DESTINATION TRUTH - Alien Mummies; Van Lake Monster

SyFy - Original Air Date: 10/7/09

Josh and crew go to Chile to check out reports of alien creatures that live in local mines.  They stop at Nazca on the way to check out the famous Lines.  They also stop at the "Stargate," a tourist attraction that supposedly is a gateway for alien beings.  Locals report not only aliens, but also strange lights, perhaps UFOs.  The DT crew descends into the mine shaft on ropes and sets up IR cameras to catch anything living in the tunnels.  Poking around, they find a strange, tiny body buried inside one of the tunnels; they collect it as evidence.  They also cross perilous bridges and poke into ill-supported tunnels.  They hear sounds and see something hot on their Fleer, something which possibly threw a stone at them, and then spot something that gives off light in the pitch-black tunnel.  They chase the light into a vertical shaft, but find no evidence of what it was.  Following a draft, they find an exit to the surface.  Then they spot a bright, star-like pulsing light atop the canyon ridge opposite, and start hearing strange things on their radios, and out of the parabolic dish -- which normally collects noises, rather than creating them.  Unfortunately, they can't focus their cameras on what's shedding the light.  The team leaves their oddball corpse for the local authorities and takes photos of it back to the US -- sadly, that leaves them with less to analyze.  Their experts are stumped.  Which leaves them with a strange corpse, a phantom light, and the ridge "UFO" all unexplained  Josh, usually skeptical, is puzzled -- but perhaps this story will be continued later.

For now, they go to Van Lake in Turkey to look for a local monster -- which has a strange (and fairly clear) video backing up its existence.  The lake is the size of Rhode Island (US) and located near Iraq.  After talking to the locals about the beast, they go to the lake to look for themselves.  And they quickly spot some undulating humps on the water; sadly the humps are gone by the time the DT helicopter gets there.  They set up base on a local island and start diving; supposedly, this is where the monster spawns, and a local church even has an ancient carving of what might be the monster trying to eat someone.  As night falls, they also set up surveillance cameras -- and head out in a zodiac boat to hunt beasties.  It starts to snow and the weather sucks.  They begin hearing big splashes -- in a lake where the largest fish is a foot long -- so they charge toward the sound with their underwater cameras.  They catch something on sonar, and perhaps on their cameras as well, but they lose it as it submerges.  By the time they get back, the weather has torn and flooded their tent; everything gets wet.  Undaunted, they go back out and get more camera and sonar hits.  Whatever this is, it doesn't seem as shy as the usual lake monster.  Sadly, their footage doesn't provide enough info to explain what's going on for sure.  And though the lake is biologically not diverse enough to support a big creature, their personal experiences seem contrary to that.  An expert looks at the original video, and, to him, it seems a hoax.  The other things have possible alternative explanations, but there are still the eyewitnesses -- and even Josh's crew.

Thus, we end up with more mystery than usual in a DT episode, and perhaps two locations to revisit later.