The Age of Exploration is Not Dead

It's just gone indie, like everything else

Despite what many would-be adventurers bemoan, there are still unexplored places in the world. They’re just harder and harder to get to (deep sea, anybody?). Not that exploration was ever easy; crossing oceans in clusters of smallish ships with Columbus, crossing North America with pack animals and canoes…those men were a special breed.

There are still a few men, and women, like this in the world. I think one of the reasons they don’t become household names anymore is because our news and entertainment have become so balkanized. Instead of three TV networks plus public television, National Geographic magazine, and newspapers full of syndicated columns, we have cable TV with myriad channels and the internet. We can curate our news and entertainment to suit our interests, which means that we’ve lost the model of everybody around the water cooler talking about a couple of things that aired during prime time the night before.

Whatever your interests are, you can follow the people spearheading those things on social media or some specialty cable channel. When I was a kid, we had occasional National Geographic specials, and every Sunday evening “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”. Today, there are thousands of shows to watch on-demand on the subject of your choice. I can watch weekly, almost daily, episodes on YouTube of, say, the adventures of a black panther living with a couple in Siberia. What can I say? I have a thing for cats.

Anyway…explorers. They still exist. In the world of cryptozoology we’ve had some great ones. There are still individuals and groups out there exploring the wild places, but those places are usually accessable with a few hours of driving and hiking. We’re losing the true explorers like Peter Byrne, a WW2 Royal Air Force vet who ran safaris in Nepal and became one of the four big names in “bigfoot” research in the 20th century. He passed away in 2023 after a long career of exploring and writing. You can see one of his last interviews in the documentary film “A Flash of Beauty: Bigfoot Revealed”.

Byrne with James “Bobo” Fay a few years ago.

A little over a year ago I discovered the podcast Blurry Creatures (mentioned in the first Weird World post, “Bigfoot is the Gateway Drug”). At that point they’d been releasing installments for almost two years, and as I binge-listened consecutively I hit episode nineteen with a guest named “Timothy Alberino”. At first I found him a bit off-putting. He sounded too good to be true, like one of those guys who talks tough but really spends most of his time agitating on the internet. The more I listened, however, and the more I looked into him, I realized I’d found a guy who’d really been there and done that and wasn’t afraid to get out of his comfort zone.

He spent most of his teens and twenties living in South American jungles, working odd jobs and learning the language and culture. Like Peter Byrne, he also monetized his need for adventure for a few years starting in 2018 when he…

…together with Spanish explorer Anselm Pi Rambla, began leading expeditions into the Andes mountains of Peru, seeking the legendary lost cities of the Inca Empire. During the course of this daring enterprise, they discovered a hitherto unknown ruined city of Inca or pre-Inca origin called Tawri Punku. (from TimothyAlberino.com)

Today, with a wife and kids, his explorations are a bit curtailed, but he still gets out when he’s not writing books on topics that mosts scientists and theologians would rather not address. When reports of “face peeling aliens” in a remote Peruvian jungle village surfaced last year, Tim looked into it, especially since he had previously lived in that region for ten years.

After establishing a long-distance relationship with the village headman, he put together an expedition and headed down there, taking emergency supplies like food and medicine, and did a thorough on-site investigation.

His book “Birthright” is a must-read for anybody looking into the UFO/aliens phemonenon with an open mind. In a nutshell, “extraterrestrial” can mean different things, and probably isn’t what you’ve been told.

Recently, he partnered with the guys from Blurry Creatures on a beautiful edition of the Book of Enoch, specifically the first few three books of the apocrypha, including speculative illustrations and detailed commentary. As I get into it (Gordon finished it in a couple of days), I can see that this is another book that belongs on the shelf of anybody looking into the “paranormal”, cryptozoology, what’s going on in Genesis 6, and why New Testament authors quote from Enoch. This is an important work, and Alberino et al are planning a follow-up, continuing where 3 Enoch leaves off.

If you can’t wait for Alberino’s next take on the apocrypha, I can wholeheartedly recommend Dr. Judd Burton’s “Interview with the Giant”, a look at the events and people referenced in the Book of Giants from the same source. Burton is another modern day Indiana Jones and a solid scholar, and I’ll probably talk about him at some point in the near future.