Photo: Courtesy NBC/Universal Studios

In Search Of … Josh Gates

In the grand tradition of Leonard Nimoy, Peter Graves, and agents Scully and Mulder, Josh Gates, A99, has got himself a license to hunt strange phenomena. His adventures, broad¬cast weekly since 2007 on the Sci-Fi Channel’s Destination: Truth, take him to remote corners of the globe.

Josh and his crew scour the news for purported sightings of lake monsters, ghosts, and other curiosities, then try to get to the bottom of the mystery. “The real hook that we hang the show on is eyewitness testimony,” Josh says. On one episode, he drove deep into the Gobi Desert in search of the dreaded Mongolian Death Worm, which is said to resemble a cow’s intestine with spikes on either end. (The thing to remember about the Mongolian Death Worm is not to let it spit on you: you’ll die instantly.) While Josh never found such a creature, he did come across what just might possibly, conceivably, have been the worm’s burrow.

Other of Josh’s quarries have included the Mapinguary—a foul-smelling Amazonian creature said to have either one or two eyes, and perhaps a mouth in its belly—and Vietnam’s Tarasque, which supposedly sports a lion’s head, a turtle’s shell, the body of an ox, a scorpion’s tail, and six stubby legs.

His favorite episode so far is when he traveled to Nepal to look for the Yeti, aka the Abominable Snowman. As usual, he was unsuccessful, but this time his efforts yielded tangible evidence: he took a cast of an extremely large footprint that made the news as far away as Australia.

Destination: Truth seems made to order for Josh. After double-majoring in archaeology and drama at Tufts, he tried acting in L.A., but couldn’t resist the siren call of travel: “I’d go to Hawaii for three months. I went to Africa for a bit. I would always just kind of take off and go places.” A producer friend recognized that Josh would be the perfect host for this new travel adventure show.

For Josh, the truth or falsehood of the claims he investigates is less important than the chance to hear other people’s tales. “People want to share with outsiders their culture and their history, where they are from and what they believe in—especially people who have had these fundamentally mysterious experiences,” he says. “They want to understand what has happened to them and what they have seen.”