INTERVIEW: Josh Gates searches for Amelia Earhart evidence on new series
Josh Gates, former host of Destination Truth on Syfy, is facing the world’s most thrilling unexplained mysteries and legends in a new Travel Channel series premiering Thursday, Jan. 8 at 9 p.m. Called Expedition Unknown, the show follows Gates as he looks for answers to some legendary question marks. The two-hour premiere examines the oft-investigated circumstances of Amelia Earhart’s final flight.
“Expedition Unknown … focuses on the world’s most enduring legends and mysteries, and the search for Earhart is, I think, a really great place to start,” Gates said recently during a phone call with journalists. “It’s probably the most confounding missing person case of the 20th century. Our two-hour season premiere focuses on two of the most exciting developments in the search. First, there have been these longstanding claims that Earhart may have circled back toward Papua New Guinea, which is where she took off from on her final flight. A remote tribe there has identified a wreck in the jungle, which some believe may be her missing Electra aircraft, and other underwater wrecks offshore are also promising leads that have never really been fully investigated.”
The Papua New Guinea portion of the episode is followed by an investigation in Fiji. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) has, “to a high degree of certainty,” identified an aircraft panel as being from Earhart’s Electra plane. According to TIGHAR’s website, the debris was found in 1991 on Nikumaroro, an atoll in the Pacific. TIGHAR has been leading the charge in trying to find evidence of Earhart’s final flight, and the organization’s efforts have focused on Nikumaroro.
Gates had this to add: “On the island where that aluminum panel was found, a skeleton was discovered in 1940. That skeleton was shipped to Fiji and unfortunately lost amidst the island’s archives, and there has been this longstanding question as to whether this skeleton could be Earhart or her navigator who vanished on the flight, especially considering a piece of her plane may have been found on this island. So a new search for the bones has recently been launched in Fiji, and in the premiere, we head there to join the hunt for the missing remains.”
The TV host was tight-lipped about the evidence his team found, but he promised a possible “big break in the case.”
“Along with the search for Earhart, we’ve got some really, you know, kickass stories on tap,” he said. “We’re going to be trekking to a recently found lost city in the jungles of Cambodia. We’re going to be hunting for the world’s most valuable missing object in Russia. We’re going to be looking for the lost pirate flagship of Capt. [Henry] Morgan off the coast of Panama and hunting down a puportedly cursed relic in Myanmar, which is a country that is just now really being opened to the outside world. These are really compelling stories — you know, really, really daring adventures, really interesting objects with fascinating legends — and we’re really excited to share them with viewers.”
Travel Channel plugs Gates as a “cultural explorer” and “adventurer,” two pretty cool titles for a person in 2014. A graduate of Tufts University and inductee into the prestigious Explorers Club, Gates has probably exploded his personal bucket list many times over. African desert? Check. Antarctica? Check. Mt. Kilimanjaro? Check. Aconcagua, tallest mountain in the Americas? Check.
On his previous show, Destination Truth, Gates had a way of combining an Indiana-Jones type of curiosity with a Ricky-Gervais type of humor. For him, it seems that the journey to the “truth” is sometimes more revealing than the “truth” itself.
Gates has several items on his checklist of what makes a good mystery or legend for TV.
“I think at the top of the checklist is that it needs to be a story that has some relevance, some topicality right now. It has to be something where there are developments in the case. I think that, you know, the story of dragons is really interesting, but I think we’d be hard-pressed to get an hour out of that unless someone claimed that they found a dragon.”
Other items him and his team look for include locations that are dynamic enough to support an expedition for 60 minutes of television. This is probably the reason Gates treks through the jungles of the world on a regular basis. In the Cambodia episode of Expedition Unknown, he heads through “landline jungles.” He has also trekked through the jungles of Mexico to go underwater diving in the Mayan underworld.
“Above all else, it’s about stories that are interesting. When you hear some of these legends, they really pop. You really hear about some of these lost cities or missing treasures, and you just think, damn, that’s a really cool story. I wonder what’s really going on there, and so, if it kind of pops that way, then that’s usually a good indicator for us that it’s going to be interesting for viewers because these stories have a natural kind of drive to them. They make you want to kind of find out what’s really going on there.”
The Earhart series opener, which runs two hours with commercials, could have lasted a lot longer, Gates said. He acknowledged there are many competing theories about the ultimate fate of the iconic pilot. However, he credited TIGHAR and the work on Nikumaroro as a “leading theory.” TIGHAR is not a new organization to be profiled on television. Other documentaries have explored their trials and tribulations in securing evidence on the remote atoll and its surrounding waters.
“That’s certainly a group that is well organized,” he said. “It has spent an enormous amount of its time and resources devoted to this, and we really felt like we wanted to follow a part of their story and to follow this investigation in Fiji for these missing bones.”
Gates promised an Earhart investigation that is not at arm’s length from the viewer. Other specials, he contended, used stock footage and told stories about where Earhart went.
“But there isn’t really a kind of first-person experiential element to it,” he said. “We wanted to go to the runway she last took off from, go to the places that are associated with her story, and kind of put boots on the ground, and let people experience it in a first-person way. I think that’s what sets it apart, and I think that’s what sets the series apart, that it’s not just a kind of arm’s-length show where we just do nothing but kind of put up talking heads or just kind of talk our way through a story that you’ve heard a number of times. It’s about kind of going there, being there, going to the place, experiencing the story.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
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Expedition Unknown premieres on the Travel Channel Thursday, Jan. 8 at 9 p.m. Click here for more information.
I have enjoyed Josh Gates in all the cable TV series in which he has appeared. I will definitely be watching this series as well. However, this particular description of the Earhart investigation troubles me because it omits up-to-date research and analyses conflicting with the TIGHAR theories. Specifically, the research done since 1960 by Fred Goerner and expanded upon by Mike Campbell in Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last (2012). Also Campbell’s blog at earharttruth.wordpress.com . More than one book has been written since 1960 by others, including an eyewitness to Earhart’s Electra being discovered in an old hangar on the south end of Saipan in 1944 by invading US marines (Devine’s Eyewitness: The Amelia Earhart Incident, 1987). There is testimony by a Japanese medical tech who treated the head (and other) wounds of a white man – pilot – captured from Mili Atoll in July 1937, who was accompanied by a white woman called “Meel-ya”. The Marshall Islands issued a 50th anniversary stamp series in 1987 commemorating the crash and capture of Earhart and Noonan on Mili Atoll. The analysis and evaluation of Earhart’s radio transmissions on that last leg of her worldwide trip are ongoing and raise more questions about whether she was avoiding being tracked – by the US or the Japanese. Why? I encourage anyone who is sincerely interested in learning more FACTS about the Earhart disappearance to look at Campbell’s book and his blog. As recently as this week researchers continue to post and debate artifacts and documentation that supports a scenario more plausible than TIGHAR’s: Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, landed at Mili Atoll in the pre-WWII, Japanese-held Marshall Islands on July 2, 1937; they were picked up by the Japanese and taken prisoner onboard a fishing vessel or support ship along with the Electra (strapped to the back of the vessel), taken to Japanese military headquarters in Jaluit, then to Kwajalein, and finally to Saipan; the Electra itself was eventually hauled to Saipan, where it was secreted in a remote hangar at the southwest end of the island. Both Earhart and Noonan died at the hands of their Japanese captors in Saipan well before 1944. I imagine it is too late for Josh Gates and his researchers to present any of this factual evidence on an episode about to premier, but I sincerely encourage others to look more deeply into the volume of accessible evidence supporting the Mili Atoll landing for Earhart and Noonan.
After all he [Josh Gates] is doing to help promote TIGHAR, it’s strange, but maybe typical behavior, of Gillespie to insult Josh Gates on the TIGHAR forum.
On August 08, 2014, Gillespie wrote,
Re: Bones found in Fiji
“Josh Gates seems to have all the earmarks of a first class phony.”
It is known since several years that Earhart’s aircraft was ditched in the Pacific near Howland , one hour after the pilot’s signal that the remaining fuel (to finish the trip at destination) was sufficient for 1/2 hour . Stories like ‘Meel Ya’s aircraft was strapped to the back of a Japanese vessel’ , and transported to Saipan , as well as stories about a landing at Mili Atoll and Gardner are completely nonsense , held up for commercial reasons only .
Puullease !!! Thus belonged on Comedy Central. Or the Cartoon Network. The sound man could have been resting on Earhart’s skull and not have known it.
Wonder what the ratings were….
If it had any real credibility, they could have lied and said they searched for two hours – So, what stamp do we put on this Missing Persons File ? ” FAILED ” ? “INCOMPLETE ” ? “IN OVER MY HEAD”?
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Awesome! Josh Gates is the best!! Can’t wait.