A Season 3 SyFy Expedition with Josh Gates of Destination Truth
by Troy Rogers

In an effort to get to the truth about the third season of Destination Truth, we ventured through the phone lines to a conference call destination with Josh Gates to learn what fans can expect come September 9 on SyFy.

Can you give us a preview of the some of the things that you're going to be looking at or going after this season?

JOSH GATES: Absolutely. You know, Season 3 we really sat down at the end of Season 2 and asked ourselves what can we do to raise the bar from the second season which was not just really successful but which we felt covered a lot of really interesting places in the world.

And we came up with some really interesting stories so we're going to do the world's first overnight paranormal investigation in King Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. We're going to be doing our first US investigations. We have a great story out in the frontier of Alaska and also in the swamps of Florida. So we'll be kind of book-ending the US and doing two stories here. We've never done a US episode before.

We spend an entire night doing an investigation at the ruins of Chernobyl in the Ukraine which is a really sort of high-stakes episode. And we have an extraterrestrial episode in the deserts of Chile. We're going to be doing some stuff in the Amazon. We'll be spending part of the season in South America. And then we'll be returning we sort of wanted to kind of - through-lines of the show season after season is that we always do a sort of big story on Big Foot or one of the sort of Sasquatch stories.

And so we're going to be continuing our Yeti story we did in Season 2 which was in Nepal by doing a one-hour special in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan which was a great episode and a really beautiful country for us to showcase. So it's going to be a really exciting season. We're really looking forward to it.

What can you add to Season 3? Can you talk maybe about any specific production challenges you guys had or maybe an episode that was especially difficult and challenging to pull off would you say?

GATES: Well, the thing about Destination Truth is that it's a pretty lean and mean machine. You know, we travel with a very small crew. And that's really by design because we want the show to feel like people are on a real adventure. You know, and they're riding shotgun on something that's a little bit crazy and not completely smoothed out and designed.

And so there's always production challenges because we try not to over-fix each of the stories. But this year I think we kind of put ourselves in harm's way more than a few times. I think the Chernobyl story is a great example of that. You know, we actually pitched that internally as a joke almost at first. We said, wouldn't it be amazing if we could go to Chernobyl. There's a whole ruined city that sits right in the shadow of the reactor there that has been abandoned for 30 years, and that is still very radioactive.

And then we sort of started saying, well, could this be done? Could you actually go and spend a night there? And we talked to the government in Ukraine and we talked to producers in Ukraine and we started to realize that if we were able to meet certain production challenges and keep people from being exposed to radiation then we could do something that really hadn't been done before.

And really have free reign to wander around a totally abandoned city. And so it's a lot of not just kind of how do you keep a crew from being exposed but how do you keep your cameras and your microphones and your battery packs and your pens and paper and everything else - how do you bring those things into a place like this and then bring them out safely?

And that's something we'd never tried to do before obviously; there's very few places in the world you can attempt such a thing. And so that was a great production challenge. And we all got our decontamination checked on the backend and so far we all are alive and kicking. So that was a that was a really particular one.

I think the same was certainly true with places like Bhutan. It's a very traditional country that's sort of staved off the modern world. And to bring a television production there and interact with a very traditional Buddhist culture is a real challenge. I think that's the fun of the show because sometimes you meet those challenges in real time, in the field. And that's I think some of the fun of the show is seeing me and my team come up against cultural roadblocks, production roadblocks and that's I think part of the fun.

What has been the scariest occurrence to date for you personally and maybe one that had you actually believing, you know?

GATES: Well, there are two different types of scary occurrences on the show; there's the scary occurrences where you're looking for whatever creature or phenomena that you're looking for where you think wait a minute, maybe this thing is here. And then there's the scary occurrences when you're doing something that's sort of physically perilous.

And there's both of those things happen on the show. This year we had a very close call in an airplane on a very old plane in Romania that we chartered for a flight to try to do some aerial photography. And we had essentially an accident in the plan while flying. And that's actually in the premiere episode.

So that's a great example of one of those. You know, there's a lot of old vehicles, old Jeeps, old planes, old boats on the show because the places we go to have a lot of well-used equipment. And so that's a great example of a situation like that. That certainly was a moment where I thought maybe we were filming our final episode.

But I think sometimes what is really scary on the show is that whether or not you think that there's some sort of unknown creature lurking in the jungles in the Amazon or wherever we happen to be there's certainly plenty of other things that are that we know are there. And so we're always very mindful of, what if a tiger comes out right now? What if an anaconda shows up right now. And so we have had a lot of close-calls with wildlife. We've had a couple of snakes and spiders and animals show up while we're filming.

I think we've been really lucky to capture some of those things on film and not have any real incidents with them. And there are cases occasionally where you're someplace that is purportedly haunted or that purportedly has a creature and things start to happen that are unexplainable and you start to think well wait a minute maybe there's something to this.

Egypt, I know that's sort of traditionally a nightmare to film in. What kind of issues did you have filming there?

GATES: Well, you know, it is; it has a reputation as being a very hard place to film in. And in fact Ghost Hunters International had filmed there, or gone to film there, and had hit some real snafus. And a lot of these countries, and Egypt is certainly a prime example of this, it's kind of who you know on the inside.

And all these episodes depend largely on local producers which we call fixers. And we had been recommended a guy in Egypt who another production company had said don't look any further; this is the guy you want. We got him on the phone and he's this really young guy, he's like 22 years old. And his father is a very famous fixer in Egypt that has been fixing there since the 60s. And so this kid has sort of apprenticed his dad and is just dialed into everything.

We talked to him a few times and he seemed to either be putting on a good show or he seemed to really know how to grease all the right wheels and make everything work. And true to his word we went to Egypt and filmed two different locations, one in a village called Armant, which is near the Nile down by Luxor and of course the Valley of the Kings which is roughly in the same area.

And it was just effortless. And this guy just really got everything working for us. And it's amazing a lot of the roadblocks to filming in countries like this are things that are difficult to smooth out from here and you really need someone good who really knows the local politics, the local economy, the local government and often military things. You just need someone who understands the whole mechanism. And this guy was just terrific. And so, we managed to get in and out of Egypt without a problem. India has always been a place we've wanted to go and that's another place with a very dodgy reputation for filming. It's just a lot of red tape. And so we've kept India off the list but I'm sure at some point we'll try to tackle that too.

Are there any other places like that that you haven't been able to go for political reasons?

GATES: There are a few places. I mean, there is also a certain safety threshold for NBC, right? I mean, there is a certain level of danger that they are not willing to assume the risk of. And so there's a couple of great cryptozoological stories in Central and Western Africa. And we've just never really been able to do it because they're in countries that are not politically stable enough to film it.

And that's not necessarily even just an NBC issue, it's an issue for us to. I think that we don't mind going to places that are a little bit unstable. But I think you have to have a certain degree of safety on the horizon. And there are a few countries where that's just not the case. There's some great stuff around the Congo in terms of these stories. But it's just we've never been able to figure out a way to do it safely enough.

I'm sure that we will at some point make our way into India because it's just such a vibrant culture that we'd love to experience. And there's good stories in places like Sri Lanka and it just sort of depends on how you hit the sort of political current.

So is there anything or any place, any mystery that you haven't investigated yet, even on the upcoming season, that you really want to do at some point?

GATES: For me it's often about locations. And I think when I look at the globe the places that I'm most kind of gravitated towards along with places like Southeast Asia is I'm really kind of intrigued by a lot of these small Pacific island nations.

And they're really hard to get into the show because some of them are very difficult to get to. And they're difficult to build into a route. Because when we film the show we typically bounce from location to location. And so there are a couple of great stories or many great stories in the Pacific from Polynesian curses to cursed or haunted islands.

There are shipwrecks. There's all sorts of sort of amazing things that are just sort of floating out there in the middle of nowhere. They're just hard to get to. So I certainly would love to figure out a way to maybe we do a season where we take the show on a boat and we go around the Pacific or something. But that's a part of the world that I really want to kind of dig my hands into.

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