June 12, 2020 • 18 mins
George Noory and Don Wildman, the host of the new Travel Channel program "Buried Worlds," discuss some of his most dangerous travels, including the search for a lost city of gold deep in the jungles of Honduras.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori
with you. Let me tell you a little bit about
our guest. Don Wildman has spent decades on television addressing
the eternal question what happened here? And impassioned history enthusiast adventurer,
He's developed his on camera investigations that have carried him
(00:21):
far and wide to mankind's greatest legends and lore. He
has traveled around the globe to history's hardest places, where
visceral tales are set against ancient backdrops and human intrigue
is carved into walls. He began with the Travel Channel
hosting the producing program Off Limits if you remember then
Mysteries at the Museum that featured spinoffs like the Monumental
(00:44):
Mysteries and Greatest Mysteries, And prior to the Travel Channel,
Wildman appeared on the History Channel and the Groundbreaking Cities
of the Underworld. Don welcome to the program. Good to
have you. It's really nice to be here. Thanks for
having me. You love these travels, Yes I do. I
have really been fortunate to get a ticket around the
(01:05):
world doing really cool stuff, telling stories in unusual places,
and it's a it's been an honor, it's been a privilege,
and I feel, you know, it's incumbent upon me to
to sort of tell the human story from an everyman perspective,
because I'm not an expert of anything. Now. You had
your series premier just a few days ago, right, Yeah,
(01:26):
Buried Worlds came on Monday. It's a Monday's at nine
o'clock and it just started with the episode about vampire
hunting in Bulgaria, which was quite an adventure, and uh,
and we go on from there. We basically started this
kind of global paranormal tour that started as we shot
out of the sequence that it's showing in. We started
(01:48):
in Peru and then we went to Haiti, finally ended
up in Bulgaria for the show that just showed, and
we headed over to Germany, England, Ireland and then back
to hunt US and America. It's been an extraordinary That
was an extraordinary six months, which ended just pre virus,
you know, was about the I was going to say,
it sounds like you beat COVID because Hollywood's been shut
(02:11):
down ever since, asn't it. Actually, Yeah, it was just
before all that. In fact, we spoke among ourselves that
we worried that we might have had something to do
with that. It was addressing every curse in the world
and you know, pulling strange things out of the woodwork
all over the world. So anyway, it was. It was
a great experience historically, culturally, and paranormally, which was a
(02:34):
brand new experience for me. I don't come from that background.
I'm a history guy, you know, and so I was interested,
you know, to be honest. What happened was we were
talking last year about me doing a show based on
Cities of the Underworld, which has been a very popular
show back in the day. We're talking about two thousand
and six, seven and eight back then, and that was
a show that kind of dug underneath things and went
(02:56):
into the kind of the under girding of society, you know,
physically and metaphorically speaking, and it was really cool. But
we only got so far with it, and so we
wanted to do it again, and so we talked about
doing that from a straight historical perspective, and then travel
Channel became a paranormal channel, you know, during those discussions.
So I said, well, I'll do paranormal, but let's do
(03:18):
the history of it, because otherwise nobody's gonna buy me whatever.
You know, I'm not a ghost guy. And so we
proceeded to do that because there's just so many stories
when you look at the world and world history from
that perspective, especially the prescience world legends and curses and
myths and so forth, and it's pretty fun. And there's
a lot of people obviously in the world who are
(03:41):
practicing these things even today, and so it was a
neat way of a neat lens to look at places
in the world in global history and still practice things
in the present, which was an unusual aspect of that world.
And the Travel Channel really seems to be into these
kinds of programs now big time. Well, for years and
(04:01):
years Zach Began's and His and His Ghost of Adventures.
I think is this show was the most successful show
on Travel I mean, by far right, I kind of
pulled up the in second place for all those years
with Mysteries at the Museum, which was on for years
and u and it was always recognized that Zach was
killing it on Fridays or Saturdays, and so finally they
(04:24):
when Discovery took over Travel Channel. There's a big sale
of all the script networks to Discovery. They just looked
at the numbers and said, well, that's a no brainer.
Let's make this all paranormal. So those of us who
are already on that contract, you know, sort of went
okay and and sort of adapted, and so here we are.
I bind ancient aliens a lot on the History Channel.
(04:45):
Same thing with them. I mean, this thing's been going
on for years now. They're happy with the results. Yeah,
people are really fascinated. Uh, It's it's a lot of
fun to look at the world that way. It's it's
a very addictive television when you watch it doesn't matter
if you're a believer not. It's a fascinating world to
sort of delve into. But I can say from meeting
people and from really studying this stuff, which you do
(05:08):
when you go and do TV shows about these places,
that there's a rich it's a treasure trove of information
to understand. There's a lot of research. That's that's what
I like. I kind of get off on that aspect
of my job. I like to read up on stuff
before I go to these places and sort of you know,
become full of information so that when I have these
conversations and interviews and experiences with these people, that I
(05:31):
have some kind of level of expertise that I can offer.
And when you start delving into these worlds, which we'll
talk about, it's extraordinary how many books are written about
these things. Never mind Wikipedia, you know, you can just
keep on going down a rabbit hole with these things.
And that's what I think people find interesting is that
there's so many different ways and fascests to look at stuff.
(05:52):
Absolutely and buried world. It's a seven episode program, and
then you've got a two hour finale, right, Yeah, it's
a yeah, it's a big It was a I guess
a three week experience that we had down there in
honduras Um that was always out there on the on
the horizon of our experiences whether we were going to
(06:12):
be able to do it and then if we would
live through it. There are extraordinary dangers doing what we did,
and I, for one, we had some pretty serious meetings
about whether we really wanted to do this or not.
It boiled down to the fact that when you go
into this part of the rainforest of honduras Uh, there's
some big time dangers and you can get into a
lot of trouble. So um, we were being very careful
(06:35):
and we didn't Obviously, you have to being assured and
everything else for these TV shows, so we couldn't just
jump in naively. And what's more, Honduras won't let you.
You have to have permission from the president himself. It's
that realid Yeah, I mean it's a it's a very
cool story, which I will tell you in detail in
a moment, but it's a it was always there as
the kind of finish line for this extraordinary, you know,
(06:58):
half a year adventure that we were on. Wherever you went,
would they government people follow you or anything like that?
Not so much. I mean that was true in Honduras. Well,
here's the story with Honduras. So years ago, meaning twenty fifteen,
a guy named Steve Elkins, who is a terrific TV
(07:19):
production guy actually cameraman, was passionate about finding the White City.
The White City was a legendary place, kind of an
Eldorado type of story, you know, where the conquistadors were
trying to find it and all kinds of legends were
surrounded this sort of mysterious area in the middle of
the rainforest in Honduras to this day, in the middle
(07:40):
needless to say, back in conquistadors it was, they couldn't
find it. So it was supposed to be streets paved
with gold, the whole story. But no one could ever
discover where it was. And I mean there's many big,
famous stories about a guy in the thirties who goes
in and people dying trying to find this place. It
was never discovered. And so the reason, of course is
(08:03):
that it's in such a canopy of trees that you
could just not fly over it. You couldn't find anything.
So Steve, who I interviewed for the show and became
very fond of, used lidar technology. He had heard that
there was a plane up in Canada that had this technology,
which is basically kind of an airborne sonar. You know.
(08:24):
It shoots waves down at the sort of radar the
shapes of things on the earth, and they can find
hidden structures underneath the trees. Through this technology, it sort
of bounces a wave back to the back to the machine.
So sure enough he took a group down there to
Roatan and they based themselves there in Honduras and they
(08:47):
flew over this place. Everybody kind of thought that it
was in this certain area where there were logical reasons
to find it there. And sure enough they found you know,
hard edged right angles. If you find right angles in
ldar in the jungle, that's man made structure, absolutely, And
that was a big break through. That's a big story.
This was nat GEO, and everybody was very excited about
(09:09):
it because it had been so sought after for so long.
So then Steve and his team of you know, highly
qualified archaeologists and so forth, and herprutologists and so forth
went into this place, took a got dropped in and
spent two weeks investigating this site, and they hit the jackpot.
It was a remarkable find. But they immediately understood the
(09:32):
value and danger of losing this place because it had
been because the rainforest is so diminishing so quickly, and
so the government set up a military base there, a
modest operation, I can tell you. It's a six or
seven soldiers who are sort of living in the middle
of the jungle there to protect this area because they
(09:52):
found so many artifacts. They found hundreds and hundreds of
artifacts just sort of spread across the forest floor in
the middle of what we're mounds of dirt, basically overgrown
mounds of dirt that we're hiding the structures that had
been lost hundreds of years ago. And so it was
really incredible and it kind of blew people's minds how
(10:12):
big this place was. It was a vast settlement and
probably part of several different settlements they haven't even yet found.
So in order to get permission to get into this,
as I mentioned, you have to go directly to the top,
and the president himself, who's sort of oversees this k
taken ownership of this operation, has to personally endorse you
(10:38):
to go in there. The military has to give you
a helicopter to go in. It's got to be overseen
by the military, basically, and all this has got to
be done prior to even getting down there. Right, Oh
my god, that's what I mean. So we were spending
all these months in all these other places, making these plans,
hoping we would get in. The big problem healthwise is leishmaniasis,
(10:59):
which I ever even heard the word that flesh eating bacteria.
Oh god. So yeah, it's a very bad thing. And
what happens is that there's these sand fleas that will
that lived in this area and you get bitten by
one of these sand fleas and the microbe goes into
you and off you go. And so they've had a
(11:20):
big problem with that with the soldiers that are there,
and even that first team Steve Elkas, everybody got leishmaniasis
when they went in. And so I was not interested
in getting slash eating bacteria by any stretch. And what
had happened is they figured out that if they cleared
this particular area of the landing patch of all the
(11:41):
vegetation that that held these sand fleas, and you only
went in during certain hours of the day, you could
avoid the sand fleas with underlying could they can't guarantee anything,
never mind sandles. Their fertilence is the most dangerous snake
in the word world that exists in this part of
(12:02):
Oh my god, you were they were coming at you
from all angles. Jaguar, lots of jaguar out there. It
was an extraordinary amount of things to worry about and
not tell my wife about where did you sleep today?
We just got dropped in and then taken out. And that, okay,
prevent you from getting this anymore. And when I say you,
(12:24):
I just mean, only a handful of people have gone
in there, so there's still just less than a hundred
people have seen this place. Because it's so far in
the middle of nowhere. You can't even find it anyway.
But you can't get transportation there. There's no roads there obviously,
and so forth, and so this is how they manage it.
Can you estimate what the population was a long time ago, Yes,
(12:49):
hundreds and hundreds of people. I mean, these cities down there,
and you're talking at the Maya later on, but this
was This isn't Maya. This is even older than Maya.
That's what's so fascinating about it. Uh, these are very
advanced places, real advanced cities, with extraordinary planning and execution
and architecture and so forth. You've seen the pictures. You
(13:09):
know what the story is. It's it's Aztec, it's my
it's all these all these civilizations were the most advanced
places on the planet. I think, I think I remember
the the reference which was the size of London. That's
huge of medieval London. Yes, was there in the in
the jungle, you know, it was that kind of major
(13:30):
city for the day, and uh, and probably better run
than London. Now Curse of the White City will be
your finale show, right it is. Yeah, it's an amazing
thing to see. I'm very proud of being able to
be a part of it and proud of the guys
who organized and everything else and to tell the story.
So getting to the to the meat of the matter
(13:52):
with this with this show, so we try to find
the paranormal angle on everything, even that story, which is
a straight ahead archeological story that blows your mind anyway.
But because of the show, we had to figure out
what that angle was with this. And it turns out
that there is a sort of ancient alien kind of
myth about this area having to do with a creature
(14:14):
named Wata, and he's spoken of as a legend but
almost as a fact among the people there are the
tribes that that originally come from that place, the Mosquito tribe.
This is the Mosquito Coast we're talking about from from
the days of you know, the Harrison Ford movie. All
that area down there is the Mosquito Coast because the
Mosquito tribe is that one snakes, lots of snakes, and
(14:39):
so these myths of what it sounds very much like
an ancient alien type of thing, and they talk about
it as if it that is what you can sort
of what it suggests is that it was more of
an immigrant story. Someone from perhaps down towards Columbia area,
that part of South America may have come up, understand,
(15:00):
adding that these people don't see other people from other
places very often, you know, this is the middle of nowhere,
and so somebody coming in with a lighter skin or
any number of you know, physical attributes might have looked
like someone from another world. You don't know what the
real base of that is, but they talk about it
in terms of ancient alien and that he's being pursued
(15:20):
by an enemy. And this conflict sits in the middle
of their legends, and this myth and the departure of
what Ka and the conflict casts curses on this land.
And so this curse has existed for hundreds of years,
and is they attribute the deaths of conquistadors looking for it,
(15:42):
and people going in by themselves and so forth to
this curse, which is all the dangers and the disease
that you can get from this place comes from that curse.
It's it's fun and interesting to look at it from
that standpoint, and to talk to the tribal members about this,
the shaman and so forth, and all the different ang
those of that is what we do two hours on.
(16:02):
Why would the inhabitants of that era done build and
construct these edifices in the woods like that for security
and safety? Well, in those days it was just part
of there's a massive migrations through those areas. And in
the days you know, back then the extraordinary cities are amazing.
They weren't necessarily in the middle of nowhere. In those days,
(16:23):
you know, these were developed areas and they grew around it,
I guess, and vegetation. Yet it's a well, that's what
I want to say, is when you drop in here.
So the big unexpected experience for me was the moment
we got in there. Of course, we're thinking, you're just
you're covered in mosquito netting and every inch of your
body is covered with something so that in case, they
(16:45):
literally duct tape your sleeves so these fleas can't get
into your body. Oh god, but they will bite through
your skin through those clothes, so you have to be
very fast and move. Are you wearing a net on
your face? Oh? Everything? Yeah, it's all I'm completely covered,
and you're you're covered in deep you know, all this
(17:05):
insecticide and stuff, and so there's a great deal to
be distracted by. And so suddenly you dropped into this rainforest.
You jump off the helicopter as if it's a marine expedition,
you know, go go go kind of thing, and we're
running up a hill to get up to this area
so that we can actually shoot for a while up
there and not you know, spend too much time down
(17:26):
where the fleas are. And lo and behold, I get
to this rainforest with all this distraction, and it just
stops it dead in your tracks. It's the most beautiful
thing you've ever seen in your life. You know, I've
seen Grand Canyon, a big Yosemite guy. I'm I'm a
very big outdoorsy guy. This blew my socks off. It
(17:47):
was absolutely stunningly gorgeous. And I'd never I realized I'd
never seen pure, untouched rainforest in my life. I'd seen
it in the movies. Yes, I should be a fashion
the outskirts of places such as that, but I've never
been in really virgin rainforest. And we're talking about the
orchids and the giant trees and these just this beautiful,
(18:11):
beautiful landscape that suddenly takes your breath away and you
realize you've been touched primarily, you know, that's the feeling
you have of this sort of virgin territory that speaks
directly to your soul. You know you're right in it
and it gets you right away, just like any of
those great natural environments. But this is unique because it
is what it is, that that's sort of deep, thick,
(18:34):
ancient forest, and you realize that's sort of the magic
of the place. You know, it has its own sort
of legendary feeling to it. Listen to more Coast to
Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go
to Coast to Coast am dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori
with you. Let me tell you a little bit about
our guest. Don Wildman has spent decades on television addressing
the eternal question what happened here? And impassioned history enthusiast adventurer,
He's developed his on camera investigations that have carried him
(00:21):
far and wide to mankind's greatest legends and lore. He
has traveled around the globe to history's hardest places, where
visceral tales are set against ancient backdrops and human intrigue
is carved into walls. He began with the Travel Channel
hosting the producing program Off Limits if you remember then
Mysteries at the Museum that featured spinoffs like the Monumental
(00:44):
Mysteries and Greatest Mysteries, And prior to the Travel Channel,
Wildman appeared on the History Channel and the Groundbreaking Cities
of the Underworld. Don welcome to the program. Good to
have you. It's really nice to be here. Thanks for
having me. You love these travels, Yes I do. I
have really been fortunate to get a ticket around the
(01:05):
world doing really cool stuff, telling stories in unusual places,
and it's a it's been an honor, it's been a privilege,
and I feel, you know, it's incumbent upon me to
to sort of tell the human story from an everyman perspective,
because I'm not an expert of anything. Now. You had
your series premier just a few days ago, right, Yeah,
(01:26):
Buried Worlds came on Monday. It's a Monday's at nine
o'clock and it just started with the episode about vampire
hunting in Bulgaria, which was quite an adventure, and uh,
and we go on from there. We basically started this
kind of global paranormal tour that started as we shot
out of the sequence that it's showing in. We started
(01:48):
in Peru and then we went to Haiti, finally ended
up in Bulgaria for the show that just showed, and
we headed over to Germany, England, Ireland and then back
to hunt US and America. It's been an extraordinary That
was an extraordinary six months, which ended just pre virus,
you know, was about the I was going to say,
it sounds like you beat COVID because Hollywood's been shut
(02:11):
down ever since, asn't it. Actually, Yeah, it was just
before all that. In fact, we spoke among ourselves that
we worried that we might have had something to do
with that. It was addressing every curse in the world
and you know, pulling strange things out of the woodwork
all over the world. So anyway, it was. It was
a great experience historically, culturally, and paranormally, which was a
(02:34):
brand new experience for me. I don't come from that background.
I'm a history guy, you know, and so I was interested,
you know, to be honest. What happened was we were
talking last year about me doing a show based on
Cities of the Underworld, which has been a very popular
show back in the day. We're talking about two thousand
and six, seven and eight back then, and that was
a show that kind of dug underneath things and went
(02:56):
into the kind of the under girding of society, you know,
physically and metaphorically speaking, and it was really cool. But
we only got so far with it, and so we
wanted to do it again, and so we talked about
doing that from a straight historical perspective, and then travel
Channel became a paranormal channel, you know, during those discussions.
So I said, well, I'll do paranormal, but let's do
(03:18):
the history of it, because otherwise nobody's gonna buy me whatever.
You know, I'm not a ghost guy. And so we
proceeded to do that because there's just so many stories
when you look at the world and world history from
that perspective, especially the prescience world legends and curses and
myths and so forth, and it's pretty fun. And there's
a lot of people obviously in the world who are
(03:41):
practicing these things even today, and so it was a
neat way of a neat lens to look at places
in the world in global history and still practice things
in the present, which was an unusual aspect of that world.
And the Travel Channel really seems to be into these
kinds of programs now big time. Well, for years and
(04:01):
years Zach Began's and His and His Ghost of Adventures.
I think is this show was the most successful show
on Travel I mean, by far right, I kind of
pulled up the in second place for all those years
with Mysteries at the Museum, which was on for years
and u and it was always recognized that Zach was
killing it on Fridays or Saturdays, and so finally they
(04:24):
when Discovery took over Travel Channel. There's a big sale
of all the script networks to Discovery. They just looked
at the numbers and said, well, that's a no brainer.
Let's make this all paranormal. So those of us who
are already on that contract, you know, sort of went
okay and and sort of adapted, and so here we are.
I bind ancient aliens a lot on the History Channel.
(04:45):
Same thing with them. I mean, this thing's been going
on for years now. They're happy with the results. Yeah,
people are really fascinated. Uh, It's it's a lot of
fun to look at the world that way. It's it's
a very addictive television when you watch it doesn't matter
if you're a believer not. It's a fascinating world to
sort of delve into. But I can say from meeting
people and from really studying this stuff, which you do
(05:08):
when you go and do TV shows about these places,
that there's a rich it's a treasure trove of information
to understand. There's a lot of research. That's that's what
I like. I kind of get off on that aspect
of my job. I like to read up on stuff
before I go to these places and sort of you know,
become full of information so that when I have these
conversations and interviews and experiences with these people, that I
(05:31):
have some kind of level of expertise that I can offer.
And when you start delving into these worlds, which we'll
talk about, it's extraordinary how many books are written about
these things. Never mind Wikipedia, you know, you can just
keep on going down a rabbit hole with these things.
And that's what I think people find interesting is that
there's so many different ways and fascests to look at stuff.
(05:52):
Absolutely and buried world. It's a seven episode program, and
then you've got a two hour finale, right, Yeah, it's
a yeah, it's a big It was a I guess
a three week experience that we had down there in
honduras Um that was always out there on the on
the horizon of our experiences whether we were going to
(06:12):
be able to do it and then if we would
live through it. There are extraordinary dangers doing what we did,
and I, for one, we had some pretty serious meetings
about whether we really wanted to do this or not.
It boiled down to the fact that when you go
into this part of the rainforest of honduras Uh, there's
some big time dangers and you can get into a
lot of trouble. So um, we were being very careful
(06:35):
and we didn't Obviously, you have to being assured and
everything else for these TV shows, so we couldn't just
jump in naively. And what's more, Honduras won't let you.
You have to have permission from the president himself. It's
that realid Yeah, I mean it's a it's a very
cool story, which I will tell you in detail in
a moment, but it's a it was always there as
the kind of finish line for this extraordinary, you know,
(06:58):
half a year adventure that we were on. Wherever you went,
would they government people follow you or anything like that?
Not so much. I mean that was true in Honduras. Well,
here's the story with Honduras. So years ago, meaning twenty fifteen,
a guy named Steve Elkins, who is a terrific TV
(07:19):
production guy actually cameraman, was passionate about finding the White City.
The White City was a legendary place, kind of an
Eldorado type of story, you know, where the conquistadors were
trying to find it and all kinds of legends were
surrounded this sort of mysterious area in the middle of
the rainforest in Honduras to this day, in the middle
(07:40):
needless to say, back in conquistadors it was, they couldn't
find it. So it was supposed to be streets paved
with gold, the whole story. But no one could ever
discover where it was. And I mean there's many big,
famous stories about a guy in the thirties who goes
in and people dying trying to find this place. It
was never discovered. And so the reason, of course is
(08:03):
that it's in such a canopy of trees that you
could just not fly over it. You couldn't find anything.
So Steve, who I interviewed for the show and became
very fond of, used lidar technology. He had heard that
there was a plane up in Canada that had this technology,
which is basically kind of an airborne sonar. You know.
(08:24):
It shoots waves down at the sort of radar the
shapes of things on the earth, and they can find
hidden structures underneath the trees. Through this technology, it sort
of bounces a wave back to the back to the machine.
So sure enough he took a group down there to
Roatan and they based themselves there in Honduras and they
(08:47):
flew over this place. Everybody kind of thought that it
was in this certain area where there were logical reasons
to find it there. And sure enough they found you know,
hard edged right angles. If you find right angles in
ldar in the jungle, that's man made structure, absolutely, And
that was a big break through. That's a big story.
This was nat GEO, and everybody was very excited about
(09:09):
it because it had been so sought after for so long.
So then Steve and his team of you know, highly
qualified archaeologists and so forth, and herprutologists and so forth
went into this place, took a got dropped in and
spent two weeks investigating this site, and they hit the jackpot.
It was a remarkable find. But they immediately understood the
(09:32):
value and danger of losing this place because it had
been because the rainforest is so diminishing so quickly, and
so the government set up a military base there, a
modest operation, I can tell you. It's a six or
seven soldiers who are sort of living in the middle
of the jungle there to protect this area because they
(09:52):
found so many artifacts. They found hundreds and hundreds of
artifacts just sort of spread across the forest floor in
the middle of what we're mounds of dirt, basically overgrown
mounds of dirt that we're hiding the structures that had
been lost hundreds of years ago. And so it was
really incredible and it kind of blew people's minds how
(10:12):
big this place was. It was a vast settlement and
probably part of several different settlements they haven't even yet found.
So in order to get permission to get into this,
as I mentioned, you have to go directly to the top,
and the president himself, who's sort of oversees this k
taken ownership of this operation, has to personally endorse you
(10:38):
to go in there. The military has to give you
a helicopter to go in. It's got to be overseen
by the military, basically, and all this has got to
be done prior to even getting down there. Right, Oh
my god, that's what I mean. So we were spending
all these months in all these other places, making these plans,
hoping we would get in. The big problem healthwise is leishmaniasis,
(10:59):
which I ever even heard the word that flesh eating bacteria.
Oh god. So yeah, it's a very bad thing. And
what happens is that there's these sand fleas that will
that lived in this area and you get bitten by
one of these sand fleas and the microbe goes into
you and off you go. And so they've had a
(11:20):
big problem with that with the soldiers that are there,
and even that first team Steve Elkas, everybody got leishmaniasis
when they went in. And so I was not interested
in getting slash eating bacteria by any stretch. And what
had happened is they figured out that if they cleared
this particular area of the landing patch of all the
(11:41):
vegetation that that held these sand fleas, and you only
went in during certain hours of the day, you could
avoid the sand fleas with underlying could they can't guarantee anything,
never mind sandles. Their fertilence is the most dangerous snake
in the word world that exists in this part of
(12:02):
Oh my god, you were they were coming at you
from all angles. Jaguar, lots of jaguar out there. It
was an extraordinary amount of things to worry about and
not tell my wife about where did you sleep today?
We just got dropped in and then taken out. And that, okay,
prevent you from getting this anymore. And when I say you,
(12:24):
I just mean, only a handful of people have gone
in there, so there's still just less than a hundred
people have seen this place. Because it's so far in
the middle of nowhere. You can't even find it anyway.
But you can't get transportation there. There's no roads there obviously,
and so forth, and so this is how they manage it.
Can you estimate what the population was a long time ago, Yes,
(12:49):
hundreds and hundreds of people. I mean, these cities down there,
and you're talking at the Maya later on, but this
was This isn't Maya. This is even older than Maya.
That's what's so fascinating about it. Uh, these are very
advanced places, real advanced cities, with extraordinary planning and execution
and architecture and so forth. You've seen the pictures. You
(13:09):
know what the story is. It's it's Aztec, it's my
it's all these all these civilizations were the most advanced
places on the planet. I think, I think I remember
the the reference which was the size of London. That's
huge of medieval London. Yes, was there in the in
the jungle, you know, it was that kind of major
(13:30):
city for the day, and uh, and probably better run
than London. Now Curse of the White City will be
your finale show, right it is. Yeah, it's an amazing
thing to see. I'm very proud of being able to
be a part of it and proud of the guys
who organized and everything else and to tell the story.
So getting to the to the meat of the matter
(13:52):
with this with this show, so we try to find
the paranormal angle on everything, even that story, which is
a straight ahead archeological story that blows your mind anyway.
But because of the show, we had to figure out
what that angle was with this. And it turns out
that there is a sort of ancient alien kind of
myth about this area having to do with a creature
(14:14):
named Wata, and he's spoken of as a legend but
almost as a fact among the people there are the
tribes that that originally come from that place, the Mosquito tribe.
This is the Mosquito Coast we're talking about from from
the days of you know, the Harrison Ford movie. All
that area down there is the Mosquito Coast because the
Mosquito tribe is that one snakes, lots of snakes, and
(14:39):
so these myths of what it sounds very much like
an ancient alien type of thing, and they talk about
it as if it that is what you can sort
of what it suggests is that it was more of
an immigrant story. Someone from perhaps down towards Columbia area,
that part of South America may have come up, understand,
(15:00):
adding that these people don't see other people from other
places very often, you know, this is the middle of nowhere,
and so somebody coming in with a lighter skin or
any number of you know, physical attributes might have looked
like someone from another world. You don't know what the
real base of that is, but they talk about it
in terms of ancient alien and that he's being pursued
(15:20):
by an enemy. And this conflict sits in the middle
of their legends, and this myth and the departure of
what Ka and the conflict casts curses on this land.
And so this curse has existed for hundreds of years,
and is they attribute the deaths of conquistadors looking for it,
(15:42):
and people going in by themselves and so forth to
this curse, which is all the dangers and the disease
that you can get from this place comes from that curse.
It's it's fun and interesting to look at it from
that standpoint, and to talk to the tribal members about this,
the shaman and so forth, and all the different ang
those of that is what we do two hours on.
(16:02):
Why would the inhabitants of that era done build and
construct these edifices in the woods like that for security
and safety? Well, in those days it was just part
of there's a massive migrations through those areas. And in
the days you know, back then the extraordinary cities are amazing.
They weren't necessarily in the middle of nowhere. In those days,
(16:23):
you know, these were developed areas and they grew around it,
I guess, and vegetation. Yet it's a well, that's what
I want to say, is when you drop in here.
So the big unexpected experience for me was the moment
we got in there. Of course, we're thinking, you're just
you're covered in mosquito netting and every inch of your
body is covered with something so that in case, they
(16:45):
literally duct tape your sleeves so these fleas can't get
into your body. Oh god, but they will bite through
your skin through those clothes, so you have to be
very fast and move. Are you wearing a net on
your face? Oh? Everything? Yeah, it's all I'm completely covered,
and you're you're covered in deep you know, all this
(17:05):
insecticide and stuff, and so there's a great deal to
be distracted by. And so suddenly you dropped into this rainforest.
You jump off the helicopter as if it's a marine expedition,
you know, go go go kind of thing, and we're
running up a hill to get up to this area
so that we can actually shoot for a while up
there and not you know, spend too much time down
(17:26):
where the fleas are. And lo and behold, I get
to this rainforest with all this distraction, and it just
stops it dead in your tracks. It's the most beautiful
thing you've ever seen in your life. You know, I've
seen Grand Canyon, a big Yosemite guy. I'm I'm a
very big outdoorsy guy. This blew my socks off. It
(17:47):
was absolutely stunningly gorgeous. And I'd never I realized I'd
never seen pure, untouched rainforest in my life. I'd seen
it in the movies. Yes, I should be a fashion
the outskirts of places such as that, but I've never
been in really virgin rainforest. And we're talking about the
orchids and the giant trees and these just this beautiful,
(18:11):
beautiful landscape that suddenly takes your breath away and you
realize you've been touched primarily, you know, that's the feeling
you have of this sort of virgin territory that speaks
directly to your soul. You know you're right in it
and it gets you right away, just like any of
those great natural environments. But this is unique because it
is what it is, that that's sort of deep, thick,
(18:34):
ancient forest, and you realize that's sort of the magic
of the place. You know, it has its own sort
of legendary feeling to it. Listen to more Coast to
Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern, and go
to Coast to Coast am dot com for more
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