Beneath the baleful gaze of taxidermically preserved animals, three members of New York City’s Explorers Club sit around an antique table drinking scotch. Well over a century after the professional society was founded as a meeting place for explorers and scientists, a Discovery Channel microcelebrity, a veteran History Channel host, and a video-game developer are stationed on the club’s topmost floor, discussing their predecessors: the Apollo astronauts; South Pole explorer Ernest Shackleton; the first climbers to get to the top of Mt. Everest, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. All were members of the Explorers Club, still headquartered in a Jacobean Renaissance townhouse on East 70th Street near Central Park.
Conversation in the warmly lit, high-ceilinged gallery eventually turns to crates of fossilized dinosaur remains stacked in the downstairs lobby. Bolortsetseg Minjin, a paleontologist who works with the American Museum of Natural History returning stolen fossils to her native Mongolia, is set to open the crates at a presentation that night. She has a warehouse nearby “overflowing with dinosaurs that they can’t yet ship back to Mongolia because there’s no museum yet to house them,†explains Richard Garriott, the video-game developer, noted space tourist, and current president of the Explorers Club. “But she’s raising money to build that. We’re helping her.â€
“One of the crates down there was seized from Nicolas Cage,†points out Josh Gates, the TV presenter who supplied Discovery Channel with an enormous amount of unscripted adventure content leading up to, during, and following the pandemic, including the popular Wednesday night show Expedition Unknown. Cage, of National Treasure fame, bought a Tyrannosaurus skull at a 2007 auction for $276,000, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio, but agreed to return it in 2015 when the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan filed a civil forfeiture complaint stating that the skull had been illegally removed from Mongolia by a Florida paleontologist turned smuggler named Erik Prokopi.
“The U.S. government took the skull away from Nicolas Cage,†Garriott says.
“He’ll be okay,†Gates says with a laugh, smiling at the former History Channel personality, Digging for Truth’s Josh Bernstein, across the table. “He’ll be fine!â€
Gates is easily the most recognizable of the contemporary Explorers Club cohort and the reason for this visit to its hallowed halls today. Expedition Unknown has been on TV for almost nine years, following Gates as he travels the world in search of new evidence for old mysteries — the disappearances of Amelia Earhart, pirate ships, entire kingdoms consumed by the sea — and enrapturing men ages 25 to 54 in the process. Before Expedition, Gates was a SyFy fixture, hosting a globetrotting paranormal show called Destination Truth and appearing regularly on Ghost Hunters. Gates offered to give me a tour of the club and discuss how he’s sustained a nearly 20-year career as a modern-day Indiana Jones — if Indiana Jones was a full-time reality-TV star instead of a tenured professor of archaeology.
Television has a long tradition of making stars out of men who visit far-off places, and they’ve tended to fall into one of two categories: soft-spoken “explainer†types like undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, or chiseled stoics like Man vs. Wild’s Bear Grylls, a former SAS soldier who broke three vertebrae during a paratrooper mission in Kenya and climbed Mt. Everest after recovering. Gates fits neither description. His screen energy is more like Mike Rowe, the affable frontman of Discovery’s Dirty Jobs, or Scottish mountaineer Cameron McNeish. His series merge the TV-adventure-show template with elements of the Hollywood action-comedy blockbusters that he used to watch as a child of the ’80s: Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile, The Goonies, and yes, the Indiana Jones franchise.
Over the course of 12 seasons of Expedition Unknown and five seasons of SyFy’s Destination Truth, Gates’s brushes with death have rivaled those of Dr. Jones. While shooting a 2007 episode of Destination Truth about a mythical creature known as the Namibian Night Stalker, Gates was hallucinating with chills until a “a Hail Mary pass of antibiotics†from a village clinic saved his life. While flying over Romania in a 40-seat Antonoff biplane in search of a haunted forest near Bucharest, the roof ripped off “like a can opener taking off the top of the can.†While rappelling into some supposedly haunted mines in Chile in 2010, Gates and a cameraman got trapped in a lightless mine shaft. “I was just scared to my core that I was suddenly going to be weightless and falling for infinity into this blackness,†he says.
Although Gates is six-two and built like a lineman, he tends to be the least imposing person on his shows. He could be your genial uncle — the one who was heartbroken when National Geographic ceased putting its print edition on newsstands. Any given episode of Expedition Unknown is likely to feature him sampling unusual-to-Yankees cuisine, trying on hats that don’t do him any favors, and taking part in feats of strength that end with him getting his ass kicked. When he’s huddled with an expert translating a scroll or ancient map, he’s blurting out “That’s amazing!†and grinning like a kid looking at his birthday cake.
In the end, Gates knows he’s not going to solve the disappearance of D.B. Cooper or conclusively determine if the Yeti is real. The quest is usually just a pretext; he and his crew go places where other people have already been and are at the mercy of inclement weather, illness, and air-travel red tape just like the rest of us. Back when the Explorers Club was founded, adventure heroes were trekking to the edge of the planet with pencils and paper and the promise of scientific discovery, but today, Josh Gates is nearly falling out of cruising altitude with a camera crew and the promise of shooting one more season if he keeps viewers amused. It’s adventure with more chuckles than screams, just the way Steven Spielberg liked it.
“There’s something about seeing your host, your Everyman, out there. There’s a Schadenfreude thing where people want to see you as a real person,†Gates explains. “If there’s a flat tire on my show, they shoot me changing the tire and struggling to get the bolts off. One of the things I think people forget about Indiana Jones is that sometimes he misses the ledge.â€
But Gates and his crew usually find something when they visit a ruin or tomb. The moments when he digs an old coin or helmet out of the ground aren’t exactly staged for the Expedition Unknown camera, but they are facilitated — or the odds of their occurrence increased — by, for instance, having the crew hang around a very active dig site where lots of objects are being unearthed daily or following a tip from working archaeologists who’ve found “a door to a thing†and are willing to wait for production crew to be there when they open it.
“I do think it’s important that there are moments of discovery,†Gates says. “And sometimes they are big moments. We’ve been there to discover entire pyramid complexes and platforms that nobody’s seen in centuries.†Still, “people who watch the show need to know that if we’re gonna go look for the lost tombs of the Snake Kings of the Maya empire, I’m probably not going to find the lost tombs of the Snake Kings in the next 43 and a half minutes.â€
This season’s two-part Expedition Unknown opener sent Gates and company to Truk Lagoon in Micronesia to try to locate the remains of 200 American airmen who were downed there in World War II. They had to take what he describes as “an incredibly circuitous plane route†across the Marshall and Caroline Islands in a United Airlines 737 called the Island Hopper that was the only mail or supply transport in the region.
“We cut together this sequence on what it means to take the Island Hopper — what it means to get out of the plane on the tarmac and stand under the wings and then get back on the plane,†Gates explains. “We have this debate a lot in postproduction on the show as to what is this balance between the mission — which is usually an archaeological, investigative, hands-in-the-dirt kind of thing — versus the travel and the humor.â€
Because it’s an unscripted show, the humor is always ad-libbed. While driving a Porsche on the Autobahn in an episode about finding Hitler’s hidden treasure, Gates turns to the cameraperson in the passenger seat, holds up the car phone, and says gravely, “I’ve actually had to delete all the German names from this phone because, by law, it needs to be Hans free.†While searching Scotland for gold that went missing after the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, outdoorsman Gregor Ewing tells Gates he walked 500 miles re-creating Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight after the Battle of Culloden, and Gates instantly asks, “But would you walk 500 more?†Making jokes without seeming disrespectful — to the episode subjects, to the audience — is a tightrope walk, and Gates has resigned himself to the inevitability of falling off the wire.
“I’ve spent an enormous amount of my life now carefully treading into other cultures and experiencing their cultural norms and their ceremonies,†he says. “You have to really have a good internal barometer.â€
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Gates built his barometer in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, mostly in movie theaters and in front of TV screens. He learned about life outside the United States through his dad, a former commercial diver who worked all over the globe. “My dad was always going away to what seemed to me like very exotic places. He was off in West Africa, he was in the Middle East, he was in the North Sea,†he recounts. “And every year, we’d go over to England to visit my mom’s family, so from an early age, I was going to Europe and had this understanding: ‘Wow, there’s a big world out here.’â€
In high school, a drama teacher cajoled him into auditioning for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and he got cast as Bottom the Weaver (“an ass, which seemed appropriateâ€). He realized that he didn’t just love movies, he loved acting, despite suffering from an intense stage fright that persists to this day. When he attended Tufts University, he co-majored in archaeology and drama, and despite his choosing “the two lowest-earning fields you could major in,†his parents were “very supportive,†even when Gates decided to take a gap year after graduation and spend it in Hollywood in lieu of his original plan to enroll in grad school at Texas A&M and get a master’s in underwater archaeology.
Gates’s gap year ended in 2007, when his obsession with acting and exploration (and a growing fascination with screenwriting) converged and he was hired to host Destination Truth and investigate paranormal phenomena around the world. Two million viewers regularly tuned in to the show’s third season, a series high. “It was kind of the ooga-booga version of Expedition Unknown, with me looking for monsters and ghosts and cryptozoological creatures.†It ran five years and helped form what would now be considered Gates’s “brand,†which he describes as “a weird intersection between documentary and narrative and performance and verité.â€
The Gates brand might have a protracted description but it’s quicker to visualize, thanks to a singular sundial necklace Gates dug out of a drawer and has worn during every episode of every show he’s done since Destination Truth, and nearly every one of his TikTok videos that have racked up over a million views. (He sometimes wears a brown leather fedora and scarf like Indy, too.) Gates doesn’t quite remember where he got the necklace — “probably at a museum shop or a cathedral gift shop or something†when he was 11 or 12. “I tell my kids it’s the source of magic powers, and they roll their eyes at that,†he says. “But then they go, ‘Is that true?’ That’s all you can hope for in life.â€
Blind optimism, gleaned from the annals of Explorers Club history, is the deep core of his success and has turned him into something of a corporate mascot, necklace and all. During the pandemic, neither Gates nor any other Discovery host could travel, so he did an interview show titled Josh Gates Tonight. “They were so desperate that they said, ‘You can film it on your iPhone if you want.’ We filmed the first month in a makeshift studio we made in my bedroom.†Gates interviewed everyone from race-car driver Danica Patrick to director Baz Luhrmann to Matthew McConaughey, along with various Discovery personalities, including Drew and Jonathan Scott (Property Brothers) and Sandra Lee (Dr. Pimple Popper).
That same year, Gates debuted Expedition X, a throwback to Gates’s SyFy days. Nearly all of the on-site exploring was done by scientist Phil Torres and paranormal researcher Jessica Chobot, and Gates interviewed them about their experiences like an old-fashioned news anchor asking follow-ups of a field reporter. In 2021, he co-hosted a four-part miniseries with Back to the Future star Christopher Lloyd in which they traveled North America searching for the seven DeLoreans used in the production of the trilogy. Titled Expedition: Back to the Future, the series was genuinely funny, thanks mainly to Gates’s chemistry with Lloyd, and became one of the channel’s biggest limited-series hits.
Gates says he used to feel some pressure from executives and viewers, mainly when he was on SyFy, to produce momentous TV every week. Now he’s at the point where he can end part one of an Expedition Unknown two-parter stuck in a jungle hut waiting for a storm to wear itself out and feel confident that viewers will think, Of course — this is the kind of thing that happens to Josh.
“The history of the world is this incredible Game of Thrones–like drama and you need the right person to clue you into how interesting it all is,†Gates says. “If I’m doing that even a little, I’m thrilled.â€
Not every planned adventure works out. At the Explorers Club, Gates originally wanted to talk to me in his favorite room in the building, the Roosevelt Room, named for former president, conservationist, Manifest Destiny advocate, and trophy hunter Teddy Roosevelt, but it was unexpectedly nabbed by a group of skiers for a meeting. Still, we’re able to explore the guts of the place. Lacey Flint, the archivist and chief curator of the Explorers Club, leads us to a room filled with bound volumes of research material and ephemera from the club’s history and presents a few highlights. Gates already knows most of what Flint has to say about the significant objects in the room — he did a whole series titled Tales From the Explorer’s Club about this stuff — but he nevertheless seems enraptured by the chance to be in the same room with them again.
He picks up the framed original of Roosevelt’s application for membership. “It’s so goofy that he had to fill this out,†Gates says, pointing to a list of accomplishments that includes serving as governor of New York and president of the United States. Other treasures laid out by Flint include a bullwhip that belonged to naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews, one of the inspirations for Indiana Jones; astronaut gloves worn by Owen Garriott, Richard’s father, on the Skylab space station; balsa fragments and a length of rope from the Kon-Tiki raft that brought Thor Heyerdahl and his five-man crew across the Pacific Ocean to the Polynesian Islands; and an Explorers Club flag brought to the moon by Neil Armstrong.
Gates gets emotional as he speaks about the tradition of flags being brought on expeditions, whether to jungles or into space, then “retired†in the Explorers Club’s archive. “The fact that Neil Armstrong had that flag tucked away on the moon flight is pretty amazing and gives you all the context you need about the club as a real gathering place for pioneers,†he says. “It’s a very special thing.â€
But Gates’s attention keeps returning to a large wooden crate on the library floor. Inspection of the label confirms it’s the repatriated Nicolas Cage T-rex skull that’s supposed to be opened later tonight. Gates and Garriott urge me to stick around for a couple more hours and watch the contents of the crate be unveiled, but prior commitments make that impossible.
“This is so frustrating, to have this right in front of us and not be able to open it,†Gates says. He and Garriott query employees of the building for tools they can use to open the quarter-ton crate a little early. No luck. I leave him an unsatisfied man. But 45 minutes after my Explorers Club departure, Gates texts me a set of close-ups of the T-Rex skull in the just-opened crate, braced with foam and wood. The caption reads, “Richard Garriott found a screw gun.â€