Return of “Destination Truth”

Last night was the season premier of season three for the SyFy Network show, Destination Truth.

I’m a huge fan of this show and it’s been a long enough of a wait to finally see some new episodes of investigations into cryptozoology and the paranormal.  Not only is the show about investigating the unknown, but it’s also about exploring new areas and meeting the different people who live in the regions and seeing their customs.  Each half episode is an adventure into a remote and foreign part of the world.

In a way, this is almost like a real life Indiana Jones adventure.

I’m a huge fan of studying geography, anthropology and the unexplained mysteries of the universe (a bunch of my electives in college were in geography and history related classes).  Some of my other favorite TV shows right now are Ghost Hunters, Ghost Hunters International, The Amazing Race and Special Ops Mission.  Some of those other shows will receive individual attention on this website.  Unfortunately, at this time of year a lot of TV time is spent watching the news (aren’t politics fun?) and college football / NFL.

Getting back to the main point of this posting, it was great to watch Destination Truth again last night.  The first half of the episode in Romania’s Hoia Baciu Forest was simply outstanding.  That alone was worthy of a full episode of the show and should have been fully investigated instead of cramming it into a twenty or so minute segment.

Before I go any further, let me say that I am aware that this is a TV show designed for entertainment, and it is possible that some of the events on shows like Destination Truth, Ghost Hunters and GHI may be fabricated.  Because of the low light levels and audio recordings used as evidence, we, the TV viewers, cannot be completely confident that everything on TV is 100% authentic and real.

This is a big reason why I do not care for other “paranormal” shows such as Ghost Adventures, Paranormal State, or even parts of Most Haunted.  The Ghost Adventure guys are more entertainers rather than actual investigators (though I like how they take a more aggressive stance and yell at the “ghosts” and try to stir up activity).  Paranormal State tends to be too quick to make the call that the place is haunted or that somebody is possessed, and they also rely heavily on the use of a “psychic”.  Most Haunted also relies on using “psychics” and they’ll do a seance in an attempt to look for answers.

Those can all be entertaining shows, but as far as showing hard evidence of the paranormal, it’s very tough to convince people when you use a “psychic” or conduct a seance to try to communicate with those on the other side.  A seance can be faked just as easily as using a “psychic”, so when paranormal investigative shows have to resort to those efforts as “evidence”, then they lose credibility in my book.

That’s my stance when it comes to the paranormal shows on TV, and that’s a big reason why I enjoy Destination Truth and the GH and GHI shows.

So assuming that the events in the Hoia Baciu Forest in Romania were in fact true, I can easily see a full scale investigation by the GH or GHI crew to try to stir up more activity and collect more paranormal evidence.  I’d rather see the GH crew there as I also believe that the GHI crew tends to jump to the “this place is definitely haunted” conclusion more quickly, whereas GH tends to need more evidence to reach that conclusion.  Or at least Jason and Grant were tougher back in the first couple seasons of GH before they would make that claim.  They also seem to be more lenient these days and give more support to personal experiences despite that people’s senses are often thrown off and can easily be tricked or distorted, giving the illusion that a paranormal event may have occurred.

The Hoia Baciu Forest seems like it’s worthy of an hour long investigation of its paranormal claims.  The video of the Destination Truth photographer being suddenly yanked backwards was great.  It’s just too bad that Josh takes a neutral stance on paranormal activity, and as we saw in the new episode of Ghost Hunters last night where Josh was a guest investigator, he clearly didn’t want the ghosts touching him.  Seeing the activity happening to somebody else was one thing, but touching or messing with him was forbidden.  If Josh was more aggressive then we would have seen him take another shift of sitting in the middle of the clearing in the forest to see if anything would happen to him.

It’s too bad that many of the Destination Truth episodes are really two episodes in one, and that not enough time is allotted for many of the cases.  The episodes end way too fast and leave you wanting to see more, often resorting to looking up more information online and personally researching stories about similar incidents.

The other main problem with the show is that we know that no outstanding pieces of evidence in cryptozoology are ever found.  These are mythical creatures and local legends that they’re trying to prove in the episodes.  If good solid evidence was collected that proved one hundred percent of such a creature’s existence, then we would have heard about it on the news long before the episode aired on TV.

Despite the lack of the TV news networks confirming that such a mythological creature does in fact exist, some of the evidence collected in the episodes is still quite interesting and leaves you questioning whether or not such a creature could actually exist.