Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter (9 page)

I climb into the front compartment, the crew hops in the back, and away we go. As we gain altitude, the entire island steadily resolves into a tapestry of palm trees and thatched roofs. The Duke of York Islands roll by as we course above the frothy waves and deep blue sea. As we approach New Britain, my eyes widen at plumes of menacing smoke that billow out of three active volcanoes. We arc around one of the larger cones, which, until fairly recently, was entirely underwater. In the 1800s it exploded up from the depths, and when it finally quieted, there was a new island here. Maps had to be redrawn. The large town of Rabaul constructed shortly after was one of PNG’s most cosmopolitan but also an astonishingly poor choice of real estate. In 1994 the inevitable finally happened.

A brutal eruption devastated Rabaul, with rocks the size of cars raining down over the city and heavy ash crushing most of the buildings. Today it is a chalky, abandoned ghost town resting peacefully in the shadow of still-smoldering giants. Six hundred feet away, a new Rabaul is springing up, unwilling to learn from the mistakes of its past.

Our helicopter lands on the outskirts of the ruined city. We are immediately presented with a hefty bill for our last-minute helicopter extraction, which Neil and I promptly charge to the network. We’re here to search for an iguanodon-like dinosaur that locals have reported seeing in the nearby jungles. Our mission is straightforward: head to the remote village where the creature was spotted, interview the locals, and attempt to figure out what they saw.

We meet with the town mayor, who directs us out of town and kindly insists on loaning us an additional security guard. As the mayor diplomatically prattles on about how I’m going to love the unspoiled rain forests and friendly natives, I can’t help but notice that my new escort is carrying a fully automatic machine gun. We drive out of Rabaul past ash-covered ruins on streets lined with charred palm trees. Above the blackened foliage, I notice the volcano belch out a cloud of vapor and cross my fingers that I’m not about to find myself in a Roland Emmerich movie.

After orchestrating the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto moved his base of operations to Rabaul. By 1941, this entire island was overrun with more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers. Today there are still lingering reminders of this bloody past all around us. The natural vegetation is broken up by huge gun turrets and scattered mechanical debris. By the side of the road I notice a graveyard and a long-abandoned execution area. It’s a disquieting sight and we continue on in silence.

The muddy road slits the jungle like a knife but becomes more and more compromised by the encroaching foliage. By the time we make it to our destination, the ground is barely visible. We step out of the jeeps into a clearing where I can make out a loose arrangement of huts. I also hear the sound of beating drums, which brings a smile to my face. We’re about to be given a proper welcome. The villagers emerge, and we’re surrounded by traditional painted dancers clad with necklaces of dried flowers. As the drumming picks up pace and the dancers encircle my team, I stand amazed at the vivid eruption of culture.

Since the whole scene feels a bit like the arrival at Skull Island in
King Kong
, we’re doing our best to ingratiate ourselves. The quickest way to fit in here is also the simplest; my crew and I agree to partake in a mouthful of
buai
. As the entire village looks on in delight, we make an earnest if pathetic attempt to chew the nearly inedible betel nut as drool comes spilling out of our mouths. We spit the juice out onto the ground, which is already stained red as far as the eye can see. The power of the bitter concoction hits us first-timers like a ton of bricks, and within minutes we’re all high as kites and stumbling around like a pack of fools. Marc Carter is dancing like a chicken, Neil is reeling and can barely stand, and the entire village laughs their collective ass off. For the next ten generations, they’ll probably be talking about the white idiots who came to their village one day.

The effects pass quickly, and we’re warmly embraced by the entire tribe. They serve us a challenging lunch of stewed bananas and taro root, which we diplomatically consume as best we can. I teach the kids how to use an iPod (it turns out that a click-wheel really is pretty intuitive); they squeal with laughter, tickled by the strange sounds of a little-known band called “the Beatles.”

A tour of the village is revelatory. There’s a vibrant community here that is totally divorced from the modern world. The discovery that the locals are still using seashells for currency is downright mind-blowing. I spend the better part of an hour trying to work out the dollars-to-shells conversion rate, but in the end I just give up. I’m offered a few thirteen-year-old brides, which I politely decline, as we weave our way between the simple huts and throngs of onlookers.

We get down to business and interview eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the iguanodon creature. They nearly universally describe the animal as having a dog-like head, a long body, and a spiked tail. Villagers seem to think it’s a dinosaur of some sort. Several people claim that the creature has eaten local dogs. We also buy a live chicken to use for bait that the mayor strangles to death, a process at which he doesn’t appear overly adept. The zombie chicken keeps coming back to life again and again, and I gnash my teeth waiting for it to be over.

Finally, with our (hopefully) dead chicken and a fan club comprising everyone in town, we head out to begin our investigation. One eyewitness is actually too scared to descend the slope where she spied the creature. This is a little nerve-racking, since it’s clear some kind of animal really did frighten this woman, iguanodon or not. A few of the locals assist in erecting a base camp, using machetes to create bamboo supports for our rain tarp. In the span of about three minutes, they turn the site into the Professor’s hut from
Gilligan’s Island
, fashioning a table, two chairs, and a roof out of bamboo, putting my own camp-building efforts to utter shame. I half expect them to install a coconut phone.

Just before dark, we string out a series of infrared cameras to survey the area for any movement. Thermal imagers aid our efforts as well, piercing the darkness and illuminating anything that emits heat. While part of the team begins a preliminary sweep, the rest of the group continues to activate the equipment at base camp.

The ensuing investigation is notable in that it marks the first of two instances when I nearly get my head blown off while making
Destination Truth
. It happens as we trudge through a swampy section of wilderness beyond our camp. I hack at a huge banana leaf that suddenly drops away to reveal a heavily cleared expanse and about twenty Papuans servicing construction equipment. The men immediately stop what they’re doing and accost our group, hysterically yelling and waving us away. Two of the men are holding pistols, which they wave about haphazardly in the general direction of my face; the rest step forward with machetes. I watch our Papuan security guard take the safety off of his machine gun and I motion the muzzle down while Steve politely apologizes for the intrusion. An argument ensues but is settled when we all back off from the site and agree to go around.

As we retreat, I glance back at the equipment, which appears to be dredging part of the swamp. Steve tells me that they’re looking for the wreckage of an American bomber from World War II, which they believe was carrying a shipment of gold. Clearly, they’re protective of the bounty.

We double back to base to begin our overnight investigation, more than a little wary of our newly discovered neighbors. I’m less than surprised to find that Lucas has fallen asleep on a log.

The rest of the night is monopolized by an extensive search of the jungles surrounding the village. Just after midnight, we encounter something that shakes the trees so hard I’m convinced it’s the Smoke Monster from
Lost
. Whatever it is, we never get a good look, and it quickly flees into the darkness. We trek on and eventually loop back to our camp. The video monitors back at our bamboo base show flickering scenes of static jungle and a dead chicken swaying in the breeze.

At dawn there’s little to report by way of findings, and the chicken is cooked and consumed by the villagers. Though our culprit is described as an iguanodon, the consistent elements from the interviews sound to me like this monster might be a large crocodile (of which Papua New Guinea has many).

We speed away from the village, waving back at a mob of cheering locals. Though we didn’t find their dinosaur, this was certainly a journey of discovery for my group. Palm fronds smack the front bumper of our car, clawing at the doors before releasing us and cloaking the road behind. I wonder if I’ll ever see this place again.

At the airstrip we board a flight to Lae, a city nestled in the Huon Gulf on the west side of the main Papuan island. We’re flying in an old de Havilland Dash 7, a plane better suited for a museum than the friendly skies. A rattling old piece of junk, the plane lurches up off the tarmac and lets out a cacophony of ill-fated mechanical sounds. As we level out, I watch as the copilot props his knee against the stick and opens a local newspaper across his lap. The headline reads, “GIANT CROC KILLS LOCAL WOMAN.” It seems the Iguanodon has struck again.

We’re now on the hunt for Papua New Guinea’s flying dinosaur. Known as the Ropen, this pterodactyl-like cryptid has been spotted in the skies over PNG for decades. The creature is said to be uniquely bioluminescent, glowing brightly as it flies. As the rusted wings of our plane shudder in the cloud line, we drop down toward the tarmac to begin the search.

The main airport here is in disrepair and closed, so we head for a World War II strip, which hasn’t seen much service in the last fifty years. We somehow touch down in one piece and make our way to a primitive yet serviceable hotel. It’s the first running water that we’ve seen in nearly a week. I shower quickly, and while the rest of the group cleans up, I grab the car keys and jump in the jeep. There’s a place nearby that I’ve always wanted to go.

I step out at the old Lae airfield, which now sits in abject disrepair. I walk along the silent runway and crouch down, skimming my hand across the rough stones at my feet. It was here, in 1937, on the very pebbles that now slip between my fingers, that a heavily loaded Lockheed Electra plane gained momentum and took off into the blue. The pilot, a wiry, thirty-nine-year-old woman, was bound for tiny Howland Island, more than 2,500 miles away. But Amelia Earhart would never arrive. I rise to my feet and slowly walk the length of the narrow field, looking up at the clouds and picturing her waving to the locals before arcing out over the ocean. I’m fascinated by her, of course. What adventurer isn’t? Her many exploits were brazen but undertaken with such surety of purpose that they appeared effortless. Earhart was seemingly unconstrained by gravity, an aviatrix Astaire who could glide across the globe with ease. During her trans-world flight, she wrote, “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards . . . I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”

The magnificent thing about her is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart’s legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don’t think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon.

I head back to town and to our comparatively modest adventure. The most recent sightings of the Ropen are concentrated along a small peninsula that we can only access by boat. I pilot one of two vessels, hugging the coast and riding the swells toward our target. We bank in toward a simple village, noticeable only by small fires set along the beach. We tie up at a primitive dock and begin to interview the witnesses. All of them describe a large, bat-like monster and then point up to the sky, recalling the Ropen’s strange glow. They gesture toward the jungles along the coast. The entire peninsula they’re referring to is now a nearly impenetrable mess of vegetation, snakes, and spiders. We look over wartime maps to see that, like in Rabaul, the Japanese did a thorough job of turning this particular sliver of land into a military powerhouse. Dozens of gun turrets are marked on the documents, as well as a vast network of defensive tunnels that underlie the entire area. Allied forces bombed the region so heavily that the Japanese spent much of their occupation underground. The locals believe that the Ropen now inhabits these tunnels.

Our first attempt at exploring the forest is by way of direct assault. We leave the beach, passing a perfectly preserved Japanese Zero plane that’s literally hanging out of a tree. The path degrades quickly, and we eventually reach a dead end. We revisit the maps, and the locals point out a nearby feature that we’ve missed: the entrance to a tunnel. They cut back vines to reveal a badly collapsed opening that’s now completely sealed. We translate back and forth between pidgin and English and are told that an earthquake destroyed the opening more than fifty years ago.

“How many people can you get together from the village?” Neil asks Lucas.

“Neil?” I interject. Even though I know exactly what he’s thinking.

“What? You’ll love it in there,” he offers smugly.

While Neil oversees the work of uncovering the tunnel entrance, I lead the rest of our group on a trail up the peninsula, searching for an alternate entrance. The heat is absolutely sweltering as we trek uphill, and by the time we reach the first Japanese gun turret, my clothes are soaked through. I sit behind the rusted barrel of the gun and look out through the natural camouflage of the canopy, imagining Allied ships in the distance. We press on as far as we can, but hordes of prickly vines and spiderwebs prevent much progress.

Back near the beach, we come across a forgotten graveyard. Here the final resting places of gold miners, soldiers, and wayward travelers are being reclaimed by nature. Some of the plots are dug up and empty. The locals say that they believe this to be the work of the flesh-feasting Ropen, though to me simple grave robbery seems a much more likely cause. Names are still legible on a number of the broken headstones, and I walk down the line reciting them aloud. “Jack Davies. Charles Collins. Keith Suttor.” I falter when I see a postscript under one soldier’s name that reads, “KILLED BY NATIVE ARROW.”