all this sort of stuff.
	And one day, I don't know how it came about, then she started talking about the Otang.
	I think by then I'd actually had my very first sighting and she started talking about the Otang.
	And that's actually where the name came from, that she actually referred to these beings, because I didn't have a name for them.
	I didn't know of a local name.
	And she started referring to the Otang.
	So when you had a sighting, what happened and what did you think you had seen before you met her and heard the story?
	Okay, just to jump in quickly, what I'm saying is that for someone who's living so close to nature in an environment like that, the Otang was no different to her in her perception or to her family or even her grandchildren.
	They were no different than the elephants or the bushbuck or the leopard or anything else.
	It was just another inhabitant of the forest and the fame boss.
	You see what I mean?
	It's part of the landscape.
	So to them and to the indigenous people, this is nothing new.
	It's only new to us.
	Right.
	So this is, it's almost like a forgotten or a lost, well, to some of us, a lost history.
	And no one's asking the local people.
	And that's why researchers are realizing more and more and more, it doesn't matter what species you're studying, particularly if you're looking for very rare species, you've got to take what the local people are saying very, very seriously.
	Because they live there and they know.
	And they've been there for generations, you see.
	So they know what's going on out there.
	So we've got to be humble and actually learn from them.
	You know, us with our PH, well, not me, but people with their PhDs and all the rest of it, just to listen, just to listen and to communicate with the local people and you can learn a lot.
	But going to micro-sighting, I mean, I had been one Sunday morning, I don't know why, Sunday mornings, things happen with me.
	I think the last time, sorry, I told you was a Sunday morning.
	So I was out and I was out and I'd, over the weeks gone by, I'd got to know this place that I called the secret place of the elephants.
	And I was heading further and further into the foothills of the mountains.
	I was very cautious.
	I was walking alone.
	I don't recommend that to anyone.
	You should be, at least two of you out there.
	You know, I would leave very clear instructions, more directions where I'm going with my girlfriend.
	I was as careful as I had, but the nature of the work, I was alone.
	And I kept on walking further and further and further behind this particular mountain.
	And the further I went around it, over days, I kept on coming, more and more sign of the elephants, more and more droppings, more and more feeding sign.
	And then one day I turned a corner and it would be a sight that you're used to because you've been to the Kruger National Park, you've been to these game researchers, you get to a water hole and there's just elephant droppings everywhere.
	You almost feel like sometimes the animals are in collusion because they know that that's what you want to see if you're visiting.
	So they'll put in an appearance for you.
	And elephants always, for some reason, they deprecate when they're drinking and wallowing and all the rest of it.
	So you get a lot of droppings around a watering area.
	And I hadn't seen anything like it.
	I mean, up until then, I was made out this strange average ratio at very early days.
	It was taking me 25 kilometers per droppings found.
	I mean, that's how far I was walking per pile of droppings that I was finding because I didn't know the area.
	Boy, and those 25 kilometers in that terrain, they're hard yards.
	Yeah, they are.
	And the first few years, someone worked it out.
	First few years, I covered something like 22 kilometers, 22,000 kilometers.
	Wow.
	And he came up with this.
	And that works out the equivalent of walking halfway around the world.
	And all I knew was that I'd gone through six pairs of boots.
	But getting back to this place, and I thought, what on earth is going on here?
	There was old sign, old droppings, and old footprints and new footprints and fresh feeding sign branches down and old.
	And it was obviously a place that is routinely visited by these extremely elusive elephants.
	And I turned the corner And then I could see what it was.
	And it was just a tiny pool, it was a tiny spring of water.
	And it was just pulsating like sand out of the bottom of this little pool.
	Honestly, it's no wider than, I would say, about a meter and a half in diameter.
	But the water was absolutely fantastic.
	And elephants are commoisseurs of water.
	And eventually I had that water analyzed by the South African Bureau of Standards.
	And they got back to me and they said, they didn't really know why, I hadn't really explained why I wanted to have the water sampled, but they got back to me and they said, Gareth, you should be bottling this.
	This is fantastic mineral water.
	It really is.
	And obviously, that's the attractive for the elephant.
	And so they would routinely go there.
	And I spent a lot of time there.
	But on that particular Sunday morning, I had returned.
	I was heading back from the secret place.
	And it was interesting because they were down trees across the road.
	No vehicle can get in there.
	And I used to play a game with the elephants.
	Now I'm not sure if it was the elephants or the otang, to be totally honest, because I would leave stones on these boughs laying across the, these trees laying across the road.
	So it would be at my sort of chest high.
	And I'd leave these stones on top.
	And when I come back again, the stones had been put down on the ground.
	And I would put them back up again.
	And it was like a game that I was playing.
	I think it probably was the elephants, but every time we were like leaving our own calling card.
	And they were teasing you, it seems.
	Yeah, and I'm leaving Sent behind, obviously, you know.
	So they would get to know, there was three of us who were out there on a daily basis for years, only really about three, four of us, or five perhaps at the maximum.
	So it's the forest, it was the forest guards, rangers, and myself.
	And so as we're tracking the elephants or going through the, we're constantly touching trees and elephants, I mean, I've been followed by elephants, not only in the Nisla forest, but in Botswana, by scent alone of my tracks.
	That's how they can track you like a dog can track you.
	Their sense of smell, they've actually got the best sense of smell of any mammal on earth, believe God.
	Really?
	Far better than a dog, yeah.
	So we're leaving all our signs.
	So it's the foot is on, the shoe is on the different foot, if you're not on the other foot, in the sense that, you know, we're going out of a way trying to learn about the elephants and learning from signs and inference and all the rest of it.
	But meanwhile, we're leaving signs behind and they're learning about us.
	I have no doubt that they knew me as an individual and my colleagues Wilfrid and Carl and the other guys who had extraordinary encounters, non-aggressive, close-up encounters with these elephants.
	And it's because they got to know us through time, through our sand.
	And anyway, so carrying on with the story, so I left the tree and put the stones back up and I was heading along and it was a bright, beautiful day, clear skies.
	I was looking forward to going to a restaurant, an open-air restaurant on a beach here overlooking the Indian Ocean to have lunch with my girlfriend.
	The last thing on my mind was an upright walking hominoid figure or anything like that.
	I mean, that really was the last thing on my mind.
	I was just feeling really fantastic with what I found at the secret place.
	And I was just walking back to my vehicle.
	I was about two, three kilometers away from the vehicle.
	And then we're talking about you know when you've been stared at.
	And I think it becomes even more acute in the bush because you're aware of predators or poachers even or whatever.
	And I just felt something was looking to me to the left-hand side, I'd say about 50, 60 yards away.
	And I saw this figure in retrospect.
	I initially would say about five foot, but I say more about five foot three, five foot four, just peeping with about one third, two thirds of its body just peeping out from the right hand side of the.
	It was actually a stand of pine trees.
	It was actually a portion of pine trees to my left.
	And I just saw this russet colored human figure there.
	And the one side of me was just reacting, you know, because I spent most of my adult life amongst lions and predators and all the rest of it.
	The rule, it's embedded in you.
	You don't swing around and stare at the animal.
	You know, if it's a non-aggressive situation, rather pretend that you haven't seen it to the animal watching and just carry on on your way.
	Because if you swing around, it could be construed as a challenge.
	Yes, and then it feels threatened.
	Then you get a then you'll get a mock charge.
	But if you're walking just past, you can actually walk past it.
	If they think they haven't been seen, then they would just let you go.
	And that's fine.
	That's what they want.
	They don't want to be seen.
	So you'd seen this creature and that creature knew that you'd seen him or her.
	I don't know.
	I just looked at the corner of my eye and I could, I think I am the, I was, to these beings, I think I was, there's this whole thing about being the familiar stranger.
	You know, it's like when you're going into the underground in London and every day or whatever, and you go into the platform and every morning, there might be lots of familiar faces, but they're strangers to you.
	So they are.
	But you feel that you know them.
	So in their minds, perhaps they were on some level aware of what you were.
	Yeah, maybe they had seen me walking around there for months and months and months.
	And now it's like 20 years later, you know.
	But they've probably seen me.
	That's why sometimes I say to myself, was it actually the elephants taking those stones down or the Zota?
	So when you had that sighting, who did you tell?
	How did you, I mean, that's the kind of thing you can't keep to yourself.
	I walked on for About a kilometer and a half, and then I swung around and I could see nothing behind me.
	And then I just sunk to the ground.
	I was in shock.
	That's all I can call it.
	It's almost like a form of post-traumatic shock disorder, but instantly, not a gradual hitting you.
	It was like shock, you know, because I've seen many different things in Africa and not saying I've seen it all, but I've seen all that I expect to see.
	And that morning, I was seeing the unexpected.
	Right, so you're something that you weren't familiar with.
	And I knew it wasn't a person.
	And I knew it wasn't the only large primate we've got here is chakma baboons.
	The smaller ones is the burbert monkey.
	I knew it wasn't any of those.
	And it couldn't be a baboon because if you've been on holiday to South Africa or anywhere, you know, in southern Africa, you will know the baboons are wily and fairly small compared to us.
	And they're the ones who steal your sandwiches.
	But this is something different.
	This was something very different.
	And so I just sunk to the ground with my backpack, my rucksack on my back.
	And I just actually just covered my eyes.
	And I felt as if I was in a fog.
	And it was a beautiful clear day.
	And yet I felt as if I was in a fog.
	It was shock.
	It was total shock.
	And then I sort of shook it off and I carried on walking, got up and carried on walking.
	And then after two, three kilometers or so, I got to my vehicle and then I drove the rest of the way home, which would have been, I live right on the edge of the forest and in the same areas where I did then.
	And so that would have taken at least another half an hour.
	And yeah, just in a blur, really.
	And then I got to where I was living.
	And yeah, and that day I told my girlfriend at the time, you know, I told her what I saw.
	And she recounts in this new book of mine, which I tell about this discovery.
	I mean, it's not a discovery.
	I didn't discover them.
	They've always been out there.
	But my awareness of them, let's put it that way, this book Beyond the Secret Elephants.
	And in the book, for the research, for the book, because Francia and I, we parted separate ways many years ago, but remained good friends, I contacted Francia and I said, that day when I came back, when I had that first sighting, I said, what was I saying?
	Because I don't actually recall too much about it.
	And she just said to me how confused I was and how I was just trying to work out, you know, what had I seen?
	And she said, I just kept on speaking about it for days, trying to, almost like I was thinking aloud, trying to work out because, you know.
	Well, it sounds like it had an impact on you, on not just the, you know, the emotional, I've just seen something odd level.
	It seems to have affected you more deeply than that.
	Yeah, because, you know, I've got an open mind, but this was seeing something that I couldn't even imagine.
	And were you aware of stories of Bigfoot and Yeti and Sasquatch and all the rest of them around the world in Yaoi in Australia?
	Yes, I was.
	I was.
	We've missed out a chunk because in between that sighting with the Taurus and when I first came down here, initially stories, not just Mrs. Jordan, but other stories of these beings started filtering down to me.
	I remember once being in the office of a forestry scientist here in Nisner.
	We were looking at different plant foods of the elephants and we were talking about this.
	And out of the blue, he said to me, Gareth, when you're out there doing your research on the elephants, have you ever come across an upright bipedal human-looking person out there, you know, covered in hair?
	And I was pretty shocked when he said that.
	I mean, this is coming from a scientist.
	In retrospect, I congratulate him for his open-mindedness on it, you know, to just come out with that to me.
	And I said to him, no.
	I mean, this is before my first sighting.
	And I said to him, no.
	I said, why do you ask?
	And he says, well, we've had two or three separate reports from our workers out there working in the forest and in the famed Boss Ayrshire plantations who are claiming that they've seen such a being.
	And he says, I would really like to know what it is out there.
	And these are coming from separate people and they're swearing blind that this is what they are seeing on different occasions.
	So these sort of stories were sort of floating towards me.
	And I was aware of Sasquatch and Bigfoot and Yeti.
	But just a curiosity to me, not a subject of study, so to speak.
	So did you start to compile accounts of these beings?
	Yes, I did.
	I did.
	And what Francia said to me, what she said, over the days, you just almost became resigned to what you had seen, that you had seen some kind of relic hominoid, which I referred to them generally as, as a relic hominin or hominoid or whatever.
	And how do you feel about the term cryptozoology?
	Well, I never imagined, you see, the thing is, I never imagined that I find myself in that arena.
	I mean, it is the study or the search for, you know, supposedly unknown species, and it doesn't have to apply to anything too strange.
	I mean, in the part of the world that I live in here, one of the most extraordinary discoveries was made in the Indian Ocean back in the 50s was of the coelacanth, this amazing prehistoric fish that was discovered, which was thought to have gone extinct back in the time of the dinosaurs about 63 million years ago.
	I mean, nature can't surprise you.
	I think they've just discovered in the last few months, what is it called?
	The elephant shrew.
	Rediscoverer.
	It has been rediscovered.
	And this little guy, please take a look.
	I'm talking to my listener here online at the elephant shrew because he is the cutest little guy, like a little mouse.
	But they were thought to be extinct.
	Thought to be extinct.
	And now we're getting back to what we were discussing earlier.
	But now there's a researcher there.
	One of the researchers was an Ethiopian researcher.
	And he's basically saying, well, we do actually know about these creatures.
	So it's new to Western science, if you know what I mean.
	But the local people, it wasn't like a groundbreaking discovery.
	If you read the BBC news report on that shrew, it was a fantastic discovery.
	But closer to home to where you are, I think I saw something just the other day, now, today even, on, is it Ministry of Defence land that discovered a cider, I think in the last couple of days, that is thought to have been extinct well over 100 years ago, was last seen 100 years ago.
	Last week, a chameleon was found somewhere else that has so-called lost to science for 150 years.
	I think it's Malagascar or whatever.
	I mean, that's just two.
	We're discovering new species of monkeys every year in the Amazon.
	Right, so seeing Otang, for anybody who sees Otang, yes, it can be a shock, but it shouldn't really be a surprise.
	No, it should be a surprise because there's no point of reference with you.
	I mean, so when you see an elephant shrew, there's many kinds of elephant shrews.
	If you see the chameleon, you know what a chameleon is.
	If you see a spider, you know what a spider is.
	But if you see Bigfoot, you don't have a point of reference.
	You don't have that point of reference.
	And your points of reference will all be wrong, like the baboons.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, people, I mean, there's been sightings in Europe, what they call the wild man or whatever, or if people coming across these beings that could also be happening, I mean, occurring in Europe.
	I mean, even reputedly in Britain itself in some of the wilder areas.
	Oh, yes.
	I mean, you know, South Wales and other places.
	Certainly, we have our own sightings, even this year, of creatures that are purported to be Bigfoot.
	So look, you have this, you know, this light bulb moment where you see this creature.
	And then you decide you want to study them and find out more about them.
	But how do you go on the trail of them?
	Well, I mean, it's very, very interesting because like most eyewitnesses, I mean, I told my girlfriend Francia, but I didn't tell anyone else.
	And because I was going through what all the eyewitnesses go through, which is a fear of ridicule, you know, not even a fear of ridicule, but I was doing serious work there.
	I mean, I was rediscovering, so-called rediscovering.
	They'd always been there.
	Anybody would have been afraid of being taken on a kind of detour.
	Yeah, these elusive elephants that people were saying there's only one and I was saying there's definitely more and the DNA proved it.
	I wasn't going to go public on the O-tang at that point in time.
	I need to keep my credibility intact for the sake of the elephants.
	So I mentioned a little bit about the O-tang in my book, The Secret Elephants, which was my book, which I told about the discovery of the Neisna elephants.
	But I didn't write much about them.
	But it's only recently with this new book that I'm telling the whole story of what really happened out there.
	But it was like a silent study because I would only talk to Francho about it.
	And that was about it for quite some time until I discovered a couple of researchers in Indonesia, both British researchers, Debbie and Jeremy Holden,
	and they had this incredible discovery, again, which the local people knew all about, which is the Oran pendict, I think it's called, which is quite a small hominoid species or being, whatever you like to call it.
	And they found tracks and I actually communicated with them.
	And that was so refreshing because they are, you know, great naturalists and they were in a sort of similar situation as me, that they were, you know, they'd stumbled upon this mysterious being.
	So it was actually, I think, perhaps refreshing for both of us through emails to be actually talk about what our respected, what our inverted commas respected species were, you know, sort of feeding off or the range of these animals or coexisting with or whatever.
	So that was good.
	But for the large part, I was largely keeping it to myself.
	But at the same time, trying to assess them as much as I could.
	I mean, the main focus, obviously, was the elephant, but just keeping my eyes and ears open.
	And then more and more stories started drifting towards me, you know.
	And that is the remarkable thing, because ever since the book came out, Beyond Secret Elephants came out in January this year.
	And I write about a whole load of eyewitness reports, very, very compelling reports of what people have seen.
	From old people to young people, cross-section of racism, all the rest of it.
	It's extraordinary.
	What's the most compelling one?
	The most compelling I would say would be, I run a thing here called the Secret Elephants Forest Experience, which is like a mini expedition.
	I take people out for the day.
	It's like a visual representation, interpretation of my book, The Secret Elephants.
	I take very small groups out into the forest, and I took this one group out into the forest, and we spent half a day dealing with the incredible world of the Naisa Elephants.
	And at the end of this forest experience, a lady came up to me and she said to me, and she just read The Secret Elephants, where I mentioned a little bit about the other tongue.
	And she came up to me and she says, Get up, I want to tell you about something that my son saw one of them, I think she said to me, and I said, what, a Naisa elephant?
	She says, no, what you're writing about in your book.
	And then she recounted to me that her son, I forget six months or a year before, his adult son, went down to part of the Garden Root National Park here overlooking the Indian Ocean, Krunzhook.
	It's a place on the cliffs and there's picnic sites there where you can have barbecues and all the rest of it.
	And he went ahead of his friends, I think it was, or friends and family, to set up a little barbecue and he's putting the logs down and all the rest of it and preparing things.
	And it was very quiet.
	It was the day during the week.
	It was a weekday.
	And he was getting everything ready.
	And he turned around for some reason.
	And just a few meters behind him, behind a bush, there was an Otang looking at him.
	And he just dropped everything and got into his vehicle.
	Not threatening, but I mean, but it's so shocking.
	You know, it doesn't have to be threatening.
	It's just so shocking when you see one of them.
	And he just dropped everything.
	He got into his car and he phoned his family.
	He says, no, no, we've had a change of plan.
	He didn't tell them what he'd seen.
	He didn't tell his wife.
	He didn't tell his mother for a long, long time until eventually he actually told his mum.
	He told his mum before he told his wife even, which is typical of eyewitnesses, what they go through.
	And that's why what I'm saying with the secret elephant, I mean, with the Beyond the Secret Elephants, it's been so important because so many of these eyewitnesses have come forward since.
	So if the book has done one thing, it's brought sort of validation and vindication to these people.
	I've had two now, 80-year-old ladies who have read the book and have contacted me and telling me what had happened to them as one as a teenager and one as a young woman in two completely, one Bainesclough past down in the southern Cape here and the other one in the Drakensberg,
	two totally different parts of South Africa and two stories that they had kept to themselves all these years until they could see that they're not mad and they saw what they saw.
	And you have to understand the territory.
	I know the Drakensberg very well.
	You know, Cathedral Peak is one of my favorite places on earth.
	I think it's Clarence.
	Well, I know Clarence, Clarence is like a stopping off point when you're on your way back up from Durban to Johannesburg.
	That's it.
	I know Clarence very well.
	But those areas, it's actually, it's not a stretch to understand how something could hide there because we are talking about vast areas that are, you know, where the number of people is minuscule.
	I mean, Clarence, I think, has got a few hundred people, barely a thousand people in the town.
	If that, I mean, it's a tiny little place.
	No, I've got a photograph of myself standing in Clarence where I had a very nice lunch.
	I think there's a well in the center of the town with a sort of wheel at the top of that well.
	There's not much else there.
	It's very charming.
	But it's a lonely place.
	It's a lonely place.
	And there's so many lonely places here.
	And then, you know, back in the 1890s, I mean, the Afrikaans farmers, the Boer farmers, when they were moving, well, even before that, when they were on the Great Trek and they're heading north and they settled in what is today Limpopo province and Northwest Province and those areas, they were coming across, I mean, that is, you've been up there, I'm sure, as well.
	That's more savannah land and hilly and all the rest of it.
	And that really is lonely.
	Yeah, and they were having these beings taking some of their small livestock because, you know, it does seem like Sasquatch and these other beings and Otanga, it does seem that they're omnivores, you know, so they're eating meat, they're eating fruit, they're like, you know, basically their diet, I believe, is like baboons, which is like omnivores.
	And they were losing fruit from their orchards and they came up with this term, my Afrikaans is terrible, but Bata Bojan, which means the water baboon, because there's like an association with water or water falls, rather, with these beings.
	So that was old, old, long time ago of the first sort of white records.
	Bigfoot Otang has been hiding in plain sight, as indeed Bigfoot has been doing, I believe, in many, many other parts of the world for a very long time.
	So I guess as a researcher, the questions you will want to be asking are the ones around how long has this creature been here and how has this creature existed?
	And, you know, was this creature there before Europeans went to Africa?
	Well, the answer to that is, I would guess, you know, almost certainly for a substantial amount of time before.
	But there's a whole backstory that it would be good to know.
	But the difficulty with doing all of that research is that you're giving, it's almost like winning the lottery.
	You know, some people don't want publicity because everybody will flock to them and want something.
	Ditto with the Bigfoot, the Otang, if you start to reveal that these creatures are out there and where they might be, people are going to start looking and that isn't necessarily so good for them, is it?
	No, but, you know, to be absolutely honest, I've been in that situation before with the elephants.
	And I had to weigh things up very, very carefully with the Neister elephants because people were saying to me, no, no, you're making these discoveries, but you mustn't write a book about it.
	You mustn't talk publicly about it because then it's going to be loads of people going into those areas.
	But because of the nature of these elephants, I mean, we've got tens of thousands of visitors overseas.
	Well, we used to visitors coming through here, local visitors, tourists driving through the area.
	You go on self-guided walks here.
	Anyone can walk here.
	I mean, a couple of years ago, two German tourists, first time in Africa, just arrived in Cape Town, drove up here two days later.
	They're on one of the walks here, turned a corner and they walked straight into an elephant.
	But I mean, that is completely exceptional because on average, with thousands of people here going through the area and people working here, forest workers, there's probably officially only one or two sightings of these elephants a year, despite all this activity.
	And so I learned from that.
	So, and my book about the elephant secret elephants that came out 11 years ago or 10 years ago, and there hasn't been a flocking of people.
	I mean, you can't find them.
	There's a few of these.
	In this day and age that we live in, nobody can travel anywhere.
	So, you know, they're safe for now.
	Okay, we're coming to the end of this.
	They were safe before, actually.
	No one can actually set out and try and find a nice elephant, just as much as no one can set out then and try and find a no-tunnel.
	My sightings have just been by pure accident because they chose to be seen.
	So how then do we, if we want to, how do we further the research into them, which presumably you want to do?
	Well, I'm continuing with the research, but it's unlike mine isn't a search of trying to discover them.
	I've had six sightings and four clear sightings.
	So it's four clear sightings and two obscure sightings.
	So I know that they're there.
	I've got all the eyewitnesses here.
	We know they exist.
	What is intriguing is to know how they exist and what their behavior is.
	But it's got to be so non-intrusive and it will be because that's the nature of it here anyhow.
	Another question would be, I guess, sorry to interrupt, but are they aware of the fact that there are other creatures around and there are humans around and they don't particularly want to be noticed by them?
	Are they aware of a need to cover their tracks?
	In other words, are they being elusive deliberately?
	When they choose to be, but when they run across in front of a vehicle at night, I feel there's a sense of humor at work there as well, because these so-called elusive animals could just be hiding in the shadows and wait for a car to pass, but they choose to run out in front of them.
	I've been in a vehicle twice.
	I didn't see it.
	If you read my book, you'll know why.
	I was tending to my dog at the time, just coming back from the vet.
	Someone was driving us.
	And another occasion, I was turned to the back, but the driver both saw it on two occasions, run out in front of them.
	And both drivers on those two very separate occasions were left in shock the days afterwards.
	So I think a little bit mischievous.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, no, it sounds like...
	And, you know, you just...
	Yeah, down the line, I mean, who are they?
	I mean, we had this incredible discovery by Professor Lee Berger and Professor John Hawkes and the team at the Cradle of Mankind with the discovery not so long ago at all of Homo Naledi, which dated back only to about 200, 300,000 years, which is incredible because, I mean, modern humans were actually pretty much walking around about 152,000 years.
	So there's various hominoid species coexisting.
	So perhaps this is nothing new.
	It's only new to our mindset that there can be another bipedal hominoid.
	We think we're the only one, but there's probably many different kinds of them all over the world.
	Six encounters.
	Some people report in some parts of the world, mostly North America, I think, that the creatures communicate with them on some level, perhaps telepathically.
	Did you ever feel that?
	No, I haven't.
	I haven't.
	No, I haven't.
	I haven't felt that.
	So what would you like to do in this research, just as we come to the end of this now?
	What would you like to do to take this forward?
	What would be the next thing you'd like to do?
	I know you told me that you were at a site today that was important.
	I was at a site yesterday.
	I mean, it's all sort of ties together because very recently a research team over the past few years have been scouring this coastline here where we've got fossilized incredible massive dunes, primary dunes.
	And they've made incredible discoveries.
	I mean, you don't equate, this is prehistoric times of certain species that, I mean, there were crocodiles here, there was giant buffalo here.
	And amongst all these creatures, they've come across, there's about six different sites now in the whole of South Africa.
	And I think four of them are on the South Cape Coast here, where I am, of modern human, of the first modern humans.
	The first ones were found in the West Coast, and they dubbed it the footprints of Eve, for example.
	But they're coming across these fossilized footprints, or rather the impressions underneath where the foot went.
	It looks underneath like a little hull of a boat, the impression, it's been fossilized.
	And so these are dating back 145 or 100,000 years or whatever.
	And they can't conclusively say that it's Homo sapiens because, you know, Homo and Our Lady, even though they're dating those beings to 200,000, but that's just of those individuals.
	What of that line of Homo and Our Lady lived far in more recent years than that, if you know what I mean?
	That's just the dating on those individuals.
	And yeah, so it really is a time of discovery down here.
	It's very, very exciting.
	And it's taking each day as it comes, just being completely open-minded and not getting diverted and just seeing them as flesh and blood beings.
	But most important, that they have somehow, like the elephants, have survived here despite our human altering of the landscape that they have witnessed.
	You feel for them, for what this place was once upon a time and what it is today, even though it's a beautiful, beautiful place, but the loss of habitat is just extraordinary.
	And yet these beings have managed, like the elephants, have managed to hang in there all this time.
	Which is the most fascinating aspect of what they're all about.
	But we need to know more.
	You know, because you know, you feel compassion for them, because I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, if they are indeed human beings, then I mean, it brings a whole load of issues into being in terms of, I mean, we're talking about land rights, we're talking about human rights.
	Yes, yeah, and how do we relate to them?
	Well, it's Gareth, we have to talk again because I sense that there is much more to say, but I'm glad that we were able to go into this story, which we didn't have time to do properly last time.
	And it's marvelous to be able to speak in this day and age across all of these miles.
	And even though, you know, up here in the United Kingdom, we're in lockdown again.
	And, you know, the world is going through some bad, bad times.
	And it seems a lot of it is centered here by the sounds of it.
	But hopefully I'll be able to get back to your wonderful country and maybe see some of these sites.
	But thank you very much for speaking with me again, Gareth.
	It's always a pleasure to speak with you.
	If people want to read about you, you have a great website.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	What's the address?
	It's just GarethPatterson.com.
	Gareth, I found something new about the Otang update, I think, a couple of days ago.
	Okay.
	And is that anything that we should mention at the end of this?
	What should we be looking for?
	I was putting in there that what I've started now with this secret elephant forest experience, it does actually cover that new book is obviously covering the Otang and the elephants.
	And I'm doing these tours, but I'm also doing a new thing whereupon I'm doing actually a storytelling experience in my own cabin for people on the edge of the forest where we can, one of the subjects that they can choose is that we can talk about Otang.
	Oh, fabulous.
	I want to come to that.
	Gareth, listen, there's two hours between us, so I'm talking to you.
	And the evening is fairly young, and the evening's a bit older where you are now because the clocks have changed.
	And it's now two hours between up here and down there.
	But thank you very, very much.
	Thanks ever so much.
	It's been great.
	Thank you very much.
	The remarkable Gareth Patterson.
	Let me know what you thought about him.
	Go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
	You can send me a message from there.
	And as ever, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
	Strange days indeed, as Mr. Lennon once sang.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained Online.
	And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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