DESTINATION TRUTH - Sloth Monster & Flying Dinosaur

SciFi Channel - Original Air Date: 4/2/2008

After a hard day enduring UFO shows, it's always a pleasure to spend some time with Josh Gates and his crew on Destination Truth.  This show, they're off to Brazil to hunt for a giant sloth-like monster reported by the natives.  After gathering stories from the locals, they head into the Amazon jungle to look for the creature.  They set up night vision cameras around their base camp and begin to tramp through the jungle.  As they do, the crew hears strange sounds, including the snapping of what sounds like big trees.  Investigating, they discover an area where trees have, indeed, been snapped -- and there is no known native creature that could do that.  Try as they might, though, they cannot turn up the elusive sloth.  They do return to the US with audio tape, and a prominent zoologist declares that a big, unknown animal could still exist in the Amazon.  (Maybe they should have looked in the Black Lagoon.)  Another possibility might be ancestral memory, native stories told from the times when men and giant sloths did occupy the landscape together, before the sloths went exinct.

Then Josh and crew head to Zambia to look for a reddish flying creature said to look like a pterodactyl.  They talk to a man whose friend was supposedly attacked by the creature; sadly, the victim refuses to talk.  A local game warden suggest bats or rare storks, like the shoebill, as being a more likely culprit.  As usual, the crew has to travel to a remote swamp to try and find the creature.  And they do find bats -- amazing numbers of bats, swarms like from a SF or horror movie.  Despite strange chirping sounds (frog?) and hits on their thermal camera (bats?), Josh bravely ventures onto the lake at night but finds nothing.  Several large flying creatures captured on camera, when analyzed turn out to be big bats.

So, again, no monsters, but that's okay.  This show doesn't want you to believe; it wants you to go along on the adventure.  And I, for one, am happy to do so.  Sadly, next week is the season finale.