NARRATOR: On this episode of "Destination Truth,"
Josh and his team try to survive a trip
to the remote forest of Romania,
an isolated woodland that locals claim
is the haunted gateway to the other side.
If you are going, you will never come back.
Next, Team Truth jumps continents and journeys
to the faraway jungles of southern Mexico,
where locals are experiencing
an outbreak of horrific attacks
they claim is the work of a demonic forest gnome.
Does Josh unearth the identity of this feared phenomenon
in Yucatan?
GATES: Whoa! Move, move, move, move, move, move!
Back, back, back back!
Hold on.
I'm Josh Gates.
In my travels, I've seen some unexplainable things,
and I've done some things I can't quite explain.
Now I've pulled together a team armed
with the latest technology in the search for answers
to the world's strangest mysteries.
I'm not sure what's out there waiting for me,
but I know what I'm looking for:
the truth.
There's a reason that many of our darkest fairy tales
are set in the woods.
Dark and disorienting forests seem to kindle
our most primal fears.
And those fears may well be justified deep
in the backwoods of Transylvania,
where stories have emerged that even the Brothers Grimm
would have a hard time adapting for children.
Recently, a group of Romanian villagers
reported a new batch of strange disturbances
in a notorious mountain forest overlooking their town.
Locals claim bright beams of white light tower skyward
from the uninhabited woods at night.
Two local search teams that traveled into
the forest returned spooked
when ghost-like human figures appeared
in their digital photos of the area,
even though they saw nothing with the naked eye.
Now locals are convinced that the Hoia-Baciu forest is haunted
and won't travel to it.
Locals are calling it the most haunted spot in Europe.
With over 45 reported ghost sightings in the last 16 months,
we were hoping for a happily-ever-after
ending to this journey into the woods.
We flew 6,000 miles from Las Angeles to Cluj, Romania.
With exactly zero words in my Romanian vocabulary,
I guessed my way through a Russian website
to rent an SUV so we could hit the ground
running in the former Soviet empire.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
Like, where do you even find this?
JAEL: It's awesome.
They couldn't even clean it?
Oh, good, it comes with firewood.
MAN: We're going to need that tonight.
They call it a 4x4 because it's 4 feet by 4 feet.
Here we go. Uh...
[ Engine turns over ] There we go.
I'll just choose one of these levers.
Moving.
We sputtered our way into the center of Cluj
hoping to meet a professor
who has specialized in studying
the strange phenomena observed in the forest.
After crossing 10 time zones in a flying metal tube,
we were exhausted and just happy to get outside.
♪
Though he's a ringer for Gene Shalit,
Professor Adrian Patrut
is actually Romania's leading expert
on the Hoia-Baciu Forest
and has seen both bright lights
and amazingly lifelike human apparitions
there on nine different trips
in the last 3 years.
He told me that most of these
occurrences were concentrated around
an unexplainably perfectly circular
clearing in the woods,
a natural vegetative dead zone where nothing grows.
What brought people to investigate in this forest?
That's in 1968.
This, sir, appears to be the top hat from Monopoly.
People report seeing nocturnal lights.
Is that the most common reporting from the forest?
That sounds like my prom night.
[ Laughs ]
Since he could only give me a general idea
of the circle's location on a rudimentary map,
he referred me to a small village outside of town
bordering the southwest edge of the forest.
The residents there had been seeing strange lights
with increasing frequency over the last few weeks.
We decided to risk a Romanian road trip
to reach the eyewitnesses.
Am I in third or reverse?
Yeah, that wasn't standard.
I had to have that added on.
It's part of the Stalin supreme package.
I went all out on this baby.
Okay, I'm in the 1500s right now.
Hello. [ Speaking Romanian ]
It didn't take long to find a local
who had something to say about the haunted forest.
I think it's some kind of different energy
because it's too many voice
who says something is there.
I am a believer.
GATES: If I go to the forest,
and I want to observe these lights and these ghosts,
does he have any advice for me?
What should I do?
[ Speaking Romanian ]
[ [ Speaking Romanian ]
Don't go...
Don't go. is the advice, yes.
Why, why don't go?
[ [ Speaking Romanian ]
You will remain there.
If you are going, you will never come back.
GATES: To ensure that my team would not "remain there,"
we needed to get a better orientation
of this vast expanse of forest.
By taking to the air, we would have the best chance
of visually identifying the mysterious circle
and plotting out a path to reach it on foot.
Here in the Romanian countryside,
I wasn't exactly expecting to find a 747,
but I also wasn't expecting to find
an antique that somehow escaped from the air and space museum.
Well, that is it.
That is the scariest plane in the history
of "Destination Truth."
JAEL: Is that an oldie but goodie?
It's an oldie. I don't know about a goodie.
Why doesn't everybody else get in the coffin... plane?
[ Motor whining ] Wow.
[ Motor chugging ]
If we could locate the circular clearing from the air,
I would mark it on my GPS, and once back on the ground,
make our way there to continue our investigation.
That is, if we could make it back to the ground in one piece.
♪
[ Rush of wind ]
Part of the roof just ripped off.
Let's get down now.
Hang on to something, okay?
Hang on. Oh, my god.
We're going to put it down.
Hang on. Hang on. Hang on!
♪
It's a convertible now.
Oh, my God, thank you.
That was so insane.
We totally lost the roof of the plane.
♪
Next.
Having wrecked the only plane in town,
we opted for a little ground transport
to try to find the mysterious circle.
[ Engine turning over ]
We would follow the map Professor Patrut had shown me
and navigate towards the area of his sightings
before it got dark.
Our path would take us on muddy,
forgotten trails through a labyrinth of trees,
uphill and into the center of the forest.
The further we got from civilization,
and the later in the afternoon it got,
the woods became increasingly confusing to navigate,
and I started to see how people could get disoriented here.
With so many reported sightings in such a concentrated area,
I hoped we would be able to observe similar phenomena
and document the eyewitness reports.
Based on Patrut's map and recent sighting accounts,
I thought we were close to the circle.
With nightfall upon us, though, it would be too dangerous
to continue on ATVs.
Our only choice was to set up base camp, split up in pairs
and strike out on foot in search of the clearing.
It's going to be really dark and really creepy really soon.
So let's get everything set up.
We have a lot of cameras to string out tonight,
so let's get to it.
We strung out four infrared cameras
in a 300-yard radius around base camp.
Then, more than a mile out, we set up
four wireless trap cameras, marking them with a GPS locator
so we could find them later in the night.
These trap cameras start firing shots
if they detect any movement in front of their lens.
We know that we are relatively close
to an area that is known as the circle.
The lion's share of photographs, sightings, apparitions,
noises occur around this circle.
There's a number of things to listen for tonight, voices.
We're going to do some EVP sessions.
We might also get some recordings
that might not be directly heard.
And then we can take those back and analyze them
and see what they are.
We're also kind of human barometers tonight
because people say that this forest
has very strange effects on human physiology.
So kind of keep in tune with how your body is feeling tonight.
If you start feeling sick, let somebody know.
Let's just get to it.
Our first order of business was to find the circle,
so we split up.
Jael and Gabe set off to the north while Rex and Evan
and I set off to the south.
I'm actually kind of anxious about tonight.
You know, I'm excited.
It's like, there's just no shortage of people
saying scary stuff happens here,
people saying "Don't go," or "I wouldn't go there."
Hold on, hold on. What was that?
There's a little light coming right through the trees there.
EVAN: I see it, but they keep on...
Right there, you see it? You got it?
You got it? You got it?
Oh, I see it. I see it. Uh-oh.
I see it.
It just keeps going away.
Right there. Right there.
Hold on.
Is that somebody from our group?
Josh to all teams.
Can everybody please extinguish all lights
they have, headlamps, everything.
Turn them off for 20 seconds.
Whoa.
Confirm that everyone has their headlamp off.
Call in one at a time.
Bicha, I have my headlamp off.
This is Gabe. Yeah, my headlamp's off.
We got to chase that down.
Come on. Let's go. Let's go. Come on.
♪
Aah!
Whoa, Rex is down.
Rex is down.
GATES: You okay? REX: Yeah.
You okay? What happened, buddy?
I went straight down.
You hurt yourself?
You okay?
Yeah, I think I hit one of these logs or something.
Did you trip? Yeah.
Okay.
It's gone, Josh.
It's completely vanished.
We have one extra trap camera.
Let's just place it here.
We have to find that circle before we return to base camp.
JAEL: Okay.
We're lost.
Really cold right now.
Really? Yeah.
♪
Wow. What is that?
See that? Yeah.
What is that?
Like, it's brighter than anything else.
It's gone.
That's weird.
Okay.
Let's go back to base camp.
I want to show the rest of the team these photos.
♪
What is this?
All right. This is it.
Josh to base camp, come in.
We're in a massive clearing, trees on every side,
but a perfect circle with no life at all in the middle.
We're not far from you.
We almost set up base camp right on top of this place.
We're actually close by.
Copy that.
[ Beeping ]
Huge spikes in the natural magnetic field here.
This is way above the base readings
we took in other parts of the forest.
And there's no electricity here.
Okay, so I think the big question is, like,
why does nothing grow here?
Yeah, that's the thing that we haven't got
a straight answer about.
So, soil samples.
♪
Let's break out the digital camera,
and let's see what we got.
A lot of particles in the air, but I don't think
those quite count as paranormal orbs.
Hold onto that.
Make sure we take a ton of photos with it.
What do you got? Look up!
Look through the trees!
Not on thermal.
What is that?
Come on!
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
Where is it?
Not on thermal, and I don't see it now.
Me either. It's just gone.
It just blinked out.
I lost it.
I lost it, my camera.
It was, like, going fast.
Did you guys hear it at all?
I didn't hear a sound. I didn't hear anything,
and I have nothing on the thermal imager at all.
I mean, not a plane.
It's in the treeline in the forest flying by.
I saw it when it was low in the trees.
And my thermal imager just died.
Oh, my god.
That's weird.
Like, it stopped imaging.
Like, it still has power.
What is going on? It's just not working.
That was really crazy.
How are you? GABE: Yeah, man.
JAEL: Wow. How you doing?
Well, the baseline thing
that's on all the cameras is weird lights.
Let's just kind of assess where we're at.
We've come a long way to find the circle.
Let's get in there.
We'll do some isolation sessions.
I'll kick it off.
♪
Josh to base camp, come in.
Go to base camp, Josh.
I'm in position.
It is really dark in here.
I'm in the middle of the circle.
I'm starting the digital recorder for an EVP session.
Here we go.
This is an EVP session in the circle
of the Hoia-Baciu Forest in Romania.
Is there anybody here?
Is anybody here with me in this circle?
Josh to base camp, come in.
Yeah, go, Josh.
I hear something to my right and something behind me.
Is there anything on the cameras?
No, you look clear.
How close do you hear it?
Whatever is on my right feels like it's out
of the woods somewhere.
And I keep sort of thinking I hear something
on the periphery of the treeline behind me.
treeline from inside the circle.
So far, everything looks normal in the thermal.
What is that? Oh, that's surprising.
Dude, what's on your left?
What's on your left shoulder?
Don't say that. Don't say that.
Nothing is on my left shoulder.
What you talking about? I see a light.
I see somebody walking.
Turn with the thermal imager towards it.
It's kind of... Basically, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Thermal is not picking anything up over there.
Was it a person, or was it a light?
What do you see?
Thirty minutes. Evan, you're up.
Evan to base camp.
Yeah, Evan, go for Josh at base camp.
This may sound really weird,
but I'm hearing some...
Copy that. Just stay with it.
♪
Whoa. Whoa! He's gone.
Get out there. Get out there, come on!
Evan?
So maybe this may sound really weird,
but I'm hearing some kind of, like, female voices.
But they're, like, they're kind of arcing, like,
from different parts of the forest.
Aah!
GATES: Whoa, he's gone. Get out there!
Get out there. Come on! Get a camera.
Evan?
Evan!
JAEL: The camera fell off the back rig.
Where did he just go?
Evan?
Here he is. Here he is.
Rex, come in immediately, please.
We have an emergency.
Come out to the clearing right now.
Let's all give him a second.
What happened?
He's in a state of shock.
Just try to get your bearings.
EVAN: I just feel, like, itchy. REX: Okay.
Those scratches are new.
These are like these linear... They look like claw marks, Evan.
Yeah. Okay.
How did you get from there to here?
It felt just like a wind just blew at me.
It kind of came down and then shot at me.
You know, you've done your bit for king
and country here in the circle.
I want to get out of here, man.
I think, if anybody else is going to go out tonight,
it's on a volunteer basis.
We need to kind of proceed with caution tonight.
Yeah. Yeah?
Rex, you okay?
What's the matter?
[ Coughing ]
What's the matter, dude?
Have you been feeling sick tonight?
Okay. Come have a seat.
Come have a seat and chill out a little bit.
GATES: It had been a long night, and my team was experiencing strange
and seemingly dangerous phenomena.
With Rex suddenly falling sick,
I decided not to risk my crew further
and instead brought the intriguing audio
and video footage we had captured back to Los Angeles,
where we would continue the investigation.
♪
Once safely home, we started by determining
if there was a natural biological reason
why nothing would grow in the infamous circle.
Our samples taken from inside and outside the circle
were sent to nearby Wallace Labs for analysis.
Do you have results from the test?
Based upon this report,
there are very little differences
inside and outside the circle area.
Things should be growing relatively the same
in both areas?
That is correct. Okay, great.
Not being able to explain the lack of growth here,
we turn to our evidence from the field.
We sat down with Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson
for their expert opinions.
Our EVP sessions had yielded some unnerving results
once we isolated the audio.
This is an EVP session.
Is there anybody here?
[ Moaning ]
Sounds like somebody's yelling.
Yeah.
[ Moaning ]
Sounds female, though, to me.
I'll give you that.
There it is again.
Was it the strange giggle of a girl?
Is anybody here with me in this circle?
[ Giggle ]
Sounds like a giggle to me.
You might have good evidence here.
But the problem is, it's not a controlled environment.
You're outside.
You got animals and other things like that.
You can't rule anything out,
so therefore you can't really prove anything.
GATES: We then turn to our paranormal paparazzi photos.
Our trap cameras and point-and-shoots
had fired multiple times.
Would our images yield up the same strange artifacts
that had been seen by so many others?
The results spoke for themselves.
That is what you would expect to find based on reports.
Hundreds and hundreds of years...
It looks like a little torch or something like that.
In this one, we see what looks like some sort of shadow,
you know, on the left side of the frame.
That's interesting.
I'm impressed with these photos here
because they fit the reports, and they're not orbs.
They're not what we usually get.
It doesn't give me an answer, though.
Well, here's the problem.
Here's... The problem is, a picture is great,
but it's telling you one second in time.
It's like reading one page out of a novel.
But another thing is that you could go through a forest
and take 100 pictures and not get these weird anomalies.
So, I mean, they may be on to something.
GATES: But the real reason I wanted to sit down with Jason
and Grant was to show them one piece of disturbing
video footage.
I have no idea.
One of my crew actually had a physical encounter,
so I wanted you guys to take a look at it.
Okay. Let's do it.
GATES: Copy that. Just stay with it.
Whoa, whoa, he's gone. He's gone!
I have no idea.
What... Is that his arm? That's his arm.
So his arm's just like that?
Yeah, he just gets launched out of his chair.
But it's, like, so... Boom.
He just went... Boom.
Within, like, a quarter of a frame...
He's up. he goes from here to here.
Either something has grabbed his arm and is pulling him,
or he's reacting to something to his left,
and he's launching away from it.
The part of this that is the most sort of unsettling
for us is the very last part.
He has a bunch of bad scratches,
fresh scratches that are bleeding.
EVAN: I'm just feeling itchy. REX: Okay.
It's not like he was wearing a T-shirt.
He was wearing a jacket that looked like it was buttoned
around his thumb or something.
And for there to be deep, fresh wounds like that,
but his clothes are fine... Right.
we get that a lot in the paranormal field.
And a lot of claims we've experienced are people
who believe that they've been touched by something
or something has passed through them.
They have this itch which feels like it goes to the bone.
It was strange to hear Evan say that when he's never really
investigated the paranormal or looked into it.
Well that's the thing. He's a camera operator.
He's not, you know, into the paranormal.
It's not like this is a hobby of his.
He's out there working.
Yeah, I believe wholeheartedly that,
you know, he had an experience there.
Something affected him.
You definitely have paranormal things going on there.
I would say there's definitely some stuff
going on in these woods.
And if Evan ever has a question or needs anything,
just tell him to give us a call.
We've been through this before.
GATES: The wealth of personal experiences
in the haunted forest of Romania accompanied
by stark visual and audio evidence
was hard to explain away.
We can't discount that the strange lights
we observed were some sort of natural anomaly.
And the EVP results aren't definitive.
But what of Evan?
His scratches could've come from his fall.
But how did a full-grown man in a sitting position
get flung through the air like a rag doll?
Residents near the Hoia-Baciu Forest
have an easy answer.
Don't go.
GATES: They believe the culprit is right before our eyes,
invisible to us but captured on our cameras.
I don't think Evan would disagree.
For thousands of years,
the mighty Mayan Empire dominated Mexico
before mysteriously collapsing.
Now overgrown by dense jungles, the ruins of this civilization
may be hiding another mystery,
a population of mischievous Mexican Mini-Mes
called the alux.
These child-sized beasts have been reported for centuries.
And it has been estimated that more than 90 percent
of indigenous residents believe the creatures to be real.
Over the past month, there's been a spike
in sightings of alux across Mexico's Yucatan peninsula.
Eyewitnesses report the alux as a small humanoid creature
with dark fur and an aggressive disposition.
Believed to live primarily in caves
and around ancient ruins in the deep jungle,
those who have encountered it say it is ferocious and emits
a piercing-high shriek when cornered.
At less than 4 feet tall, he's compact,
though his body is human-like and bipedal.
His small size is countered by a ferocious face
and carnivorous fanged jaws.
Hot on the trail of this Mayan mystery,
we packed our gear to answer the question,
que pasa, south of the border.
Our journey began as we flew 51/2 hours from Los Angeles
to Cancun, Mexico, the gateway to the Yucatan.
Touching down, we were immediately reminded
that staying focused in Cancun was going to take some effort.
You don't even have to travel to it in Cancun.
Airport, liquor, just right there.
We did let our hair down.
Yes. GABE: I have two dreads.
Dirty Sideshow Bob mess in there.
But since we weren't hunting for party animals on this trip,
we left spring break's most infamous beaches
in the rearview mirror and headed due west.
Belief in the alux is so strong here
that locals have constructed alux houses
on mock pyramids under the highway
to appease the creature.
Along these lonely roads, the ruins of some of the great
Mayan cities are laid out like a map to the past,
laden with visual clues about mysterious magical
and menacing creatures like the alux.
But we'd need help if we were going to try to locate
a modern-day monster.
We set off to meet with Professor Carlos Cervantes,
an expert on Mayan history
who's been tracking the recent run-ins.
What percentage of people believe the alux is real?
[ Speaking Spanish ] Noventa y cinco por ciento.
Ninety-five percent.
Most of the people believe it's real.
Lo que pasa, el alux es a veces jugueton.
People here are afraid of this creature.
So, where do people say that the creature lives?
En las personas, donde crean que el alux vive?
En las cuevas.
In caves, in the jungle.
GATES: He told me that on a recent trip into the jungle,
he met a shaman whose people
came face-to-face with the creature.
He directed me to this shaman in the jungles
near the city of Merida,
and we set off immediately to seek him out.
Along the way, we ran into the toughest dance troupe in Mexico.
What in the Sam Hill...
Oh, boy. Uh-oh.
This is like I'm on a gay safari.
Yo, papi!
Back on the road, and with day turning to night,
we posted up in the town of Merida,
where we found that more citizens were letting loose,
maybe a little too loose.
We had escaped Cancun but driven
right into the heart of Carnival.
[ Cheers and applause ]
After that, things got a little surreal.
This guy just told all these people
that I'm in the Batman movie.
I'm never leaving Merida ever!
Hasta manana. Hasta manana.
I woke up in the morning with a female police officer's
phone number written on my hand.
Clearly, it was time to escape Carnival.
Once outside Merida, we made our way toward the shaman
whose people claim to spot the alux.
Along the way, we stopped in a rural town
where our research told us that a child had disappeared
near these same jungles last year.
Though a thorough police investigation
turned up no suspects,
his parents who live here strongly believe
that he was taken by an alux.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
They believe that he is in the jungle with the alux.
That he's still there?
That he's still there with the alux.
GATES: They were confident that it was possible to see the alux
if we ventured into the same area
where they lost their son
and where the shaman spotted the creature.
And how far is that from here?
Cuatro horas.
It's about 4 hours from here.
GATES: Amazed that belief in the alux was strong enough to indict him
in a missing persons case,
we headed into the jungles to begin our investigation.
As we drove on, the highway degraded
into a rudimentary backwoods road
that brought us deep into the Yucatan
and far from civilization.
Mapping out the recent sightings,
we would need to cover an area of jungle
with a radius of 20 to 25 kilometers.
I could spend days or weeks investigating there.
And, to make matters worse, the thick jungle terrain
meant that we'd be hoofing it.
Since the people of the Yucatan believe
the alux to be a cave dweller,
we first trained our sights on a massive cavern
within our investigation perimeter.
Known as cenotes, these remote caves,
while once dry, are now partially flooded with water.
Since they often have multiple entrances,
it was worth exploring for dry sections or alcoves
that could be hiding evidence of the creature.
This is crazy. This is crazy.
Jael and I descended into an alien world.
♪
Okay, copy that. Keep in mind your time.
SHARRA: Go for base camp, Josh. I copy you.
Wow. Human bones?
GATES: Based on when this part of the cave was above water,
these remains would have to have been here
for thousands of years.
Seeing that this was an adult human skull,
I decided to let the dead lie
where they lay and make for the surface.
We continued toward the shaman's village.
Nearing nightfall, we finally reached the shaman
who began a ceremony to make contact with the alux.
Buenas noches. [ Speaking Spanish ]
I just asked him to show us what he's doing.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
The aluxes are here tonight.
The aluxes are here, he says?
Yes. Okay.
Ese es de un cascada de un arbol.
He is going to use this liquid
that comes from the bark of the tree.
And he's mixed it with honey as well as these leaves
called ce pichet,
which are known to ward off evil.
So, he would like to bless us with these leaves.
All of us here are going to have to partake
and drink some of that.
It's a beverage that the Mayans used.
It is literally a beverage that the Mayans used.
That drink looks 1,000 years old.
[ Speaking Spanish ]
GATES: Hoping this Mayan mixed drink
wasn't about to send my crew
and I on a psychedelic spirit journey,
we politely obliged our local guide
and took a swallow.
♪
Gracias.
As darkness set in, we spread out
from the Shaman's encampment to hunt down the creature.
Exhausted from lugging equipment,
we decided to lighten our load and set up camp.
We placed four infrared cameras 300 yards in each direction,
allowing us to image anything that came near us.
Sharra and Bicha would monitor these cameras
from base camp throughout the night.
Okay, let's do it, guys.
With base camp set up,
Jael and I would venture away from camp
and do a preliminary sweep of the area.
[ Whispering ] Lots of spider eyes.
JAEL: [ Whispering ] There's a lot of them.
There's more here.
Right there, big one, right in front of you.
You don't see that?
Oh, my god, it's huge.
[ Gasps ]
Those guys are poisonous, too.
You can see these glints in their eyes.
I see glints everywhere, Josh.
Yeah, they're all over the place.
So just be very, very careful.
Just so you guys know, we have a lot of spiders out here.
You can see the glints of their eyes if you get
a sort of low-powered flashlight beam on the trail.
Okay, copy that.
I'm going to get off the ground then.
Let's go, nice and careful.
[ Insects chirping ]
Like, this backpack rig is, like... You hear that?
EVAN: Yeah. Like the Tin Man.
[ Squeaking ]
Seriously, oil me up. I'm like a Tin Man out here.
Wow, what is this?
Look, it's like a little cave, like, a little home.
These are ruins.
What's in it?
What was that made for?
It's hard to tell what the original architecture
was just because it's in such bad shape.
But this is some sort of Mayan structure.
They did say the creatures was supposed to live
in caves and ruins.
Josh to base camp, come in.
We found Mayan ruins out here.
We're standing on top of what is a really
badly damaged Mayan pyramid.
We'll send Sharra for that.
Copy that. Good luck, Sharra.
I got a big snakeskin here.
Be very, very careful where you're walking.
Right here.
Got it, got it. That's it.
That's all the pieces.
Watch your step.
I can see.
All right. Base camp to Josh.
Sharra is on her way up to you guys.
Copy.
♪
Copy that, Sharra.
I see you. We're up here.
Be careful where you're footing.
All these ruins are just full of loose rocks.
♪
Find us okay?
Yeah, I was listening for you with this big, giant ear.
So let's just find a spot to kind of, you know,
get you hunkered down. Okay, let's do it.
♪
Okay.
That was weird. Shh, I just heard something.
Whoa.
That's really bizarre.
What is that?
It sounded like it was a kid screaming,
like a high-pitched crying
almost... Right.
way far out, way far out there.
GATES: Whoa, whoa! Move move move move!
Whoa. Back, back, back!
I just heard something.
It sounded really far away,
like a high-pitched crying almost.
GATES: Whoa, whoa! Move move move move!
Whoa. Back back back back back back back back back!
Stop stop stop stop.
You, out of there, out of there, out of there, out of there.
Snake, out of there. Out of there.
SHARRA: How big? How big?
Wait, stay there, stay there. stay there.
Everybody okay?
Yeah, just freaked out.
Josh for base camp, come in.
Base camp here. Josh, go ahead.
We just saw a big snake up here right behind Sharra.
I pulled her out of the way, but we all just had quite a scare.
Mike bent part of the parabolic dish,
and I screwed up my hand a little bit.
That thing looks like a pit viper, very dangerous.
I'm sending Sharra back to base camp.
The rest of us are going to go down towards the sound
we picked up on the parabolic.
♫
[ Whispering ] Careful, it's kind of steep here.
That's a cave.
That's a big cave.
Hey, Josh for base camp. Come in, base camp.
We've got a huge cave out here.
We just found an enormous cave out in the jungle.
What?
We haven't gone down inside of it yet.
It's kind of slick.
But there's definitely a big cave out here.
Copy that.
Let me know what you guys are seeing out there.
Yikes.
Ready?
Okay, nice and slow, everybody.
Ah, scorpions.
Where?
That guy just hustled right in there.
Just that guy went right under this rock.
It's not a spider.
Josh for base camp, come in.
You're go for base camp.
All right, we're down in the bottom of the cave.
The tunnel seems to go along a little bit.
We're going to follow it.
There are a lot of scorpions down here,
and we're just proceeding in really slowly.
Copy that.
It's really damp down here.
Josh, my torch is out.
Yeah, mine is not going to last too much longer.
We can switch to our flashlights if we have to.
It's just nice to have a light that kills things.
Bicha, I'm about to have a problem down here.
[ Whispering ] Seriously, I got to find a new job.
So, big hive up there.
Is that a beehive?
Those are not bees. Look at them.
They're little black flying ants.
Okay, let's just take this nice and slow.
There's lots of creepy crawlies in here.
One step at a time.
No need to get bit by something.
Josh, what are we doing in here?
We're looking for aluxes.
They live in caves, remember?
Yeah, it looks like something might have been kind of nesting
in here, hanging out.
I have bones down here for sure.
I got three or four bones to my left,
and I got a couple of very small bones
here to my right.
I'm not able to identify what they are,
but I definitely have some remains down here.
I need an evidence kit run up here
so we can collect this and tag it.
♪
These are definitely alux-sized bones.
I'm not sure that's what we're looking at, but I don't know
what would be living down here.
REX: You've got to be kidding me.
Nice and slow when you make that left, Rex.
Really, it's so... Really careful there, buddy.
slippery and steep. Nothing but time.
Careful. Careful.
Okay. So, let me get down here.
And I'm going to give you a ruler in there
to establish scale.
Okay.
♪
That's a vertebra.
Yeah, definitely.
Is this the alux?
It is about the right size.
♪
It had been a long and frightening night
in the jungle caves, and the constant dangers
of investigating in this environment
had worked everyone's nerves.
With the Sun only moments from clearing the horizon,
my team was exhausted yet enthused by our discovery
in the cave of skeletal remains.
I wondered if these small-size bones,
found exactly where people in this region
say the alux are said to live and had been recently spotted,
could be the remains of the beast.
I knew the answer was waiting for me back in Los Angeles.
We escaped the jungle and jetted back across the border to L.A.,
where we headed to the Natural History Museum
to meet with mummologist Dr. Jim Dines
and get a positive ID on our skeletal suspect.
So, your first thoughts?
Well, when you have a small metapodial like that,
it's typically a climbing animal.
Okay.
After closely examining the remains,
he was able to find a near match in the museum's collection.
It's the exact same. It's a different length.
These are limb bones from an artiodactyl.
And when I say artiodactyl,
that includes things like cows and goats.
Okay, not an alux.
Not an alux. All right.
And what about these guys here?
This looks like something considerably smaller.
My first impression is, it's very bird-like.
Maybe a chicken?
Probably my best guess would be a chicken, yeah.
So we have probably a goat and probably a chicken.
That's right. Thanks for your help.
Okay. I appreciate it.
Though these bones did not belong to an alux,
it still remains to be seen
just what did devour these domestic animals
in the bowels of that cave.
And, though we weren't able to validate eyewitness reports
of this bite-sized beast,
we still had to contend with the fact
that the majority of indigenous locals
believe in the creature.
It is my belief that the alux is a potent myth
that has been inherited again and again from generations past.
The alux story has survived like the runs around it,
slightly tarnished but still strong and durable and,
like the great Mayan pyramids themselves, built to last.
It may be centuries before tales of this creature
are forever overgrown by the jungle.