Hard To Watch Continued Destination Truth And Ufo Hunters

Destination Truth

Hosted by Josh Gates, Sci-Fi Channel's Destination Truth covers a wide spectrum of supernatural and mysterious creatures around the globe, from the Tokeloshe of South Africa, the Mapinguary of Brazil, to Vietnam's Tarasque. Besides featuring a surplus of creatures with odd names this series has a lot to offer. Josh's team covers every angle from interviews, talking to experts, to submersing themselves in the local culture to prove or debunk their cases.

From the investigative side of things this approach is key in any case and even more important in cases where your area of investigation can sometimes cover many miles and you're working in uncontrolled environments to boot. The more you can narrow down your area of search the better, and this is only possible through in depth interviews and investigation. These type of investigations are often more difficult to investigate than your average haunting by far and by using every resource available to collect evidence Josh's team brings themselves closer to the truth of a case.

To give insight into the investigative methods of your average episode, one episode places Josh and his team investigating the Popobawa or "bat demon" of Zanzibar. Through interviewing locals, eyewitnesses, and researching the creature Josh correlates the timing of Popobawa sightings and attacks with the Zanzibar government election. Josh then concludes that the Popobawa is nothing more than an electoral tool used to exploit superstitious beliefs to evoke feelings of terror among the people, for political gain, effectively debunking the myth.

Destination truth airs on the Sci-Fi channel Wednesday's at 10pm EST and usually covers two cases per hour long episode. If you're interested in supernatural creatures or interested in general paranormal investigation I'd recommend checking it out.

UFO Hunters

There are two series now airing going by the name of UFO Hunters, one by the History channel and one by the Sci-fi channel, two peas in one space-pod so to say. Not only do these two series carry the same name, the two series premiered at almost the exact date and time. As paranormal as that is, the two shows each bring something different to the table.

Sci-Fi Channel's version of UFO Hunters follows NY-SPI (New York Strange Phenomena Investigators) an amateur group of UFO Hunters. Produced by the same people who brought you Ghost Hunters, it follows the same pacing and production style as Ghost Hunters. Basically, think of it as Ghost Hunters with UFO's. The only episode I could dig up was the premiering episode which is labeled as the pilot on Sci-Fi's Website, so I can't really say much about the scope of the series at this point.

The first episode has NY-SPI investigating an incident where multiple witnesses reported seeing a fireball and lights in the night sky off the coast of Normandy Beach, New Jersey and eventually saw it crash into the ocean itself. The team interviews several witnesses of the incident; afterwards they interview a member of the United States Coast Guard who reports how they investigated the incident and how they decided to suspend the investigation after 3 hours due to nothing being found at the scene. NYI-SPI then decides to enlist a salvage boat and diver to investigate the seabed where the crash supposedly took place. In the end they find nothing of substantial note as far as evidence goes making it impossible to validate the claims or dismiss them.

I can't really say if I'm for or against this show to be honest. Knowing this shows roots with Ghost Hunters I can see it going more in the direction of entertainment as opposed to hard science. That's not a bad thing, but there needs to be a blend of both for me to consider watching it. There's also something about the show that seems horribly forced and to be honest, a bit..staged. Being as this is a new series with a team that's not used to being in the limelight of a camera, I guess I should reserve my judgments at this point. I can remember back when Ghost Hunters first aired and thinking the same thing. Hopefully as (if) the series progresses the team become more comfortable in front of the camera, but as it is, the juries still out.

The History Channel's UFO Hunters follows a team of UFO researchers lead by William Birnes, publisher of UFO Magazine, Dr. Ted Acworth of MIT, a mechanical engineer and researcher who previously worked for NASA, Also from UFO Magazine are investigator Pat Uskert and finally scientific intern Jeff Tomlinson.

[Editor's Note: It's hard to believe two shows with the same name and premise would come out at virtually the same time, but they did. History's UFO Hunters early episodes rival those of Ghost Hunters current episodes, which means that the series is off to a good start. They also use good labs for their trace testing. I don't know if you noticed or not but Budinger, who was featured on the show, is also the lady on our MySpace photo. However, in the last episode I saw it appears they were running out of quality cases to investigate, so they brought in MUFON. Not only was that episode Hard to Watch, the "case file" title they open the show with wasn't even a specific case - it was a general topic.]