INTERVIEW: Alex schlegel - National geographic camera trapping project

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Ray Tarara: All right, so we'll jump right in. Can you introduce yourself and what you currently do?

Alex Schlegel: My name is Alex Schlegel. I'm actually an AI researcher. I work for a startup named Vicarious that's trying to solve human-level intelligence via robotics.

Ray: Were you involved in this work before you got introduced to the Orang Pendek?

Alex: I was not involved with this work at the time I was involved with Orang Pendek. I got involved with Orang Pendek via my doctoral advisor. That's yet another life where I was studying cognitive neuroscience.

Ray: Can you maybe explain what the Orang Pendek is?

Alex: Sure. Well, if it exists, the Orang Pendek is a small bipedal primate that would live in the Southeast Asias, at least Sumatra, where most or all of the sightings given the name Orang Pendek have occurred. The most interesting thing about it is its bipedality because we are the only living hominid at the moment that we know of that is exclusively bipedal. Orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, they can walk on two legs, but for the most part, they use their arms for locomotion as well, so that raises some interesting questions about, if this animal does exist, what is its relationship to Homo sapiens?

Ray: How did you first get involved with the Orang Pendek? You touched on a little bit with your professor, but maybe we can go a little bit more in depth than that.

Alex: Sure. I first got involved with Orang Pendek when I helped run a National Geographic project that was trying to determine whether or not it existed by trying to get photographic documentation of it. The leader of the project was my, at the time, future doctoral advisor, Peter C. who's a professor at Dartmouth College.

Ray: You mentioned that this was a National Geographic project. Do you know where their interest in the Orang Pendek came from, and how that originated?

Alex: National Geographic became interested in it because of Peter. He had friends that worked for National Geographic, and when he became aware of the possibility that Orang Pendek might exist, he talked to them. This was also around the time when Homo floresiensis was discovered. There's also interesting parallels between descriptions of Orang Pendek and descriptions of Homo floresiensis, so the idea that popped into his head at the time is, "Oh my God. What if Homo floresiensis is still alive?" Sumatra is just a couple islands over from Flores island, so it seems like it's a possibility, at least. Homo floresiensis, the fossil records we have of it are from around 12,000 years ago, which is not that long, evolutionarily. Anyway, he mentioned the possibility to a friend and said, "Somebody should go and actually see if this thing exists." They said, "You should do it." He ended up applying for some funding. This was through-- I believe it was from National Geographic Expedition, a branch of the organization that funds research, and in particular, we were in, I guess, one of their high-risk, high reward categories of funding. They probably didn't expect a whole lot, but they also didn't give us that much money, just enough to get some equipment and send a couple young graduates out to live in Sumatra for a while.

Ray: Can I hear a little bit more about Peter's background? Who is he, and did he have a background in-- An interest in primates, or was this a completely different thing than he was used to working on?

Alex: Yes. None of our backgrounds are at all related to Orang Pendek or Primatology. We were, I think, by any measure on paper, not qualified to do this project. Peter's a very interesting and interested and curious man, and he's had a lot of experiences, and not afraid to try new things. We're all cognitive neuroscientists by training. Not, I would say, very closely related to the idea of going and documenting primates in the rainforest in Sumatra. Where Peter became interested and aware of Orang Pendek was actually back in the early '90s. This was after he had graduated from college, and was experiencing the world. At one point, he was canoeing in Sumatra, and his guides were talking about the story of this creature called Orang Pendek. Orang Pendek in Indonesian just means "short person." It's like Orangutan actually means "forest person." I am an Orang America, American person. Orang is an interesting word, and at least their concept of apes versus humans, they assign this same name to all this orang, so it gives you an idea maybe of the spectrum along which, at least in Indonesian conception, we all lie. He was canoeing in Sumatra, and his guide was telling him about this creature named Orang Pendek that was about a meter tall, not quite an ape, not quite a man, walked on two legs, was furry, but was frightening to everybody who met it. It would live on the edge of a farmland. Anyway, he wrote it off as a folklore at the time, but he remembered those stories in 2004 when all the big news about Homo floresiensis was coming out. Again, like I said, the parallels were very intriguing, and so that one thing led to another, and we got money, and headed out there, and tried to run a camera trapping project.

Ray: How much funding did you receive from National Geographic, and then how long did the project last?

Alex: I think the initial grant was around $50,000. It gave us enough to buy-- Well, the initial grant was that much, then we got some more funding later on from them, but it was less than that. It was enough to buy, initially, 30 camera traps, and paper plane tickets, and rent a house for a year, and pay for guides and trips out into the jungle once a month, batteries, all that kind of stuff. It was enough to run the project, but definitely not enough to have a salary or to really have the resources that I think we should have had if we wanted to maximize our chance of documenting it. I think there was another question or two.

Ray: Oh, it was just about how long you guys spent out there conducting your research?

Alex: Oh, okay. We started the project in the summer of 2005. Headed out there, I believe, at the beginning of September, and off and on we were running the project until 2009 when money ran out and we were all distracted by getting back to our regular lives. Around four years was the length of the project.

Ray: Did you spend all that time out in Indonesia or were you flying back and forth between the US?

Alex: I spent the first year out there along with a friend from college for the first three quarters of the year it was just us two. Peter was a tenure track professor, so trying to get tenure and couldn't really spend much time at all out there. He was mainly trying to get research done back at Dartmouth. In the early 2006, we were joined by another person who we hadn't know until then, his name is Murray Cullens and he was British and also interested independently in Orang Pendek, so he ended up joining the project then living with us and helping run the project. We operated like that for a year, and then I came back to the US. The plan was to try to get the project to a point where it could be self-sustaining. Because once we had all the cameras installed in the forest, it was just a matter of once a month going out there checking the photos and changing the batteries. We were trying to get it so that we could have local people to actually just run that in maintenance mode since we couldn't just wait out there forever. We tried to do that, it worked out to some degree, but then there were possibly problems. We personally struggled with the government bureaucracy and the national park. At one point, all the cameras were confiscated, so that's when I went out and then Tim, my friend, came back out the next summer to apologize to the park, get the cameras back, put them back up. In total, I went out three times but didn't ever stay there more than that first year or any long length of time.

Ray: You mentioned a third, but was it mostly just you and Peter involved in the project and then later-- Sorry, I missed his name. What was his name?

Alex: Oh, sorry. To start with, there was Peter, my college friend Tim Maurer, and then myself. Later on, Murray Cullens joined us. He had, before then, actually done the documentary about Orang Pendek. I'm playing in on the name right now, but anyway, he had been interested independently and contacted us, and ended up flying out and joining us, so then it was just the four of us.

Ray: Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about why the cameras were confiscated, what were the issues that you guys were having with the government at the time in regards to that?

Alex: Sure. It was a mixture of owner's regulations and us thinking that we could just ignore them. [chuckling]

Alex: For instance, one example was that at some point we were operating in the national park and there was a rule that we were made aware of. We had not seen it anywhere beforehand, that photographs taken on the park should be taxed. I think it was something like $0.25 a photo. I don't know if it was ever written down on paper, but that didn't really work with the model that we were using. These camera traps would take a lot of pictures of everything. They operate by a combination of looking for something that's hotter than the surrounding and moving, so they had an infrared sensor and a motion sensor. Anytime both of them are activated, it would just take a photo, but that would mean that often we would come at the month and we would have 500 photos of rain. Given our budget, we really couldn't afford to pay a quarter for every one of those false positives. We ignored that, they were constantly also trying to get us to go through a bunch of hoops of writing a joint memorandum of understanding, and we never did that. At some point, our good friend, Sahar, who was our main guide and we were training him to take over and run it while we were gone. At some point, they came to his house all official. I think they might even have had guns.

Ray: Oh, god. [chuckles]

Alex: They took him out into the forest, made him take all of the cameras down, scared him to death. Anyway, he read out his panicked emails from him, and then realized that we were going to have to go and fix the situation.

Ray: Poor guy. [laughs]

Alex: Yes. In the end, the real problem was that we were four people, we weren't in an organization, we had minimal funding, we really didn't have the resources to be a non-profit that was navigating a government bureaucracy along with trying to do a project. We did the best we could.

Ray: You touched on it a little bit, but could you maybe go on a little bit more detail about how the camera traps themselves worked?

Alex: Sure. The reason that we went with camera traps is that they've been proving to be very useful in recent years to document animals without having human contamination in the environment scaring the animals away. Actually the camera, the models that we were using, were mainly intended for deer hunters. It's just this is the thing that hunters do, they like to get pictures of what they're hunting. You get a camera that has some kind of camouflage, a housing, and it can attach to a tree, so we would put them along trails or areas that we thought that animals might frequent. These particular cameras that we had would just be powered by 4D5 batteries. They had, at that time, a compact flash memory card in them, so it was just a digital camera that was activated by a motion sensor and a heat sensor. Anytime those sensors were tripped, the camera would take a photo. Ours were also supposed to take video, a minute-long video along with it, but I don't know what happened, they rarely took a photo, there's some issue with them. They're supposed to be just a camera that's activated by heat and movement, and it's in a weather-proof housing and has its own power supply, and then you just put them up, turn them on and leave. After a few days, your scent is gone and animals will return. This technique has been proving very useful in animal research. There's been a string of stories of the last 10-15 years of discovering the first big mammal in areas that we found in 30 years. That's pretty crazy that there's this large mammal, that's a new species that we've never documented and we discover it now in 2010. They're giving you a sense of even though we think we know everything about the world we're in now, there's a lot of still undiscovered and unknown because there's a lot of very remote areas in the world, and also a lot of remote areas especially that western science hasn't reached. There may be knowledge of these animals that they haven't yet been documented by our scientific system. We ended up at some point with 55 or 60 cameras, and we would just find an area that we thought looks promising, so that was remote and was in the general region that people reported having seen these animals or seen the Orang Pendek. We installed the cameras, hooked them up, then it would just be maintenance mode coming back every month and seeing if we got anything.

Ray: Did you guys end up capturing anything interesting, whether you think it could be contributed to the Orang Pendek or anything, even if it isn't Orang Pendek related?

Alex: Well, I guess the most exciting thing was the tiger photos that we would get. I don't know what the numbers are right now, but at that time, there were around 400 Sumatran tigers left, it's a pretty small number for a fairly big island. You just don't even think about the chance of seeing a tiger out there because they're so rare and also would avoid you for the most part if they were around, but over the course of the time that we had the cameras out there, I believe we got four different photos of Sumatran tigers, so that was pretty exciting. We got lots of photos, hundreds of hundreds of photos of animals, and the most common animal that we got photos of was a tapir. They're big and slow and they hang out in front of the cameras for a long time, so we would get lots of those. We got a few photos of clouded leopards, pigs every once in a while, deer, pangolins, lots of different types of animals. Often we would get actually photos of bird poachers that would walk through the forest and collect birds, but never any any photo that we thought might be of an Orang Pendek unless it was hiding back there in the rain of all the false positives.

Ray: Where you guys were setting up camera traps, was there any populations of any primates like gibbons or orangutans?

Alex: There were siamangs who are a type of gibbon. They always would stay up in the trees though, so I don't think we ever got a photo of them. We did get photos of pig-tailed macaques. We might have actually gotten a couple photos of siamangs, now that I think of it. Siamangs are what's called the lesser ape, so they're not one of the great apes. There are orangutans, which are a great ape on Sumatra, but not anywhere around the part of the island we were on. The thinking is that something like 70,000 years ago, there was a supervolcano explosion around what's now Lake Toba. Something about that wiped out all the orangutan population on the southern half of Sumatra, so you only find orangutans on the northern half now. At least though we think.

Ray: How do you think that folklore and mythology surrounding the creature affected perception of this project? Or do you think it did?

Alex: I'm sure it affected perception of the project. I'm not sure if I can really get a sense of how. I know that many people know or are aware of Orang Pendek that live around there. One of the most common aspects of the story that most people seem to be aware of is this claim that Orang Pendek walks with its feet facing backwards, so that it fools you if you're trying to follow its tracks. The most common reaction that we would get when we would tell people what we were doing is, they would say, "Oh," they would pantomime with their hands, the foot going backwards.

Ray: Nice. Were there any other interesting pieces of folklore you heard about the Orang Pendek like that? That's a pretty cool story.

Alex: Yes, it's a cool story there. Another interesting part of the folklore that I would hear quite a bit was a sense-- There are two I can remember. One story was that Orang Pendek is a shapeshifter, so if it's in the forest, it looks like a tiger and if it comes into a town or farmland, it looks like an ape. That was interesting. Another common theme that we would hear is that Orang Pendek won't show up in photos unless it wants to. If it doesn't want to be seen, it won't be seen. There's one more that I had only ever heard actually from Sahar, our guide. I don't know where this story came from, but he said that there's a story that there's only ever two Orang Pendek at a time. There's always a male and a female and they circle around Sumatra, on opposite sides of Sumatra, but that they'd never meet until one of them is about to die. They'll come together and mate, and then that offspring will then replace the one that dies, and there will be two again. That's more of the storytelling folklore, but there was another trend of stories that we would hear that was interesting. It's more interesting in terms of trying to decide whether or not Orang Pendek exists is that, a lot of the stories of sightings of Orang Pendek would happen around farmlands, especially farmers who owned land right on the edge of the forest. There would be stories of sighting Orang Pendek and seeing it coming into the farm and stealing food and then retreating back into the forest. A very strange and interesting part of a lot of these stories was the effect it had on the farmers that would report these sightings. It's a very patriarchal society, so these are men who are head of their family and pillars of their community. Middle aged, they're very respectable people, but they would report just being terrified. They wouldn't go back to that part of their farm because they're so scared of seeing it again. That doesn't really mesh with a sense that this is a person just telling a story. These are people that express genuine fear, and they're not really people that are going to tell a tall tale and risk losing their reputation. They seem to be genuinely affected by whatever experience they had and scared by it. That fear is also something that is a theme from other groups having seen it. Westerners as well, they express this psychological terror at seeing it. I don't know if it has something to do with the uncanny valley, the sense of a thing that looks so close to a human, but it's yet not a human. Maybe some ancient learned emotional response we have to a version to things that are not quite human.

Ray: While you were out there, did you hear-- That's a really great story about the farmers but did you hear any other compelling sightings or stories that you feel like were possibly credited to an undiscovered creature?

Alex: Yes. Not necessarily while it was out there, but in researching it, there's been four different sources that I could identify as stories centered around Sumatra that sounded like they were describing similar or the same thing. There's this Indonesian villagers story of farmers seeing it on the edge of their farmland. There are stories that I never could verify myself, but there are still some groups of people that live in the forest out there. The government over the last 50 years has been trying to move them out of the forest and into towns, but I think there are still some remnants there. One of the names they're known by are the suku anak dalam, which I think means something like children of the forest, or children of the interior. Anyway, so the story is that they just accept Orang Pendek as part of the forest that they live in and they give it offerings and try to appease it. A third source of sightings or reports of it are, there are some documentations from the colonial days. I don't know exact dates, but around when the Dutch were colonizing Indonesia. People would come back and they would say that they saw something that obliquely sounds like it could be something like Orang Pendek. Something not quite human, ape like, sitting in a tree, scared them. The fourth source of sightings, which I think you are aware of, Westerners who have come and have reported or claimed to have seen it. Debbie Martyr is the most well known of those and she works with Jeremy Holden who is a wildlife photographer in Southeast Asia. They both say that on several occasions, they actually saw Orang Pendek with their own eyes.

Ray: Maybe we could talk a little about Debbie Martyr. Do you think her experiences influenced the project? Was she around before the project started? Did her sightings occur before then?

Alex: Actually, I think she also arrived in Sumatra in the early '90s. Unless I'm misremembering, I think she was a journalist and ended up staying. As far as I know, she still lives there in the town that we were living and based out of. I don't know what her motivation was for starting the project to begin with, but she says that within two weeks of starting that project, she was up at Danau Gunung Tuju which is this lake that's in National Park. She was with Sahar. I think Jeremy was there as well. Jeremy and Debbie, Sahar our guide, their guide at the time. What Sahar says is that she was out, looking for a new trail to explore down and she came back absolutely pale and shaking and said that she had seen it and wouldn't think about anything else. I think she went back out that night and when they woke up in the morning she was gone. She didn't show up until lunch, so clearly, something she believes she saw and it affected her. That's probably what set off a lot of her work for the next few years. The way that she describes it is that she was out and she was in an area of about waist high grass and she saw it. She had a camera with her but she was so shocked she dropped it on the ground. She just saw it walk from one end of her view to the other and disappear into the woods. I'm not sure if she says that she ever saw it again after that. I think she says that she did see it on a few other occasions but for some reason never was able to get a photo of it. I think that definitely framed a lot of our thinking about the project and that the area that she was in at the time, Danau Gunung Tujuh was also one of our main sites where we placed cameras.

Ray: Was Debbie involved at all in this project or did you guys consult with her at all or have any communication?

Alex: She lived in the town and if you're the only two groups of white people who live in a town, I think you tend to see each other. She wasn't involved in Orang Pendek research, documenting at all at the time. She had moved on to run the tiger protection and conservation unit in Karinchi national park. The purpose of that unit is just to document the tiger populations and to help conserve them, help them come back from being endangered. She would always say that it felt so good to be doing something that made sense again, that there was so much about looking for Orang Pendek that just didn't make sense. It was bizarre. I have the same opinion that either way it goes if Orang Pendek exists or it doesn't, it's bizarre. In some ways I think it would be more-- The stories and the whole body of evidence, it would be so bizarre for that not to be associated with something real. If Orang Pendek exists, it's really bizarre that this thing would exist in the flesh in real life. Anyway, she wasn't directly involved much at all with our project. I remember on one occasion, we went to her house and she showed us some plaster casts she had of what would supposedly be Orang Pendek's feet. That was about all of her interaction other than that.

Ray: Do you know much about the research she was doing when she was interested in Orang Pendek and what form that took?

Alex: It was also a camera trapping project. I might be misremembering, but I think she started out with 12 cameras and it was through an organization called Flora and Fauna International, FFI. I'd either never knew or I'd forgotten how long the camera trapping project went on.

Ray: Could you talk about some of the obstacles you faced while working on this project with maybe the exception of the government which we already touched on?

Alex: Yes, let's see. The obstacles we worked on. Well, the environment is definitely the biggest obstacle. We were going to some of the remotest parts of the world. We would end up being in a jungle that or rainforest that the Sahara guide and the other guys that were with us said that it was clear that nobody had been to in over 25 years. Meanwhile, this was only 15, 20 kilometers out. Not that far out into the woods but the terrain is very difficult. It's very mountainous. There's a lot of elevation change. There's rushing rivers that are difficult to impossible to cross and not the best terrain to be carrying hundreds of pounds of batteries in and out of the forest. That was-- At least for me, it was a difficult part of it. I think also another aspect of the land that was difficult is just the area that we would need to cover if we wanted to actually have a serious chance of documenting a rare animal. We had 60 cameras, which seems like a lot but whenever we looked at the coverage on a map, it was just basically a pin drop in the forest. In that sense, our chances of-- Our success was always just a matter of probability and probably fairly low probability given the resources that we had.

Ray: Do you know if your guide, Sahara-- Do you know if Sahara ever saw the creature?

Alex: At the time that we were there, he said that he had never seen it. That was encouraging to me how skeptical he was, I think because he was also-- His livelihood was basically based on Orang Pendek. When random groups would come and want to be adventurers and come and go and find it, he would be their guide and it would help him support his family. We were paying him his salary for a long time. As far as survival, I think there would definitely be motivation for him to tell stories and to convince people that it existed but he would always just tell me, "I don't know if it exists because I've never seen it with my own eyes. I'm hopeful but I just can't tell". Anyway, a few years after our project ended, I heard from him that he had seen it and I never got a chance to actually ask him though for details about it. He passed away a few years ago now. Whatever he saw died with him.

Ray: You talked about Debbie Martyr showing you some footprint casts. Do you know of any other physical evidence that exists? Is footprint cast the main evidence for Orang Pendek?

Alex: I believe footprint casts are the only evidence that would be physical evidence. We actually saw footprints on a couple of different occasions that matched with some of the footprints that we've seen casts of. We didn't have the equipment or training to actually make casts of it. It's basically impossible to take a photo of these but being there, the footprints were very interesting. They, in some ways-- I could believe that these were maybe just sun bear footprints because they had resemblance to sun bear footprints but there were also things that were different. A big difference was that the big toe indentation was a divergent toe. If you imagine dogs or cats, all of their paws, their like, would you call it fingers would be along a line but the big toe on these footprints would be more, it was more like a thumb. It diverged from the other ones, which was interesting. Anyway, we saw those footprints on a couple of different occasions. At one point, we could actually track a little bit. I tracked some back through the woods where we saw that they were going. Over this dirt bank, there was this, what looked like a hand indentation. I could even put my hand in there and I could see that there were five fingers and roughly the size of mine. We could trace something having moved through there. As far as the evidence that we've collected, I think it's just footprint casts. Every once in a while, we would get emails from people. One time, especially sticks in my mind, somebody had emailed us who was involved in a, I think it was a mining operation in Borneo and they said that the camp had killed one and they were terrified of it so they buried it but he knew where it was and he wanted us to go check it out. We never did but I'm always curious how that would've played out if we had. Stories and footprint casts.

Ray: You mentioned that a lot of the footprints you think might be able to be contributed to sun bears. Are there any other animals in the areas that you were visiting that you think those footprints could be attributed to?

Alex: What I think is a small possibility but a possibility is that they were just fabricated. Some of them actually, I would be fairly convinced that they were not actually animal footprints. They were just made by somebody making indentations in the ground because there's a few different footprint casts that I've seen attributed to Orang Pendek and they're clearly not all correct. Especially, I think there is one that I'm remembering, I don't know where it came from but it looked more of a big foot cast than-- If there was like a large human foot. Any other than potential for fabrication or for sun bears? Not that I can think of. I mean, maybe it's a possibility that orangutans live there but nobody, not even locals who live there claim to have ever seen one anywhere near that part of the Island.

Ray: You mentioned that you had seen some prints that yourself that seemed pretty interesting. Maybe not totally clear what they were but possibly fitting some of the descriptions of the Orang Pendek. Did any of those prints lend themselves to seemingly to be belonged to a bipedal creature or was it more just like one-off like hand prints or footprints that you saw mixed in?

Alex: Oh, sorry. Do you mean in terms of being able to follow a track?

Ray: Yes, exactly.

Alex: No, we never really personally found anything other than isolated prints, other than that one time where I believe, actually, we found-- I can't remember exactly how many, but we could definitely trace them over at least several steps of this footprint. That was when following that footprint back, it had recently come over a mound of dirt and I had seen that it looked like it had pulled itself up by sticking its hand into that dirt. That was the most interesting we ever saw. There were one or two other times where we found isolated footprints that looked exactly like this footprint that we had seen and that I had seen casts of. Where again, I wouldn't be shocked if it ended up having been a sun bear, but every time we would find this footprint, it would have that divergent toe indentation as well, which is not the case with sun bears.

Ray: How common are sun bears in the area?

Alex: They're pretty common. Sun bears are pretty common We got quite a few photos of them. Another aspect of sun bear footprints that would lead me against thinking these are sun bear footprints is that, sun bears have long claws. You'll usually be able to see that claw going along with each of the pads on the foot and we never saw that with these footprints. Sun bears are a fairly common part of the forest and they also do sometimes stand up on their hind legs.

Ray: If you were going to do this project again, is there anything that you, now looking back on, would do differently?

Alex: If we were to do the project again, or maybe someday, when we retire, take it up again, I think definitely that if they have any serious chance of documenting the animal exists, we would have a need of a lot more resources. Five times at least the number of cameras that we had and I think I would have tried to be more systematic about going around and documenting, interviewing people who claim to have seen it, so farmers especially. Along with that, having people along that were actually trained to do what we were going to do would probably be good. One other creative idea that had been thrown around, that could work, I think would be worth exploring to see if we can make it work is just buying hundreds or thousands of disposable cameras and distributing them to people and having some reward if people could come back with a photo of Orang Pendek. This may have changed totally since 10 to 15 years when we were there, but at the time, nobody had cameras. Maybe now, everybody has cell phones. Anyways, farmers that live near the forest, if we could just crowdsource the project, I think that would have been a possible way to go. As long as we could figure out a way to do it without having the rewards be so big that people went and started killing animals and dressing them up like Orang Pendek. I could see it backfiring too, which is why we'd have to think it through a little bit more.

Ray: If the Orang Pendek is real, do you have any thoughts or have you heard any theories about the possible origins for the creature?

Alex: The Origins for the creature. We've thought a lot about, if this exists, where would it fit into our understanding of animals and evolution? If you believed the footprints that we had seen, that had that divergent toe, then-- Australopithecus afarensis is an animal that's also brought up when thinking about Orang Pendek because it was also one of these very early hominids or hominins, that was smaller, that was still of ape like, but starting to evolve some of the traits that we associate with ourselves now. It was bipedal, but also, its feet were like our feet, so it didn't have that divergent toe. It wouldn't be an Australopithecus but I don't think anybody would seriously say it would be. It wouldn't be a Homo floresiensis because of the same thing. Homo floresiensis was basically a human cousin. They probably looked quite a bit like us. They didn't have fur covering their skin. It could be somehow related to orangutangs. For instance, one story I could see myself believing would be that supervolcano explosion on Toba didn't just wipe out the population in Southern Sumatra, but it created an isolated population that somehow survived, but survived documentation as well. That seems like, again, just speculating. It seems like it could be a reasonable explanation. Anyway, that's all I could think of in terms of how it would fit in.

Ray: Do you believe after your experience in Indonesia, that the Orang Pendek is a real creature?

Alex: Do I believe that it is a real creature? I don't believe it is, but I also don't believe it isn't. I guess I'm happy to remain agnostic. Like I was saying earlier, just after having being involved with it, I would say that it's going to be as bizarre or more bizarre for it not to exist than for it to exist. As hard as it might be to believe that something like this exists and lives still and has not been documented by Western science in the Sumatran rainforest. My experience has been that I would be as or more shocked if it ended up being nothing other than stories.

Ray: Do you have any plans in the future to continue this research, or is this just something that you did and you're done with the work?

Alex: I don't personally have any plans to. I would still like to, but I realistically think it will never happen for me at least. It would be great if somebody else could and I'd be more than happy to help with that. I think we've all moved on to our real lives and that chapter is done for us.

Ray: Do you think your experience on this project affected you in any ways that you've taken it into other areas of your life, like professionally or personally?

Alex: The whole experience definitely affected me. When we started, I was in my early 20s. Still young and impressionable, and it was a very challenging experience, but I think also one that just instilled in me a lot of confidence that I can do pretty much anything I want. I would find myself giving presentations to national Indonesian government organizations, which wasn't something I would ever imagine myself doing. All you have to do is put yourself out there and try new things and very interesting things will happen. This project along with having Peter who was the leader of the project as my mentor, he's, I think, in some ways, reflects the nature of the project of someone who is widely curious and doesn't mind putting himself out there and doing something that might be ridiculed because even small probability events might happen and good things can come out of it.

Ray: What was your favorite experience during this project?

Alex: My favorite experience. I'm going to have to think about that. The experience that comes to my mind right now is maybe being-- Among my favorite are being out in the forest at night, all snuggled in our our shelter. When we went out, what we would do is, we would have us and a guide and then we would hire a bunch of porters to carry all the food and supplies and batteries, cameras, when we're replacing them. The groups would be up to around eight people and every night, the porters and guide would put together a shelter for us. They would cut down straight branches and we would have tarps that we would-- They would make a pretty amazing, sturdy shelter for us. Sometimes, actually, we would sleep in what were more permanent versions of these that people would use as they were passing through the forest. One in particular, when we were in this area called Bata Gulas it was a semi permanent shelter and it had fish smoking racks on it. Some of my favorite memories are just laying there after having walked through the forest all day long and I'm tired and laying in my sleeping bag and everybody's cooking and preparing food. It was a magical experience that I wouldn't be able to replicate at any other time in my life.

Ray: Obviously the orang pendek is a controversial topic especially for a tenured professor to be going out and searching for. Did your team face any skepticism or ridicule going into this that made it difficult either in Indonesia or in the West?

Alex: I don't think we faced any ridicule that would have affected us. That was probably just because we weren't in any situation to begin with that we needed to be perceived as serious. We had gotten the money from National Geographic. I don't know, I wasn't involved with getting the money. I don't know if how much skepticism Peter had to deal with at that point but once we had the money, it was just a small group of people going there and running the project. I would imagine that we got laughed at quite a bit by the local Indonesians who lived there but even without that we were freaks. [laughs] We were laughed at no matter what.

Ray: [laughs] I think that's pretty much everything. Do you know much about when homo floresiensis was discovered and a little bit about the discovery that happened there?

Alex: Sure, I know a fair bit. I'm definitely not an expert but homo floresiensis was discovered or that some fossil remnants of it were discovered on an island named Flores Island that's where its name comes from in 2004 I think in a place called Liang Bua cave. They were excavating the cave, I'm not exactly sure what I'm assuming inside of archeological dig. They discovered bones that were odd and didn't match human bones and ended up being identified as this new species. There's actually a fair bit of controversy about it for several years about whether this was a new species or whether it was just a human with some disease. I think at this point its been fairly well established. They found enough examples of different individuals that-- Sorry, that's examples of different individuals that it's pretty clear now that it does a different species. The fossils that they found, I think they dated them to something like 11,500 years ago. This was a time when there were also humans on the island. We coexisted with them. I don't know if there were humans, Im sorry Im not-- There were humans in the general area in Indonesian archipelago but I don't know if there's any evidence that we interacted with them. Yes, anyway 11,500 years is not a long time. This is part of a general trend that has just rocked our understanding of human evolution in the last 20 years or so, is we're discovering that at some point there were many, many species of humans all alive at the same time. Rhodensis , Neanderthals, Homo erectus, us, homo floresiensis. I think there was just actually-- I can't remember the name of it but another Homo floresiensis like human that has been discovered somewhere else, I think in Southeast Asia. Anyway, it's definitely, I think flipped our understanding of human history upside down and lens maybe make something like Orang pendeks seem slightly less outlandish. There was a time when we thought humans and Neanderthals, Homo erectus, that was about it but we're discovering that the past looked very different.

Ray: Great. That's everything we have for you. Is there anything you want to add that maybe we didn't touch on in regards to the project?

Alex: Let's see. I would definitely try to reach out to Jeremy Holden.

Ray: Yes, I tried him on Linkedin. I have a limit in characters I could even send him so I tried- [laughter]

Ray: I tried to get as much as I could in there but I haven't heard back yet.

Alex: I wouldn't expect that somebody like Jeremy would be looking at LinkedIn.

Ray: [laughs]

Alex: I was actually surprised he even had a profile. He's a very interesting guy. He's very sober about it. He has also interesting compelling stories to tell that-- Jeremy Holden struck me when we talked to him as a bitter because of the experiences that he had that he started working with Debbie on the Orang pendek project when he was in his early 20s, just like us and he says that he wasted his youth doing it. Clearly this is a guy that he's not lying. He believes that he also says that he saw it but again this is where the bizarreness starts as he's a professional photographer. He says that he saw it one time from behind close to him and he didn't take a photo and he was terrified. He says all he could think of was, "Dear God, don't let it turn around, I don't want to see its face." [chuckles] Yes, in the end, you just have to throw up your hands and find something to do that makes sense, I guess.

Ray: Yes, hopefully, we hear back from him. He would be a great person. Maybe I'll try to do some digging, see if I can find any other contacts for him. That email you sent me for Debbie's old email. Do you know if that was only managed by her because I'm hesitant to reach out to it and just be asking about Orang pendek. If it's managed by multiple people.

Alex: Oh, sure. [chuckles]

Ray: I don't want to put her in an awkward place.

Alex: I don't think you would have to worry about just asking and seeing if whoever's there knows Debbie. I don't know if it was Debbie's email independently but-

Ray: Maybe I'll reply her and not bring up Orang pendek at first. [laughs]

Alex: Yes, that might be a good way to go first because she is known for other things besides Orang pendek. I think she's definitely actually done some really good work on tigers. You could pretend to be interested in tigers. [laughs]

Ray: Actually an angle we wanted to take with this was also talk about some of the deforestation that's happening in Indonesia. Is there anything you know about it that you might be able to talk about in regards to the dwindling orangutangs populations and the deforestation and how it's affecting them?

Alex: Sorry, how it's affecting orangutans?

Ray: Yes, I think into the orangutan population because I think that for most explanations that I've seen, or at least, people who maybe aren't super familiar with the stories is that they tie it to orangutangs as being the most plausible explanation even though I know that there aren't populations in the area where most sightings happen. It seems like a good opportunity to at least raise awareness on this issue.

Alex: Yes. That I think was one of our main motivators and trying to conduct this project is that if we can show that something like this still exists in areas of the world that are so severely threatened by deforestation and us destroying the earth, I think it would be an amazing opportunity to try to renew people's interest in taking care of nature and taking care of the environment. The national park that we were living, or working in, it's a constant struggle for them to try to keep the land pristine and not developed. Actually Bata Gulas that one area that I mentioned that we were in, it would be prime area for logging. I think there had been attempts in the past. I think there were old abandoned logging road somewhere on there but it's just a matter of the remoteness. That's the only reason really that these areas still exist in the state they are is that nobody has been able to get there and cut them all down and burn it and turn it into farmland. The mountain range that Karinchi is in is on the west side of Sumatra, then the terrain goes down and flattens out into a large plane that forms the eastern part of Sumatra and that has all been deforested and it's all just palm oil plantations right now. It was definitely sobering knowing that and seeing that this is these remote areas and that's the only reason maybe if Orang pendeks exists, it would still exist is because man hasn't been able to get in there and mess it up. If you do want to actually talk more about this, Murray Collins, who's one of those guys on the project with us. He's a postdoc now actually and he's been working on remote sensing for a long time and especially this idea of documenting and trying to combat deforestation. He might be a good person to contact too if you're interested in having more of a conversation about that.

Ray: Cool. Is he at University of Edinburgh?

Alex: Yes.

Ray: Okay.

Alex: I don't know if he's still there but he should be fairly easy to contact because he's-

Ray: Awesome.

Alex: I'm sure it'd be easy to find his email address but if you have trouble, just let me know.

Ray: Cool. Yes, maybe we'll reach out to him and see if he can speak a little bit more on that topic. That'd be great.

Alex: Cool.

Ray: All right. Thank you so much, Alex, I really appreciate. Super interesting hearing about this project and sounds it was a lot of fun actually.

Alex: Yes, it was definitely a lot of fun. It was great to talk to you, Ray. Thanks for having an interest in it.