Wednesday, September 17, 2008

DESTINATION TRUTH - Haunted Cave; Burunjor

SciFi Channel - Original Air Date: 9/17/08

Josh and his crew go to Indonesia and Australia in search of ghosts and a mythical monster.  First up, they trek to a supposedly haunted cave in a remote area of Indonesia.  But, to get the ghosts to "play," they need to bring special holy water from another remote cave which, as it turns out, is at the bottom of a sheer cliff with rickety "stairs."  Surviving that, they then enter the water-filled "haunted" cave, and go as far in as they can.  Their native guide and medium chicken out about halfway home, but the rest of the crew -- including the increasingly visible Ryder (Is she becoming the main costar?) continues on.  When they can go no further due to deep water and blockage, they backtrack and set up their considerable IR & night vision equipment.  Then they wait and conduct EVP sessions.  And, at one point, they seem to experience a lot of strange noises and shadows and such.  But analysis back home proves inconclusive, and Josh rightly notes that the combination of cave acoustics and running/dripping water makes it impossible to say for sure what they heard, or thought they heard.

The search for the burunjor takes the crew to the Outback to look for a beast described as a living T-Rex like reptile twenty-five feet tall.  One would think something that size would be easy to spot, but Australia is very large, and parts of it are very sparsely populated.  The crew talks to locals and then heads into the bush to find a narrow lake by a tall ridge.  They fly in to a likely location and spend the night.  There, they encounter some small fauna, and hear something breaking branches in the darkness, and hear the sounds of an animal attack.  The mysterious snapping sounds continue, and Josh tries to get a fix on it with their parabolic mic.  Sadly, by the time they haul out the mic, whatever was making the sounds is gone.  In looking for the bumping creature the next morning, they find no signs of the thing, but they do find some cave paintings -- including one that looks burunjor like, though Josh notes it also shares elements with the extinct (but very real) Tasmanian tiger.  He concludes that here in the Outback, myth, tradition and reality are closely mixed, and it will take more than one short trip to figure out the truth.  And now, he's off for another adventure.  (Perhaps to find  the Yowie -- in an earlier episode -- as they must surely combine trips to save expenses on this show.)

This is another fun episode in the DT series, despite the usual lack of a solid conclusion.  And I remain convinced that, in some of these cases, longer investigations might yield better results.  (The team usually only seems to spend a day in their main investigation location.)  Maybe a two-hour episode would be in order?

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