Destination Truth

Destination Truth is back for its fifth season on the Syfy channel on July 10th at 8pm with a back-to-back premier night before returning to 9pm for the rest of the season. Josh and his team continue to tackle mysteries and try to uncover the real truth behind them.

The premier night begins with "Vietnam's Bigfoot", heading into the caves in the jungles of Vietnam to look for the Batutut - a large six foot ape with a long history of sightings. For me, the most interesting part of this is simple the fact that the government of Vietnam is actually heading up the search for this beast, establishing a department specifically for the Batutut hunt. Second most interesting, new species of animals are discovered deep in the jungles of the world every year, so the idea of a mysterious giant ape isn't an impossibility.

The latter half of this double premiere night is "Return to the Haunted Forest/Belize Goblin". First, due to popular demand, the team heads back to the haunted Hoia Bachu Forest - the site of their most terrifying investigation to date. Then Josh and company go to Tikal, a reportedly haunted Mayan ruin, in search of the Belize Goblin.

I love the search into the mysterious, into the unknown, but I can't stand the false drama, the bizarre camera rigs and just general strangeness and fake feelings that these sorts of shows thrive on. I mean, it's amazing that every important conversation gets caught on film - I suspect they recreate them - and that even when they are running the camera men seem to occasionally be in front of them to capture to chase head on - I suspect more recreating or just outright staging. Even more offputting is the constant acting, over-acting and playing-up for the camera, as well as the "local color" elements where they spend at least a quarter of every segment eating local food and visiting shops and joking around. There is just a lot of fluff to their investigations and reporting - it's clearly trying to be news-entertainment rather than just news.

To top it off, these guys appear to be some of the worst investigators ever. They don't apply simple logic to their work. For example, a group stumbling around in the forest in the second episode sees a light that is only visible on the camera and not by the naked eye. If it were me, "Okay guys, I'm going to keep my camera on this and walk toward it. You guys surround me, walk with me, and make sure I don't walk into any holes or anything." Them? "Look! It's in the camera but I can't see it! Let's stand here looking at it with the camera until it fades away and we can't possibly get any better evidence. Oh, it's gone! Good thing we captured all this completely inconclusive footage rather than try to actually prove anything." And that pattern repeats over and over. And they don't seem to care to perform any real scientific investigation. Again with the forest episode, there is a ring of trees where "nothing grows" (except grass) and they don't take any soil samples or get any readings for electromagnatism or radiation. It's all about feelings and personal experience which can only be told, not proved.

These mysteries might be real, but I just don't like the format they choose to present it. Perhaps it is just through the fog of time and the rose-colored glasses of youth, but I think the old show In Search Of, that approached these kinds of subjects more as a news magazine and less as a reality show was a much superior format.

All in all, I prefer Syfy's clearly fictional programming like Warehouse 13, Eureka, Haven, Alphas, and Being Human to the dozen or more reality shows like Destination Truth, Ghost Hunters and more. But hey, if this sort of thing is your bag, it's well made enough and they do seem to actually find a few scraps of truth on Destination Truth.